Introduction
Over recent years, there has been much interest in mobile telephony and the opportunities it presents in the global South. Of particular note is the role and impact of mobile-phone-based products and services like mobile money in overcoming structural conditions of the South and achieving better urban and rural futures. Mobile money services and products have become central tools for financial inclusion in some of the world’s most marginalized communities, allowing self-registration, formal savings products such as cash-in to a mobile phone account (through a local agent), free balance checking, transfer of money from one person to another through a mobile phone; paying for products (provided that you have access to a mobile money agent or shop), cash-out money or e-money (from a local agent), and formal money transfers (between registered customers, i.e. urban-rural remittances). Broad shifts in cultural perceptions and marketing campaigns have made possession of the mobile phone a primary – or rather, critical – necessity. For example, the mobile phone has been marketed as a gadget that enables services refocused on value propositions and marketing slogans such as ‘send money home’, which have emphatically accentuated urban-to-rural remittance flows (Kumar 2012, Guma 2014). It has been promoted as a tool whose services are aimed at, first, large under-served populations with few alternatives for financial services (Kusimba 2021), and second, a demographic profile of significant numbers of adults who have migrated to cities in search of work while retaining strong familial and financial links to their home villages.
Since its introduction in Eastern Africa in 2003, mobile money has grown to nearly 1.75 billion accounts globally by 2024, with 656 million of these accounts in Africa (GSMA 2024). East Africa remains a stronghold, boasting over 372 million subscribers, according to surveys by the GSMA Mobile Money Adoption survey (ibid.). The East African region not only has the highest levels of mobile money adoption globally but has also surpassed even the most optimistic predictions of telecom operators. Equally, mobile telephony has eclipsed fixed-lines as the primary means of telecommunication in both urban and rural contexts despite a myriad of social, economic, and ecological impediments (Myovella et al. 2020). Without necessarily going through the Western-standard and conventional evolutionary adoption path of the development and transformation of telecommunications, African regions have leapfrogged opportunities in communications (Aron 2017), accelerating economic growth, and ‘opening up’ and ‘tapping into’ new markets of unserved and underserved populations through the adoption of mobile phones and other ICTs. Mobile telephony and mobile money systems have witnessed a significant growth in market share through a broad agent network that has come to epitomize today’s technological context, which is drastically different, more flexible, fluid, and mobile. In light of this development, it becomes important to examine how with their emergence and dispersion, Africa, and in particular Eastern Africa, and rural territories where such ICTs have been embraced quite enthusiastically both by providers and users, are being reimagined.
This chapter examines mobile phones (and technologies) as tools of information and rural extension, interrogating three things in particular: first, how rural identities and the understanding of community are shifting with new cross-scalar and rural-urban connections being created; second, the ways through which the rural territory is being reinterpreted through processes, lifestyles, and behaviours influenced by the new technologies and transformations; and third, how social life is being reimagined in terms of the potentiality of the rural ‘territory’ as at once a geographic place and part of an integrated space within mobile spatial systems that in turn effectively erase the distance between issuer and receiver, urban and rural, and modern and traditional. While I explore this problem within ‘territories’ that on the surface appear to be traditional rural settings – still remote, marginalized, and poverty-stricken – it is important to acknowledge that they have always been fluid, dynamic, and changing. Thus, my goal is not to demonstrate how or whether the new technologies result in a radical change, but rather to explain the somewhat gradual transformations that follow such new technologies within the context of diverse real-world locations and beyond abstractions in mostly English texts from a Western-trained mind (see Guma 2014).
In doing so, I remain cautious of the modernist approach to African rural futures and the role of mobile money in such futures; I acknowledge that not everything that is new makes life better, at least not for everyone. Likewise, the idea of new technologies as transformative for rural contexts is to be critiqued, as new inventions and innovations bring with them new exclusions and contestations, adding another layer of complexity within territories and localities where they land. Science, technology, and society (STS) studies show how all technology, in all its manifestations, is context-based. Thus, I recognize the imperative of scrutinizing inherent discursive strategies and processes that produce a technology that works and relates in different ways in different contexts. I pay attention to situated referents of identity, community, and everyday life, recognizing that rural areas themselves are not static but constantly changing demographically, socially, and economically – transformed independently and through their interface with both human and nonhuman entities, agencies, relationalities, affects, and forces. Finally, I conclude with critical reflections on and lines of enquiry regarding digital rural futures in Africa drawing out the different kinds of dynamism, fluidity, and identity through varied features of lifestyle, community, tradition, and landscape.