Kenya places amongst the highest holders of refugees in the world with over 450,000 refugees

living in camps and informal settlements, and over 100,000 people pending registration in the

country (UNHCR, 2018). While emerging refugee events [1] in Western Europe, South and

South East Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean are receiving widespread media and

scholarly attention, the holding of migrants in Kenya within the East African displacement event

is long-standing, chronic, and often forgotten. The refugees held in Kenya’s Dadaab and Kakuma

camps, along with those in urban and peri-urban settlements, are rendered invisible on a global

scale due to diminishing aid support from international actors, including the UN refugee agency

(UNHCR) and other donor countries in the global North (The Nation, 2017).

Refugees, based on ethnic and racial characteristics, are a marginalized population in

Kenya. Since the Al-Shabaab backed Westgate Shopping Mall and Garissa University, the

Government of Kenya (GOK) has pursued the ending of refugee encampment at least for Somali

refugees. For example, the Minister of Interior in 2016 noted, “Due to Kenya’s national security

interest, the government has decided the hosting of refugees has to come to an end…The

government acknowledges that this decision will have adverse effects on the lives of refugees,

but Kenya will no longer be hosting them” (The Star, 2016). Previous attempts to close Dadaab

camp have been deemed by the High Court as unconstitutional and in violation of Kenya’s

international obligations. However, in February 2019, following an attack of a luxury Nairobi

hotel, there was a renewed push by the Kenyan government to close the camp by the year’s end

(Human Rights Watch, 2019).

In the context of forced closure, repatriation, and the legacy of structural adjustment

which has stripped away any semblance of welfare support, refugees rely on private actors for

basic survival needs. This often takes the form of peer-to-peer cash transfers and microcredit

loans within the wider ambit fintech-based capitalism. Following Gabor and Brooks (2017), and

Aitken (2015), we define fintech as part of a global financial infrastructure in which the poor are

recipients of unregulated financial services through technology. Importantly, while these veins

of critical literature understand the rise of fintech as extensions of financialization, the

contribution of this paper is found in its intersectional consideration of the racially-motivated

logics of accumulation that undergird fintech-oriented inclusion strategies within the global

North and global South. This argument understands and incorporates race as an analytic

category by framing refugees as new subjects of financial inclusion; however, the inclusion is

marked by racial difference that layers onto the political economy of refugee management

creating new social relations of debt.

The Kenyan case reveals two important aspects of financialized refugee governance:

First, it shows that the fintech industry is pervasive in both refugee camps and in urban

settlements and subverts the need for state-led welfare support. Second, it illustrates that

financial inclusion and exclusion take place on racial lines and shows that financial ‘aid’ cannot

be divorced from xenophobic socio-political realities. For example, refugees in the Kalobeyei

settlement in Kakuma refugee camp are part of pilot programmes headed by UNHCR,

Mastercard, Safaricom, and Western Union that place aid money in e-wallets by providing

credits instead of cash to refugees. Refugees in Dadaab camp who are of Somali descent do not

have these opportunities and are instead returned through so-called voluntary repatriation. This

voluntary repatriation is in fact a constrained choice as the UNHCR pays around $150 USD—a

tempting offer for refugees who are indebted to merchants and middlemen in Dadaab camp

(Sieff, 2017). Meanwhile, Western Union is able to siphon 16 USD per transaction for

remittances in the Kalobeyei settlement in Kakuma and justifies this as a profit generating

2

venture within the wider policy literature on smart cities (Anzilotti, 2017; Mastercard 2017).

This paper problematizes the ways that refugees have been framed by powerful agents of

development and self-reliance through private capital in the Global North, and maintains a

perspective that is highly critical of the ways that fintech is being harnessed to penetrate the

financial lives of refugees.

Kenya is an ideal case study for the fintech industry due to the dominance of

Safaricom’s[2] M-Pesa mobile phone-based money transfer and e-wallet system. As it stands,

over 96 percent of households in Kenya have at least one M-Pesa account and the availability

and convenience of this system has reduced transaction costs in the country, provided

alternatives to the female poor who are able to manage their own finances, and lifted about 2

percent of Kenyan households out of extreme poverty (CNBC Africa, 2017). Between July 2016-

17 M-Pesa registered 1.7 billion transactions recording 48.76 percent share of Kenya’s gross

domestic product (McGath, 2018). Safaricom makes 17.65 USD per second with a record profit

of 530 million USD in 2017 (Mwaniki, 2018)—the majority of their revenue is gained through

transaction costs and transfer fees. Refugee camps are now a new avenue for M-Pesa, and

leading banks like Equity—that own the majority share of refugee bank accounts in Kakuma—

are enabling (nay: “forcing”) refugees to adopt the technology to access most of the merchants in

the camp (Igadwah, 2017).

For many refugees in Kenya, fintech is often the only viable option for credit or

microfinance aid. While refugees are often excluded from credit, the spread of fintech as a

solution for direct peer-to-peer aid transfers from the global North to refugees has resulted in the

uneven distribution of credit access and livelihood support. Through fintech, private citizens and

groups in the global North are able to disrupt and subvert refugee assistance, deeming some

3

worthy of aid while others face ongoing exclusion. While fintech remains a hopeful source of

greater efficiency and empowerment, the direct transfer of aid money masks profit and corporate

power by only extending assistance to those refugees who are appropriately entrepreneurial, that

is to say: those that will start small businesses and pay back their loans. In short, we argue that

processes of financial inclusion carried out by and through fintech are still distinguished, largely,

by exclusion.

