Rurality and the Age of Mobile Money in Uganda
This section presents results from fieldwork that was conducted in two villages in Masaka and Kyotera, two contiguous districts in southwestern Uganda. Masaka and Kyotera run along the western shore of Lake Victoria between the capital city of Kampala and the border with Tanzania. The two districts were previously united as one district, and both are regions within the Buganda Kingdom, a cultural institution and monarchy with a high level of self-government away from the Ugandan state. In Masaka district, the first village of focus was Kako, located in Mukungwe subcounty. In Kyotera district, the village of interest was Kakoma, a parish in Kalisizo, an upcountry town. The two villages, Kako in Masaka and Kakoma in Kyotera, were selected because they are among the poorest and are remote settlements not automatically reached by government- and community-financing initiatives. While the contiguous districts of Masaka and Kyotera are wealthier than their immediate neighbours, the villages of Kako and Kakoma exhibit significant disparities and rural characteristics essential for this study. For example, the homesteads in these villages are often clusters of mud-brick and iron-roofed two- to three-bedroom dwellings with a sitting and dining room, and occasionally a kitchen. The homesteads also reserve grazing land, pasture land, bare land, development land, and farmland for subsistence crops, especially banana plantations. Homesteads are often connected by foot-trodden paths through forests and farms to even thicker forests, which serve as sources of firewood and sometimes water dams and wells. People tend plots, graze goats and cattle, and make mud bricks. Usually, families may consist of up to five adults and sometimes ten children in a single homestead, with most people having extensive kin across the whole village or sometimes simply in the neighbourhoods. Given the extensive nature of these kinships where many can trace their ancestry over five generations, the idea of family, kinship, and network in such communities is profound.
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Map 9.1. The two black points for Kako (Masaka) on the upper right, and Kakoma (Kyotera) on the lower left, in Uganda [Cartography: M. Feinen].
Methodologically, three main qualitative research methods were used in this study: participant observation, qualitative research interviews, and focus-group discussions. The interviewees and groups were drawn largely from ‘the poor’, ‘the illiterate’, ‘the landless’, ‘the aging’, ‘the young people’, ‘the farmers and farm families’, and ‘the disabled’. I also identified local councillors, religious leaders, and traditional leaders as potential participants. In total, I conducted 20 interviews, 10 in each of the two communities, in addition to two focus-group discussions, one within each of the two communities. Each focus-group discussion involved about 20 participants. These were selected through a combination of convenience and snowball sampling. Observations included daily activities in the rural communities and interactions with the rural poor: i.e. the new forms of community envisaged in the midst of spatial access and dispersion of mobile-finance services, with emphasis on how these redraw social life within the rural context. These methods allowed me to better understand the lived realities of the use and appropriation of mobile telephony and how these create a new identity of cross-scalar and rural-urban connections, in ways that challenge the discursive marginalization of communities most at risk of rural poverty and social exclusion. The following subsections examine such realities through the lens of everyday life, community and identity within Kako and Kakoma.
Everyday Life
Before mobile phones, literate rural residents in southern Uganda exchanged information on crucial news such as serious illnesses through letters. For the rural residents who were illiterate and couldn’t write, this was perceived as problematic. Letters were less informative than speech and were often disseminated informally through trusted friends; it would often take days, weeks, or even months to receive a reply. Today, calling and the use of SMS (Short Message Service) texts have replaced most of the letter-writing that many experienced as problematic. Moreover, the creative and innovative system of mobile money – which operates through text and SMS – meets basic functionality needs and operates on the most basic handset. It takes old technology and uses it in new and innovative ways. It takes old practices of sociality and modifies and syncretizes these with more dynamic and efficient systems.
One of the old practices that have changed substantially since the emergence of mobile-money services is that of saving. Mobile money has tremendously influenced peoples’ saving behaviour, where previously keeping money under mattresses or in fabric, often tied in knots, was common. Nowadays, mobile phones and mobile money are clearly substituting for traditional, unreliable savings channels. While narratives of the threat of mobile-money transformations are sometimes common in my interviews with rural residents, it is important to note that these transformations are not introducing entirely new ways of life but rather substituting what already exists.
Mobile money has also taken on the role of ensuring remittance services, substituting traditional forms of remittance transfer. Where previously people only used trustees and formal institutions including banks and other financial institutions (Schraten 2021, Kusimba 2021), mobile money has now made it possible to send money from urban centres to Ugandan villages through remittances at even lower transaction costs. Money transfers across borders are also being introduced. Especially within the East Africa region, the presence of regional cross-border banks and mobile-phone companies are making cross-border remittances relatively straightforward to implement, allowing local and cross-border mobile-money transfers. Internationally, mobile-money transfers have recently gained ground: senders are able to send money through a remittance centre, which then transfers the money electronically to the recipient’s phone. The recipient is then able to collect the money at any licensed outlet by paying a fee that varies according to the transaction. Increasingly, mobile-money subscribers can use virtual money for payments, settlements, and the purchase of goods from shops and markets. These have in many cases proven to be effective, and sufficiently reliable for the rural population to use. Without having to travel long distances and queue in traditional banks, or travel across borders, rural dwellers are now able to receive money in the comfort of their homes, as one interviewee described one of their varied experiences:
You know, if you have UGX 10,000 [EUR 2.50] and with UGX 10,000 will get you a bus ride, and back home, actually, you will save the UGX 9000 [EUR 2.30] and use the UGX 1000 to buy airtime. If you have the UGX 1000 as airtime, you can call someone and ask for the money to be sent immediately. And at your own convenience.
