Concerned with financialized extraction, the exploitation of precarious workers and racialized violence, critical scholars call for greater attention to the coloniality of financial technology (fintech) expansion in Africa. In this article, we echo the utility in foregrounding coloniality, but argue that it should be read as one among multiple, specific, and entangled ways in which fintech is creating new forms of value in the context of Africa’s urbanization. To make this case, we focus on the nexus between platforms, motorcycle taxis and fintech.
In three different African cities, we observe how fintech maps onto the impulses and desires of the private sector and the state alike to use fintech to enact various forms of value creation. In Nairobi, the motorcycle has become the testbed of assetization experiments that seek to create data-rich and less fuel-dependent economies; in Kigali, the state-led and platform-enabled standardization of motorcycle services intends to create fiscal, planning, and regulatory values; and in Cape Town, legacy supermarket chains enroll motorcycles and fintech offerings to algorithmically integrate urban economies of labor and retail. Tracing these processes illuminates the different rationalities, ingenuities, and technological entanglements that, beyond the endurance of coloniality, shape Africa’s fintech moment.
This article is co-authored by Liza Rose Cirolia, Andrea Pollio, Rike Sitas, Alicia Fortuin, Jack Ong’iro Odeo and Alexi Gatoni Sebarenzi
Our cases confirm that Africa is not simply experiencing a moment in global fintech’s spread (as the McKinsey headline might suggest), but is central to the making and remaking of these new techno-financial infrastructures. Firms—many of which defy the local/global dichotomy (Cirolia et al., 2023)—are using fintech for a wide array of reasons, enabling the everyday economies, social worlds, and political arenas of cities to function and transform in a context of contestations and trade-offs.