To understand these contravening episodes of inclusion and exclusion in the refugee

financial technology, we will first discuss our theoretical approach of understanding refugee

finance as a practice that is wrought with power relations premised on racial capitalism—

defined by Robinson (1983) as a system wherein racialized bodies have been exploited as cheap

or slave labour and have been denigrated as outcasts within colonial society. We expand upon

this premise to examine the racialized penetration of fintech companies in Kenya and add that

the Kenyan state embodies a colonial logic of exclusion that dovetails with historical

circumstances of structural adjustment and diminished state-led welfare capabilities. Refugees

face dual modes of racialization from the Kenyan state and from the more insidious and

exploitative modes of capital accumulation enacted by fintech on marginalized people through

the logics of bootstrapping and self-sufficiency. To incorporate the pertinence of race and power

in our critical analysis, we engage with the notion of disposability and surplus populations (Li,

2010; Yates, 2011; Bhagat, 2019) in our mapping of refugee financial technology in everyday

spaces. In so doing, we explore the relationships between space, institutions, business, and

socio-economic status whilst underscoring the importance of race. Second, using empirical

evidence and qualitative interview data, we show the racial political economy of fintech for

refugees by examining various spaces of financial inclusion and expropriation—the confiscation

4

of potential refugee livelihoods through the logics of capital accumulation defined through the

updating and modifying of Fraser’s (2017) concept of racial expropriation theorized below.

In our first case, we look at the role of fintech in Kakuma refugee camp and Kalobeyei

settlement for realizing new agendas of ‘self-reliance’ via financial inclusion. We do this in

order to show the discursive and systematic ways in which capital accumulation occurs through

fintech and refugee bodies. The discursive analysis undertaken throughout this paper

investigates the rhetorical landscape inherent to the ‘roll out’, or neoliberal discursive

production, of refugee fintech (Peck and Tickell, 2002). The way that refugee fintech is

communicated and framed in studies (by NGOs, governments, and the private sector),

promotional material, task reports, etc., normalizes particular beliefs and values about the ability

of financial technology to ‘uplift’ and ‘empower’ refugees in Kenya whilst invisibilizing the

logics of racialized expropriation that, we argue, guide these processes. In this sense, our

rhetorical analysis follows from authors who understand the inseparability of rhetoric from its

material - or systematic - consequences (Gill, 1995; Peck, 2010).

In our second, and related, empirical section, we look at the alternative experiences of

fintech via microfinance loans in informal spaces through interviews and data collection from

field research conducted in 2018 (N=50). Here, we show the predominance of entrepreneurism

as a scheme for poverty alleviation. Our argument is thus hinged on exploring philanthropy

driven fintech as a largely exclusionary and racialized market-led solution that profits from the

poor and vulnerable under the guise of poverty alleviation and choice. Fintech further lubricates

predominant discourses of bootstrapping with little to no evidence of success in bringing

refugees out of poverty. It conceals the ravages of austerity in terms of global aid, lack of

affordable housing, and abject xenophobia that refugees face in Kenya on an everyday basis.

5

Theorizing Racial Expropriation in the Financial-Philanthropy-Development Nexus

Following Gabor and Brooks (2017), we understand fintech, as it is encountered by refugees, as

part of a financial-philanthropy-development (FPD) that confronts the global refugee ‘crisis’ via

financial inclusion agendas. Gabor and Brooks (2017) understand fintech as an extension of

financialization within the context of rapid growth in digital innovation that incorporates the

poor into ‘global strategies of capital accumulation through digital footprints’ (425).

Financialization can be defined broadly as both (1) an epoch of capitalism associated with the

accumulation of capital occurring increasingly through financial (i.e. the growth of credit/debt)

as opposed to productive channels (Lapavitsas, 2009; 2013) and (2) a penetration of the ethics,

morality, and mindset of finance into social, individual, and everyday life (Martin, 2002).

Understanding fintech through the lens of financialization has proven fruitful in troubling the oft-

twinned processes of neoliberalism and financialization, but, thus far, has left little room for

considering the ‘hidden abode of race’ as foundational to both (Dawson, 2016). In an effort to

further the conceptual operationalization of financial technology for refugees residing in Kenya,

this paper adopts an intersectional approach that highlights race as an important defining feature

of refugee fintech in Kenya.

This follows, and extends beyond, the theories of disposability (Bauman, 2004; Povinelli,

2011; Yates, 2011) that focus on the urban poor as forgotten populations in capitalism. Insights

from disposability show that the reserve army of labour - surplus to the needs of production and

capital accumulation (Marx, 1887) - are rendered permanently surplus within neoliberalization

that cannot render these populations productive. Refugees are thus, framed within this

permanence as they are barred from formal employment in camps and other settlement spaces. In

addition, they are unwanted populations facing deeper marginalization than the pre-existing poor

6

in Kenya. This aspect points to the inherently racial dynamics of refugees, as their ethnic origins

and xenophobic perceptions as national threats places them outside of welfare assistance and

societal acceptance.

This article seeks to go beyond the framing of refugees as a passive relative surplus

population awaiting assistance in camps and, instead, highlights that while refugees are indeed

unwanted populations, they are also brought into the folds of capital accumulation through social

relations of debt that are facilitated and heightened by fintech. In so doing, we invoke

Soederberg’s concept of debtfare (2014; 2017) that illustrates capital’s pervasive ability to

generate profit through debt—what we argue as a form of racial expropriation. In refugee fintech

in Kenya, this is accomplished through cash grants and microfinance loans.

