The international development project: an overview
People in various territories of the Global South have found themselves and their indigenous norms and institutions subjected to increasing Western intervention, starting with colonialism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries onwards and continuing as targets of the development project. Colonised nations became part of the capitalist world market by supplying labour, raw materials and other commodities to the West, and were forced to âmoderniseâ their institutions to follow the âdevelopedâ Western path (Mugo 2012: 198). Even after independence, the autonomy of the newly created nation states remained conditional on rules of international law and development shaped by the liberal vision of the world order and designed to protect Western economic interests (Pahuja 2011). Following the end of the Cold War in 1991 and what has been called the global victory of Western liberal democracy and capitalism over communism (Fukuyama 1992), Western countries have increasingly exercised a powerful influence over the policies of newly independent governments, both directly and through institutions such as the United Nations (UN), the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), aid agencies such as the UK Department for International Development (DFID) and the US Agency for International Development (USAID), non-governmental organisations (NGOs), corporations and the all-pervasive ramifications of international finance including loans and aid.1
Particularly relevant measures that have framed the development project are the Washington Consensus and the adoption of structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) in the 1980s and 1990s; the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the post-Washington Consensus in 2000 and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that replaced the MDGs in 2015. SAPs represented a package of loans conditional on the adoption of neoliberal policies imposed on developing countries by the Washington-based World Bank and IMF. Such policies included measures to stabilise, liberalise and globalise economies by lowering barriers to foreign capital, controlling inflation by reducing government spending, and privatising public services and state-owned industries. However, much research has shown that SAPs contributed to increasing economic and social inequality and poverty with devastating consequences for a large proportion of the population living on a low income, in particular women, who became disproportionately responsible for social provisioning in the household (Elson 1989, 1991, 1992; BenerĂa 2003: 3; Bergeron 2004: 130; Jaquette and Summerfield 2006: 27). The MDGs, drawing on criticism of SAPs, proclaimed the need for greater attention to the social dimension of development and to expanding development institutionsâ competency, cooperation and intervention to include social objectives such as poverty reduction and gender equality (Rittich 2006). This expansion was driven by principles of good governance and the rule of law and supported by a parallel apparatus of international institutions, governments and donors with the task of coordinating the funds and financing for the evaluation and realisation of these goals (White and Black 2004). In replacing the MDGs, the SDGs reframed the social aims of development around the ideas of inclusion, economic, social and environmental sustainability and âleaving no one behindâ (Weber 2017). They continue to promote free market policy but added an additional layer of interventions focusing on good governance, peopleâs empowerment and new collaborations with non-state actors, philanthropic foundations and the private sector.
The development project can be seen as the process of offering to formerly colonised countries a variety of conditional opportunities to align themselves with Western societies and become active participants in the global economic order. These conditions, defined by more powerful Western states and international institutions, are based on trade, financial rules and principles related to liberal democracy, resonating with US President Trumanâs view of the way to development, as he stated in his 1949 inaugural speech: through productive activities, technological resources, business and private capital and liberal values.2 In the development project the realisation of decent standards of living for all people and socio-economic rights such as food, water, shelter and healthcare is not considered a priority per se, but it is linked to the aim of economic growth and, increasingly, financial development. In the immediate postcolonial period this resulted in the failure to implement the Declaration on the Right to Development, proposed by former colonial countries in 1986 following the adoption of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) in 1966.3 The Declaration on the Right to Development was part of the Third World campaign for a New International Economic Order (NIEO), which started in the 1970s and argued for the economic reconstruction and redistribution necessary to ensure a decent standard of living for all people in former colonies (Bedjaoui 1979; Cheru 2016; Slaughter 2018; Getachew 2019). The NIEO pointed to the unequal economic relations between Southern and Western countries and emphasised the collective duty of all states to eliminate unfair trade rules and commodity prices, ensure permanent sovereignty over resources and build world food security (Anghie 2013). These proposals were rejected by Western countries, which saw them as one-sided obligations and socialist projects incompatible with Western liberal values and therefore problematic during the Cold War (Cornwall and Nyamu-Musembi 2004: 1422). Even since the Cold War, development concerns regarding socio-economic rights have been deliberately framed as social objectives rather than rights and have mainly been promoted through market initiatives rather than public action for universal social provisioning.
This overview is an important starting point for the analysis of digital financial inclusion as a development strategy for gender equality. Gender equality has become a main social objective of the international development project, which promotes financial inclusion as a key instrument for achieving it. Analysis of the colonial legacy, the narratives and institutions that have framed the mainstream development project and the alternative ideas of economic and social development presented in the NIEO can help us understand the assumptions, rationale and limits of digital financial inclusion and its gender implications. To better situate the arguments developed in this book within the academic and policy debates to which it aims to contribute, this chapter provides an overview of the relationship between gender equality and financial inclusion as interrelated aspects of the development project. Drawing on the literature on law and development and international political economy, and engaging with feminist critiques of microfinance and financial inclusion, it discusses three key aspects of financial inclusion as a gendered issue: the second section looks at the legacy of colonialism in defining the socio-economic disadvantage of women that determines financial exclusion; the third section examines the rise in access to finance as a development strategy in the form of microcredit and the shift to a broader financial inclusion policy framework; and the fourth section presents the more recent turn to digital financial inclusion.