When delineated using the lens of economic geography of race, we can understand that

financial inclusion via the roll-out (Peck and Tickell, 2002) of fintech across refugee bodies and

spaces constitutes an exacting of a border or boundary of finance. Mapping the extension of this

boundary (symbolized as contour lines connecting places of the same relative altitude) reveals

how seemingly disparate financial ecosystems across space (North-South) and time (by

crowdfunding or P2P platforms that finance refugees after the funds have already been dispersed

by local financial institutions), are also interconnected under the ‘logics’ of racialized capitalism.

This approach answers the call by Gabor and Brooks (2017) to critically examine the contours of

the fintech-philanthropy-development (FPD) complex against the backdrop of acceleration of

information technology, big data-driven analysis, and algorithmically-determined financial

governance (Campbell-Verduyn et. al, 2016).

In order to understand the social relations of debt as a racial process within neoliberalism,

we draw upon Peck and Theodore’s (2015) concept of fast policy as the merger of policymaking

7

and best practices vis-a-vis the adoption of neoliberal monoculture (2015: xvi). Fast policy rests

on the roll-out of programs, quick decision making through public and private partnerships, and a

global institutional structure that facilitates ongoing experimentation for the sake of capital

accumulation. That is to say, fast policy compresses space and time in the name of poverty

alleviation, and this article uses the microcredit industry to illustrate how fast policy travels from

the North to the South and vice-versa.

As discussed below, KivaZip loans - lauded by the UNHCR as a key strategy for

entrepreneurship bringing refugees out of poverty - finds donors in the global North and deploys

these loans through intermediaries in countries like Kenya. The underpinning assumptions of this

policy highlights that entrepreneurialism is a global strategy for poverty alleviation, and also

allows for state and international organizations (UNHCR in this case) to shift the risk of welfare

to the refugee body.

The usage of fast policy dovetails with the conception of FPD understood in a multi-

scalar way. Expertise, such as entrepreneurialism emanating from the World Bank (as

Knowledge Bank), is transformed into policy that seeks to profit from racialized bodies

predominantly in the global South. Refugees, already disposable populations existing outside the

purview of state welfare, are placed in the FPD infrastructure as a last resort for their survival

and an experimental avenue for capital accumulation. That is to say, if refugees are already

disposable/ unwanted bodies, they are prone to accept credit—and the resultant debt—as a last-

ditch effort for entrepreneurial survival. The rhetoric of entrepreneurialism is understood through

the deployment of fast policy strategies in the FPD nexus as it legitimizes credit-led risk as a

strategy for survival. Best practices surrounding micro-lending are used on refugees in an

8

ahistorical manner without the appropriate empirical evidence that would justify these policies of

financial inclusion.

While both fast policy and FPD highlight the ways in which the working and non-

working poor are subjected to profit generating strategies of poverty alleviation, they are missing

direct engagement with racialization as a mode of accumulation. In order to marry fast policy to

the FPD nexus, we borrow from Fraser (2017) who argues that racial capitalism is hinged on

both exploitation and expropriation. As Fraser highlights, racial expropriation relies on the

confiscated assets of those in the periphery of capitalism whether it be labour, land, or bodies

themselves (2017:4). Fraser goes on to emphasize that, “non-propertied post-colonials are

expropriated by financialization...post-colonial states in hock to international lenders and caught

in the rise of structural adjustment are required to abandon developmentalist - to cut public

services and privatize public assets...all policies that transfer wealth to corporate capital and

global finance” (2017:12). Indeed, what we argue here is that refugee governance in post-

colonial Kenya is inseparable from the forces of capital accumulation and racialization that

operate on multiple scales.

Our theoretical contribution rests on bringing refugee governance into the FPD nexus,

thereby also showing how these policies of governance travel and compress time and space for

the sake of capital accumulation. Moreover, we also highlight that these policies fit into the

logics of global racialization where knowledge generating institutions such as the UN, IMF, and

World Bank - reflecting upon the deployment of structural adjustment - also support the logics of

capital accumulation vis-a-vis the bolstering of private interest. Refugee governance in the

fintech era rests on the Fraser’s (2017) conception of racialized expropriation where the most

marginalized groups in remote camps in Kenya are targeted as new prospects for credit-led

9

profit. In short, fast policy and the racialized FPD nexus deepen our understanding of

marginalization as it pertains to refugee survival in Kenya. As the empirical sections in this

article will show, refugee governance in Kenya is underpinned by social relations of debt,

exclusion, and desires for capital accumulation.

Refugees are ‘Open for Business’: FinTech in the Era of Financial Inclusion

Before analyzing the policy shift from state welfare to self-reliance through financial

inclusion strategies, it is important to highlight the governance of refugees in Kenya in historical

context. Kenya was amongst the first countries in the world to undergo Structural Adjustment

Programs (SAPs) where the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank emphasized the

inefficiency of the state and diverted capital from the public to the private sector in the first wave

of privatization (Rono, 2002). With diminished wages, unemployment and economic policy

oriented towards export-oriented growth, the poor were trapped in poverty and inequality

widened in Kenya (Ndungu, 2013).

Structural adjustment coincided with the advent of the first mass migration of Somalis in

the 1990s and the setting up of camps in the Garissa county. As the Refugee Consortium of

Kenya (RCK) shows, Kenya has hosted refugees since its independence in 1963 due to regional

instability in Uganda, Sudan, and Ethiopia. In the early 1970s, the Immigration Act allowed

refugees to obtain a Class M work permit and refugees were allowed to integrate without

violence. This policy directive changed with mass migration and structural adjustment in the

1990s.

There are two main spikes of Somali displacement that coincide with the changing policy

directives explored in this paper. First, between 1990-1992, ~200,000 Somalis entered Kenya

10

and faced encampment in Garissa. Second, between 2008-2012, a further 150,000 people

expanded the Dadaab camp. The early 1990s, despite the culmination of refugee integration in

urban Kenya, had more adequate support for refugee camps through UN led initiatives and more

global funding. As an informant notes, “Kenya’s involvement with refugees is only conducted

under the guise of humanitarianism...you see where Dadaab is placed? It is isolated and close to

Somalia...the plan was always for them to be returned back…” (Interview B). Encampment was

also the policy suggested by UNHCR at the time in order to swiftly return refugees to their

countries of origin under the directive of re-stabilizing conflict-ridden areas (Nanima, 2017).

Since 2012, coinciding with the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis and overall trends in

global austerity, UNHCR and other actors have switched to a policy of self-reliance. In 2017, for

example, UNHCR requested 231 million USD in aid funds but only received 66 million USD

(UNHCR, 2018). As Figure 1 shows below, UNHCR’s budget in Kenya has nearly halved from

2014 to 2019 while expenditures have remained more or less constant. This budgetary crunch

reveals a trend towards global austerity and the reduction of UNHCR’s capacity in Kenya due, in

part, to looming refugee situations in the East African region.

Thus, Kenyan refugee governance represents a conflict between the Government of

Kenya and the UNHCR. The former desires repatriation and encampment, while the latter is

pushing for entrepreneurial self-reliance due to looming financial constraints. Self-reliance acts

as a type of fast policy that absolves the responsibility of both the UNHCR and the Kenyan state.

If refugees are self-reliant then they no longer need to be placed in camps and, if moved to urban

areas, are also not competing for formal employment with the urban poor, a logic which

reinforces the need for credit-driven development.

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This policy shift from aid and encampment to self-reliance is fraught with contradictions.

Self-reliance is understood within the context of access (to public goods, sizeable markets, and

networks), and yet, outside of the confines of these designated refugee spaces, refugees (1) may

not access surrounding areas without a movement pass; (2) may not access employment without

a Class M work permit, the difficulty of obtaining this permit limits most refugees to doing

‘incentive work’ with pay limitations; (3) cannot access ownership, as they may not own the land

or the fixed assets they build on the land (Betts et al., 2018). In this way, self-reliance is defined

as a means to ‘sustainable well-being’ through refugees’ integration into the global financial

ecosystem via access to credit, remittances through formal agents, and mobile payments.

Refugee self-reliance through financial inclusion, then, maintains refugee exclusion within

Kenya and the conditionality of particular types of access.

Figure 1: UNHCR (2019) Budget and Expenditure on Kenya 2014-2019

The remainder of this section discusses the ways in which capital accumulation via

expropriation occurs through financial inclusion of refugees in Kakuma camp and Kalobeyei

12

settlement vis-à-vis fintech. These sites are significant insofar as powerful financial actors have

chosen them as a testing ground or blueprint for financial inclusion strategies via fintech that

they plan to scale across other refugee communities. The creation of Kalobeyei marks a

concentrated and intentional shift in model from ‘aid’ to ‘self-reliance’ of refugees. Foreign

capital investment in fintech in Kakuma and Kalobeyei that followed this move (outlined below)

has allowed private capital to penetrate these settlements, co-opting informal and customary

financial ecosystems, and connecting refugees to the Global North via the accumulation of

capital (via fees, and the collection of valuable consumer data that enables the offering of

financial products to refugees).

The International Finance Corporation (IFC), part of the World Bank Group (WBG), is a

global development institution that purportedly exists to create markets that address development

challenges. It is the arm of the WBG dedicated solely to channeling and directing foreign

investment, under the auspice that private equity and venture capital can – and should - play a

critical role in development. Between 2001-2016, the IFC committed $127 billion through 3343

projects, of which the largest share (36%) were financial institutions, particularly the commercial

banking sector (Center for Global Development, 2018: 7). In 2013, the IFC refocused their

efforts toward financing non-banking financial institutions, investing over 1.5 billion in this

sector between 2013-2016. Non-banks are thought to have “a crucial role to play in DFS [digital

financial services] ecosystems”, as they are able to reach mass markets better than banks when it

comes to delivering money to unbanked people (CGAP, 2018). The timing of the IFC’s

redoubling of efforts towards financing non-bank financial institutions matches a wider trend in

top-tier development agencies – including the United Nations Capital Development Fund

13

(UNCDF), the Center for Financial Inclusion (CFI), and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)

– towards a near-sole focus on financial inclusion as a development strategy.

Financing the poor, via digital financial inclusion initiatives, constitutes what Gabor and

Brooks (2017) have coined as the fintech-philanthropy-development (FPD) complex. The FPD

complex understands poverty as a new frontier for profit-making and accumulation (Soederberg,

2013), whereby digital financial technologies and practices are framed in a philanthropic manner

as an accelerant for the global financial inclusion agenda. The output of FPD-inclined projects is

the harvesting of data that is used by agents of capital to accelerate access to, monitor

engagement with, and transform individuals from financial ‘informality’ into generators of

financial assets. This fits into Mann’s (2018) critique of Data for Development (D4D), where

powerful economic actors in the Global North extract data from African-based organizations,

naming themselves as responsible data custodians in the process of disenfranchising local actors

from a key source of power in economic governance. The accumulation of data through fintech

for the stated purpose of achieving development via financial inclusion in emerging economies

effectively positions firms at the center of growing information networks that seek to map,

expand, and monetize financial and non-financial data.