This chapter shows how the financial exclusion of women, presented as a general assumption in financial inclusion policy, is in reality strictly linked to socio-economic and legal structures and norms developed since colonialism and aimed at creating a capitalist world market. Rules on such issues as the commodification of land, the wage economy and customary norms introduced during colonialism created a gendered disadvantage that has excluded women from economic development and undermined their entitlements. Addressing this exclusion, the development project has increasingly promoted access to financial services as a useful or even necessary opportunity to include women in the economic system, increase their autonomy and improve their own, their familiesâ and their communitiesâ wellbeing. However, the rhetoric of inclusion has taken the form of inclusionary techniques that fail to address the socio-economic inequalities that caused financial exclusion in the first place. At the same time, financial inclusion and its digital development has become a profitable instrument for corporations, financial institutions, philanthropic foundations and other new influential development actors.
The legacy of colonialism
No investigation of the relationship between gender, development and financial inclusion can be isolated from an analysis of the gendered implications of colonial rule. As this book is concerned with digital financial inclusion in Kenya, the main focus of the analysis is on Africa and in particular on Sub-Saharan Africa. As Okeyo (2005: 299) argues
the position of women in contemporary Africa needs to be considered at every level of analysis as an outcome of structural and conceptual mechanisms by which African societies have continued to respond to and resist the global processes of economic exploitation and cultural domination.
Gender inequality in Africa is bound up in the African peopleâs struggle to free themselves from the poverty caused by colonialism. Okeyo (2005: 299â300) points out that while men and women under colonialism shared a similar subordinate structural position in relation to the dominant culture, colonial rules had a differential impact on them and affected gender relations. This section considers three interrelated aspects of how colonialism has shaped womenâs socio-economic disadvantage and excluded them from formal finance: the commodification of land and the introduction of property rights, the rules governing the wage economy and the creation of customary law.
Colonialism in Africa involved the expropriation of land from indigenous people, restructuring access to it on a monetary basis (Manji 2006). The introduction of property rights undermined the previous âegalitarian pattern of social organisationâ (Laesthaeghe 1989: 51) in favour of patriarchal relations that saw men as the household heads and holders of land titles (Maathai 2008; Federici 2011). The introduction of the wage economy targeted men as paid workers and the family breadwinners (Hodgson 1999; Obeng 2003), relegating women to the position of secondary unpaid workers (Boserup 1970; Manji 1999; Okeyo 2005). Most men earned wages in a discriminatory and often exploitative labour market in mines, farms and infrastructure construction, and often had to migrate to newly created urban areas or fight in colonial wars (Okeyo 2005: 301). Most women, on the other hand, were excluded from paid labour and engaged in unpaid subsistence agriculture, selling surplus produce to acquire goods, and housework including fetching water and firewood from several kilometres away (Maathai 2008: 281; Nixon 2013: 16). This contributed to the framing of women as responsible for unpaid household work, depending on men for money and excluded from financial services (Guyer 1991).
The wage economy also favoured reshaping the family structure and values with a shift to the nuclear family that was seen as the emblem of Western modernity (Zeitlin et al. 1995). Imported Christian values and missionary education contributed to limiting households to the heterosexual conjugal relationship rather than, as previously, extended households including other kin (Afonja 1981; Guyer and Peters 1987; Whitehead 1990; OyèwĂšmĂ 2005: preface; Tamale 2011: 18). Christian missionaries instilled the ideals of obedience, domesticity and âappropriateâ female behaviour such as monogamy, marital fidelity and conjugal intimacy, and reinforced the roles of the male breadwinner and the dependent wife who manages the household (Cornwall 2005: 6; Ngaruiya and OâBrien 2005: 145). The dismantling of the extended household deprived women of the support that had acted as a protective buffer for social provisioning, and was not replaced by state welfare services (Maathai 2010: 274).4 Instead women, responsible for the daily needs of the household, found support in churches and other religious institutions, womenâs self-help groups, and later, development programmes and NGOs (Gaitskell 1990).5
Customary law contributed to womenâs socio-economic disadvantage by normalising the gender biases caused by land ownership and the wage economy, resulting in the consideration of women as what OyèwĂšmĂ defines as âsecond-class colonial subjectsâ (1997: 127). Chanock (1982) describes customary law as a product of the relationship between the colonial state and male clan elders, while OyèwĂšmĂ (1997) defines customary rules as reinvented traditions, as their ultimate source was the colonial government and administration. Customary laws were in fact filtered according to colonial values via the ârepugnancyâ clause with the aim of controlling government matters, protecting the economic interests of the West and favouring its economic expansion (Juma 2002; Banda 2003; Ocran 2006).6 In this way customary law facilitated and legitimised the subordination of women in areas such as property and domestic and family law including marriage, divorce, inheritance, land and burial rights (Hay and Wright 1982; Stamp 1991; Manji 1999).
These discriminatory laws and womenâs exclusion from land ownership and the wage economy prevented them from owing or even inheriting property and capital, undermining their ability to open a bank account or access formal financial services (Guyer 1991). While men living in poverty and on a low income did not have easy access to finance either, women were at a greater disadvantage in accessing formal finance. This clarification is important, because early development interventions tended to portray African women as victims...