In April 2018, the IFC released its extensive Kakuma as a Marketplace report. In an

attempt to persuade private initiatives to invest so that the refugees can lead “self-determined

lives” (5), the Kakuma Report provides a characterization of the camp as an informal economy

built on entrepreneurship (Mastercard and Western Union, 2017). The report fits into wider

financial inclusion narratives that seek to ‘formalize’ Kakuma’s informal businesses in order to

increase refugee livelihood and confront negative public perceptions of refugees as passive,

unproductive recipients of aid. To achieve this, refugees are framed as active employers,

14

consumers, and producers. The report contains subtleties that designate Kakuma as separate

from, or ‘other’ than, Kenya. Phrases like: “the population of 220,000 makes [Kakuma]

comparable to the tenth largest city in Kenya” (IFC, 2018: 86); and of refugees as “living in

Kakuma for decades with little prospect of returning home, becoming a Kenyan citizen, or being

resettled in a developed country” (ibid: 5).

While Kakuma’s closure is listed as a potential political risk, the report states that “the

politics surrounding Dabaab are more complex and Kakuma does not face the same concerns”,

and that the Turkana County Government “sees the economic potential of refugee integration

and would not likely support calls for closure” (IFC, 2018: 11). It is important to keep in mind

the histories and ethnic contexts of Dadaab and Kakuma/Kalobeyei. They were formally

established in 1991 and 1992 respectively. The former is comprised of Somali refugees

predominantly (UNHCR, 1999). Integration of refugees in Dadaab is far too contentious for the

GOK, who have continually - and as recently as March 2019 - promised to shut down these

camps and send Somalis back (Reuters, 2019). The GOK has also stopped officially accepting

Somali refugees. As one interview participant at a leading legal rights NGO in Nairobi notes,

“How can the government accept refugees if they are sending people back to Somalia? It would

be too contradictory to say that, on one hand, Somalia is safe to return and we are shutting down

camps and on the other, to take in Somali refugees--of which there are still many because

Somalia is not safe” (Interview A). Somali refugees have been unfairly associated with terrorism

since attacks in Westgate and Garissa University, pointing to the racial dimensions of financial

inclusion that renders these populations too risky for financial penetration or experimentation.

Despite the fact that Dadaab, nearly twice as populous as Kakuma/Kalobeyei in its number of

15

registered refugees, presents a larger potential ‘market’, it is not a site or focus of major fintech

partnerships, testbeds, and initiatives.

In contrast, the majority of refugees in Kakuma are from South Sudan - a group which

received prima facie refugee status in Kenya. The general makeup of Kakuma camps is also

more ethnically diverse. In the Kakuma Report, the IFC identifies the camp as a new opportunity

and challenge for the private sector. 39 percent of Kakuma’s residents own businesses and the

goal of the IFC and other private sector actors is to extend financial services through fintech to

these informal actors in a market which is valued at 56 million USD. As the IFC notes, a key

demand in this camp is credit as many rely on friends and family for support; however, the

formal banking sector could fill this credit gap by using data from M-Pesa as a way to measure

client risk in favour of collateral (IFC, 2018). Financial inclusion and exclusion are thus,

evidently based on ethno-racial lines within the context of diminishing aid and Kenyan welfare

retrenchment.

The same month IFC published its report, it announced a partnership with Mastercard

with the express motivation of driving greater financial inclusion in emerging markets via

electronic payments. The partnership involves a $250 million global risk-sharing facility to

expand access to electronic payments in emerging markets. This constitutes a form of blended

finance, defined by the OECD as “the strategic use of development finance for the mobilization

of additional finance towards the SDGs [sustainable development goals] in developing

countries” (OECD, 2018). Blended finance deploys concessional finance (loans extended on

terms substantially more generous than market loans) to leverage private capital/commercial

finance while pursuing development objectives. Approximately US$81 billion has been

mobilized from the private sector between 2012-2015 via blended financial incentives (CGAP,

16

2018a). This IFC-Mastercard partnership uses development aid and philanthropic funds to

protect private-sector investors against perceived risks. In this particular case, the IFC will

shoulder up to 100% of any potential settlement costs incurred by those whose capital is being

used to expand access to electronic payments in emerging markets (Mastercard, 2018). Blended

finance is a means of enticing the private sector to invest in locations – such as those serving as

hosts to refugees - by neutralizing risk for private capital and encouraging more investment.

Kakuma as a Marketplace report was released on the heels of a partnership between

Mastercard and Western Union in Kakuma and Kalobeyei that began in June 2017. The two

companies collaborated on a digital infrastructure model focused on mobile money, digital

vouchers, and card-based solutions to “promote self-reliance of refugees and host communities”

(Mastercard and Western Union, 2017: 5). The model being implemented in Kakuma and

Kalobeyei is meant to serve as a “scalable blueprint for underserved populations to access formal

financial services” (ibid: 3). It eliminates financial ‘intermediaries’ that present risks to refugees

and host community members – i.e. informal money transfer organizations like hawala, whereby

the money is paid to an agent who then instructs a remote associate to pay the final recipient.

Instead of Hawala, refugees are encouraged to use Western Union so that remittances can

be sent directly into an M-Pesa wallet. The sender bears the transaction costs, which eat up

approximately 9.4 percent of the value of remittances sent to this region of Africa (World Bank,

2018). Western Union representatives frame their program as ‘disrupting’ the traditional systems

of aid delivery, which are argued to create cycles of dependency, where refugees receive cash or

paper vouchers that feed the global perception of them as “poor, dependent, hopeless people”

(Macheel, 2017). Receiving aid via a smart card is argued to empower refugees insofar as they

can choose to spend, save or invest it. The specifics of how aid ‘points’ collected and redeemed

17

on a chip card, as opposed to cash or paper vouchers, provides refugees with more dignity,

control, and choice remains unexplained in the press release.

Despite the fact that Kakuma has been in existence since 1969, the promotional material

justifying the need for this new partnership and digital infrastructure draws upon the

contemporary refugee crisis trope (Bhagat and Soederberg, 2019). Representatives from

Mastercard underscore the importance of reimagining refugee camps not as temporary

settlements, but as new ‘smart’ cities. The partnership is aimed at getting intermediaries out of

the equation, as well as mitigating the types of losses attributed to in-kind donations. Mastercard

Aid Network replaces paper vouchers or in-kind donations as with a digital voucher program

where card holders receive development aid in the form of points they can use to make on- and

off-line purchases using ‘smart’ chip cards provided by Mastercard. The cards allow for the

tracking of purchases and consumer behavior, making the refugee ‘legible’ (Scott, 1998; cf.

Gabor and Brooks, 2017), as an ‘act of configuration’ (Aitken, 2017) that constitutes and extracts

financial value from places that were once invisible or excluded from formal channels of global

finance (Roderick, 2014). The goal of implementing financial technology is to accelerate the

process of financial inclusion, as digital payments are considered widely to be an entry point into

the formal financial system. Digital transactions generate data on customers that companies then

use to evaluate their credit and offer financial services.

The head of customer relations management at Western Union claims: “Refugees across

the world want to be empowered to break the chains of dependence and to rebuild their lives in

meaningful ways”, and that the solution to this desire lies in new digital infrastructures for the

delivery of mobile money, digital vouchers, prepaid cards, and the tracking of refugee purchase

and payment behavior (Western Union, 2017). For refugees held within Kakuma and Kalobeyei,

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their citizenship remains uncertain, on top of which they face violence, social stigmatization, and

the threat of forced repatriation. These people are said to have ‘received the privilege of being

the test bed’ of digital infrastructures and are now the latest ‘hot IPO’ for digital payment

companies (Daniels, 2017). These digital infrastructures are being managed and delivered by

companies whose combined total assets in 2017 surpass 31 billion (WesternUnion, 2018;

Mastercard, 2018).

Each of these examples provide evidence of the discursive, systematic, and material

encroachment of private capital in Kakuma and Kalobeyei. As a result, the refugees who live

there increasingly experience the contradiction of simultaneous assimilation (financial) and

displacement (spatial). They are becoming the subjects of financial assimilation vis-à-vis global

financial networks that are able to penetrate Kakuma and Kalobeyei via financial technology

whilst they remain materially displaced as a result of their statelessness and separateness from

Kenya. Their belonging and inclusion are dictated by their perceived productivity,

entrepreneurialism, and tech-savviness.

Everyday Forms of Financial Inclusion and Debt

In this final section we elaborate on the ways in which refugees are impacted by financial

exclusion and inclusion at various sites and scales. Inherently, there are comparisons between

camps and alternative areas of refugee hosting surrounding the binary of exclusion and inclusion.

These issues are exacerbated by the pervasiveness of fintech in the context of welfare

retrenchment and disposability. Importantly, since refugees are unwanted populations by both

state and society, they face intense marginalization on three interrelated fronts: citizenship,

livelihood, and shelter access. In this section, we seek to place everyday forms of financial

inclusion and racial expropriation within the FPD nexus.

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Issues of citizenship underpin the various barriers to access as refugees outside of formal

camps in Dadaab and Kakuma remain in a grey legal area in Kenya[3]. While international law

prevents discrimination towards refugees in urban settlements, these refugees in Kenya are still

considered illegal populations facing state-led persecution at times of security unrest such as the

attacks on Westgate Mall in Nairobi (Interview B). Despite this illegal position, Nairobi hosts

over 65,000 refugees (UNHCR 2018). Somali refugees are particularly harassed and forced to

return to camps due to their illegal status (The Guardian, 2013). Many refugees face harassment

on an everyday basis by the police who know that they can extract bribes as refugees are unable

to provide appropriate documentation (Interview C). Field research at a department held in the

Ministry of Interior and Coordination of National Government revealed that officials interrogate

refugees who ask for work permits for formal employment and tell them to return to camps if

they want livelihood or housing assistance (Observations, Interview D). This shows that the

GOK is tolerant to refugees in the country only as long they remain in the camps and the

government takes a ‘sink or swim’ approach to those refugees who end up in urban areas.

Since refugees do not receive state assistance and are also unable to find formal

employment, their only means of survival in Nairobi is through entrepreneurship—a strategy

pursued by NGOs and local organizations alike. Entrepreneurship appears as a key element of

NGO program training for urban refugees. As one NGO notes, “We get refugees to go through a

training program where they learn the necessary business skills to set-up shop. First, they must

learn how to make a profit so that they do not squander away the loan that we give them. They

must come up with a business plan and tell us how they will repay the loan. Only then do they

receive the money” (Interview E). Both international donors and their field partners strategically

transform refugees into potential financial subjects. Training programs—funded by international

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donors and financial actors such as Mastercard and Western Union—instill financial literacy and

attempt to ensure that refugees will be able to pay interests. This strategy dovetails with the

exclusionary dimensions of financial inclusion—refugees who can successfully turn themselves

into entrepreneurs are thus, deserving of aid as they are able to escape the poverty trap and are

more likely to repay loans. In contrast, those who are not entrepreneurs, or worse, those who

cannot repay loans, are overburdened with debt or must find other ways to survive. In this sense,

refugees function as expropriated bodies at multiple sites of survival. The transformation of

refugee from passive recipient of aid to entrepreneur is a form of expropriation as the refugee is

forced to transcend minimal state support and become a self-sufficient member of capitalist

society.

Nairobi has been coined Africa’s ‘Silicon Valley’, a reference to the fact that between

2010-2017, 99% of investment funding ($206.4 million) in East Africa went to Kenyan fintech

companies (Mwesigwa, 2018). Fintech plays an important role in facilitating loan transactions

within neoliberalization in Kenya. Loans are still transferred from the global North to the South

and KivaZip, for example, uses the M-Pesa system to provide these loans between 5 minutes and

24 hours. As mentioned above, refugees—while not directly paying interest on these loans to

Kiva—are responsible for transaction costs associated with M-Pesa (Urban Refugees, 2017). In

addition, the state is absent from the lives of non-camp refugees. While Kiva prides itself on

charging no interest on their loan payments and rely on donors to tip them for operating costs,

their field partners charge much higher interest rates to refugees in order to fund their projects

and remain afloat within neoliberalized refugee assistance (MacFarquhar, 2010). Fintech plays a

key role in the transformation of refugees from aid recipients to financial subjects and facilitates

capital accumulation in the following ways: First, fintech generates profit for itself by acting as a

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technological provider; second, it also generates capital for Kiva regardless of its zero interest

policies; and, third, it funds NGO service programs through interest and service delivery—these

interest rates or service costs of Kiva’s field partners are unregulated. In so doing, the racialized

FPD masks inherent asymmetric power relations between global North and South and between

service provides and refugees themselves. In addition, While the GOK maintains its stance that

refugees outside of camps are de facto illegal populations, the county governments in Nairobi

have no issues handing out business permits that cost between 120-300 USD per year. The

sizeable upfront costs of setting up business places refugees at the mercy of NGOs and drives

refugees further into debt through reliance on microcredit.

As a prominent refugee NGO that provides entrepreneurship loans to refugees notes,

“Refugees are a very precarious population…they are a flight risk for loans…sometimes the

main breadwinner gets sick, sometimes the children need extra materials or books for school,

sometimes they have promised to send money back to the camps or to their home country. We

cannot control this and who are we to dictate how refugees live? That is the reality sometimes

they need the money to get them through the month” (Interview E). A focus group conducted

with mainly refugee women further illustrated that many refugees used their loans to pay rent

and take care of household expenses and requested two-week extensions on their repayments

(Focus Group 1). Indeed, microfinance loans or cash grants are used in varying ways outside the

scope of entrepreneurism—this might be a good thing; however, it also points to the fact that

presenting a business case makes refugees worthier of assistance as opposed to identifying their

very real material needs surrounding everyday survival such as housing, healthcare, education, or

food.

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The ravages of neoliberalization in Kenya have left a gaping hole in the affordable

housing sector evidenced through expanding informal settlements and low-income housing

developments which Huchzermeyer (2007) refers to as tenement cities. This large shelter gap is

not filled by financial inclusion in any meaningful way despite piecemeal schemes of housing

microfinance that emerged in the early to mid 2000s (World Bank, 2002; Easton-Calabria and

Omata, 2016). These issues overlay with refugee housing on racial and class-based dimensions.

For example, the GOK and UN-Habitat have conducted slum upgrading schemes in Kibera.

However, only Kenyan citizens can own property and thus, refugees who are living in informal

settlements allotted for upgrades are evicted, sent back to camps, or deported from Kenya due to

their illegal status (Interview G). This narrative of exclusion reflects the realities of

neoliberalization and the inability of fintech backed financial inclusion to intervene as a

meaningful avenue for poverty alleviation and development assistance.

While fintech-backed microfinance loans for both housing and livelihoods have barely

made a dent in the overall assistance of refugees, the UNHCR has lauded it as the future mode of

refugee assistance. In Kenya, KivaZip is considered a resounding success despite only serving 45

refugees between 2012-2014—an inadequate sample size for the perceived successes (UNHCR,

2015). Additionally, UNHCR suggests that fintech will vastly improve financial access for

refugees through easy digital payments and loan transfers, remittances, and increased

competition and innovation in refugee camps themselves through the interlinking of mobile

wallets and micro-entrepreneurs to financial providers (Pistelli, 2018).

Meanwhile, refugee camps such as Dadaab are characterized by different forms of debt

infused by voluntary repatriation or what Kevin Sieff (2017) names debt-motivated repatriation.

Dadaab has hosted the longest and most continuous refugee population in Kenya since the advent

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of the Somali displacement in the early 1990s. The GOK has been vying to shut down the camp

and UNHCR has finally agreed to repatriate refugees if they wish to return to their country of

origin. As interview data reveals, many refugees choose to accept voluntary repatriation as

UNHCR pays 200 USD per family member who returns to Somalia in order to pay off debts

within the context of diminished aid funding in Dadaab (Interview F). Most of these debts occur

as refugees try to pay for subsistence costs such as food and thus, many feel like they have little

to no choice but to return to warzones in order to finance the debts occurred in Dadaab (Sieff,

2017).

The racialized FPD nexus illustrates various aspects of expropriation whether through

inclusion or exclusion. Refugees in urban settlements are encouraged to be entrepreneurs

because welfare assistance for subsistence costs are hindered by national and urban

neoliberalization and xenophobic attitudes towards refugees. Entrepreneurship is also an

inadequate option to pull refugees out of poverty in informal settlements when housing and other

costs of survival are mounting and many groups, due to their racially marginalized social

positions, live in remote and precarious areas outside of formal camps. Meanwhile, the nexus

between fintech and microfinance loans accumulate capital for various actors in the global North

and global South through the casting of refugees as financial subjects. Kakuma refugee camp

demonstrates the pervasiveness of fintech in the aid industry while Dadaab shows the various

issues of exclusion.

Conclusion

This article has examined the racialized dimensions of fintech as a solution for refugee aid

and survival in the face of unavailable state-led welfare assistance. We understood

dimensions of fintech as elements of financial expropriation inherent to racial capitalism, which

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allowed us to show the distinct, uneven, and variegated ways that public/private development

finance initiatives have been rolled out rhetorically and materially. Fintech for refugees being

developed in Kenya constitutes an iteration of a fintech-philanthropy-development (FPD)

complex, which embeds a digital layer into development finance and everyday life in order to

map, expand, analyze and monetize data that the tracking of purchasing, spending, and saving

produces (Roderick, 2014; Aitken, 2017, Gabor and Brooks, 2017). Our intervention concerning

the FPD complex (Gabor and Brooks, 2017; Mann, 2018) literature, often theorized in processes

of financialization, proceeds from an understanding of refugee fintech as part of a neoliberal

reason that is fundamentally raced, both structurally and agentially (Tilley and Shilliam, 2017).

In order to show this, using the logics of a neoliberalism that is raced and engrossed with

productivity, we integrate an understanding of exploitation and expropriation vis-à-vis fintech -

led development for refugees in Kenya. By exploitation, we do not mean to draw a comparison

between refugees hosted in Kenya and Kenyan citizens, but, instead, seek to frame the

encroachment of fintech and development of the ‘smart city’ in hitherto ‘informal’ refugee

spaces as an example of racialized fast policy. As these logics dictate the continued suffusion of

global capital into formerly invisible or ‘informal’ economic spaces, under the guise of smart

cities and connectedness via financial technology, we argue that the Kenyan case of refugee

fintech for development proffers the opportunity to further our understanding of a financial

inclusion that is beset - by and with - exclusion.

Our critical methodology blended primary and secondary empirical evidence, critical

discourse analysis, and qualitative interview data, whilst our cases were organized spatially by

refugee finance in (1) designated UNHCR camps and (2) as it is encountered by refugees on an

everyday basis in informal spaces in Kenya. In our mapping of the various interrelationships

25

between ethnically-diverse displaced people in Kenya, the state, (public) global development

financial institutions, (private) corporate financial actors, and various types of fintech (mobile

money, P2P investment platforms, e-wallets, etc.), we demonstrated that while these

interrelationships are often difficult to disentangle (i.e. blended finance models), the

contradictions therein demonstrate the exclusionary characteristics of financial inclusion

agendas. These exclusions are best understood as the result of power differentials that are

omnipresent in raced markets and become manifest in discursive framings that communicate

who and what is valued, and under what circumstances (Bhagat, 2019).

Through this framing and methodology, we have argued that refugee assistance in the

era of fintech and microcredit as a form of livelihood support is largely distinguished by

exclusion. Fintech has discursively remained a hopeful source of greater efficiency and

empowerment; however, these discourses of entrepreneurial self-sustenance mask

corporate power by only extending assistance to those refugees who are deemed

appropriately entrepreneurial. Fintech and credit card firms stand to make a profit per

transaction under the guise of smart governance, and smart finance, in refugee camps. This

is facilitated by universalized tropes of entrepreneurship that places the burden of survival

on refugees themselves, absolving both the Kenyan state and global aid actors from any

welfare responsibility. To deepen these insights, we have hinged our analysis on racial

expropriation that operates on multiple scales. This occurs in two main ways: First,

refugees are cast as racial ‘others’ deemed unwanted by the Kenyan state and only allowed

to live in the confines of the camp or face deportation. Second, and perhaps more insidious,

the regime of fintech led entrepreneurialism relies on the exploitation of racialized people

who turn to credit out of necessity. Racialized expropriation shows us how refugees are

26

targeted as new prospects for credit-led profit through ahistorical and poorly evidenced

fast policy implementations. In turn, we have explored the interrelationships between

development aid, private capital, and space in the production and consumption of financial

technology amongst refugees. Refugee governance in Kenya illustrates variegated social

relations of debt and exclusion along with desires of capital accumulation. More broadly,

we have unearthed ways that processes of racialization and capital accumulation dovetail

with global financial power in its ability to penetrate the refugee camp and bring refugee

survival to global raced markets.

Acknowledgements

This research was partially completed through generous funding from the W.C Good Memorial

Fellowship and the IDRC International Doctoral Research Award.

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[1] We forego the term crises for events as the former implies a sudden or unpredictable movement of people; however, the mass migration of people across regions is argued as characterizing geopolitical instability within contemporary capitalism.[2] Kenya’s leading telecommunications provider owned by Vodafone[3] The GOK made any refugees outside of camps in Dadaab and Kakuma illegal subjects; however, this runs counter to the signing of international law that considers freedom of movement for refugees a human right (Interview A).

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