These remittances exert multiplier effects on the community. For instance, they have in some cases motivated young local men and non-receiving households to start seasonal entrepreneurial activities. Before, youths used to have no choice but to leave their villages for bigger cities like Mbarara and Kampala, so much so that there were not enough youths to work in farms and gardens within the rural confines. But many of those who are becoming more aware of how fast things are changing are now realizing that the countryside is indeed a fine place to live and work. A specific case is one young man who was part of a group that moulds mud bricks and then bakes them in huge ovens to make them strong and resistant to erosion by water and rain. They would sell the bricks to the remittance-receiving households for building houses on their homesteads. This highlights a multiplier or spill-over effect reflecting the family-centred money transfers to the wider community.
Mobile money is also substituting traditional ways of making monetary payments. These traditional methods of payment that often involved agents and the ‘middleman’ have especially been substituted by mobile means of cashing in (depositing funds), cashing out (withdrawing funds), transferring funds person-to-person (money transfer), purchasing airtime, and making mobile accounts inquiries and payments to workers. Sometimes when asked why they used mobile money, the rural residents suggested that it was the appropriate alternative to and substitute for these rather unfavourable fixed and traditional ways of spending money such as cash. They pointed out the need for efficiency, adequacy, swiftness and security – in addition to the fact that mobile money reduces transaction costs and risk. They said that cash or traditional bank accounts, credit cards, and traditional financial facilities were very complex to understand and later on to operate and maintain in remote villages, and that they were a preserve of some people at certain economic levels – for instance, people wealthy enough to afford a handset.
In fact, in the true spirit of substitution, rural realities – that largely explain the essential non-existence of infrastructure in the rural areas – are surprisingly the same realities that have inspired the tremendous uptake and transformation of mobile money. For instance the absence of proper roads and accessible banks in these areas explains why a mobile phone will be popular for saving, transferring, and making real-time payments. As such, the new infrastructural concepts engineered by mobile-network operators are not only broadening the range of transactions that target the rural populations, they are also providing alternative means and are providing much more fluid and dynamic substitutes. These concepts and models have made rural spaces and territories even more dynamic and fluid.
The money-transfer application has emerged as the ‘killer app’ of mobile money – a highly innovative, powerful, and essential tool that fundamentally transforms and simplifies everyday life. It supports the indigenous and traditional settings, realities, and world-views. The sector that has benefited the most is probably education, where schools have changed from accepting traditional means of paying tuition and other school fees – such as delivering funds in person or proxy, and use of agents such as banking institutions – to using mobile alternatives. Many community schools in the region have now adopted mobile money as an acceptable means and mode of payment. They have registered with MTN and Airtel Uganda Limited, where parents are allowed to transfer school fees and other school related costs for the children. Some people paid their water bills through mobile money. There was also the case of multinationals and NGOs coming to the village that had substituted in-person payments in cash with mobile-money payments and other mobile applications to reach out to the communities and distribute emergency aid to families. Such alternatives, the participants argued, simplified their lives when they needed to access goods and services. They were cheap and easily accessible. Some research participants argued that they used electronic transaction forms for additional home goods and food items such as sugar and salt. Others used mobile money for paying utility bills for water and electricity, and to pay the salaries of their house girls or housemaids and other support staff in their homes, instead of going to the bank to withdraw cash. Such accessibility and availability mean that almost everyone in every corner of the country, community, and village has a story to tell about mobile money. The imperative of this social reality lies in the benefits that these different mobile-money applications have provided to people in such regions, including, but not limited to, storage and transfer of monetary value.
While the increasing number of money transfers from urban to rural territories through mobile phones has also increased the flow of information between people in and outside the village, one consequence is that urban dwellers are increasingly keeping away from these rural localities owing to the convenience and reliability with which mobile applications provide them. According to a Church priest,
… a lot of people here come to the village when it’s Christmas. They only come to the village for the seasons’ holidays. And when they come here, it’s as if there is nothing to keep them there. They leave as soon as they arrive. Mobile phones have encouraged our people in the urban areas not to visit at all. They have provided an easy means of communication and sending money. People no longer need to physically come here. It is as if the major motivation for people to purchase phones nowadays is so that they can avoid expenditure on travel to the village. It is as if there is no need for the inconvenience of having to make constant trips to the countryside.
While people have less direct physical contact, they are connected through their access to mobile phones, and mobile money in particular. As remote transfers are much faster, cheaper and safer, rural communities and families easily depend on support from outside without there being a necessity for physical proximity or contact. This reality highlights the nature of new and emerging lifestyles and forms of community depictive of emergent rural futures.
Community
Without a discussion of ‘ubuntu’ – a communal and relational modality of the Bantu or, specifically, Baganda – the effectiveness of mobile-money applications in Southern Uganda’s rural communities may not be properly understood. It is therefore imperative to provide a brief description of the process through which people in the two communities I visited, in Buganda and in South Uganda, come to be understood, communally and relationally. What is clear is the ‘buntu bulamu’ (the equivalent of ‘ubuntu’), which is an epistemological and humanistic metaphor that embodies the significance of possessing relational, collectivist, intuitive, and contemplative ideals in a community. To be ‘muntu mulamu’ is to empathize and to belong with kin, friends, clan and community. It is also to ensure group harmony, interpersonal relationships and consensus over individuality. ‘muntu mulamu’ is a person that deserves to be integrated into the entire society if he does not already belong. Everyone in the tight-knit society is expected to have ‘buntu bulamu’. It is the proper social conduct in a community in which self is bound to others. A person must always strive for communal relationships. In this way group solidarity still remains very prevalent. The notion presumes that an individual does not and cannot exist alone but owes existence to the village and/or community. ‘Buntu bulamu’ recognizes the usefulness of community-centredness.
What makes the mobile-money application ideal in this case is the fact that it is not perceived as a threat to such ingrained and indigenous ideals, notions, and realities of the community. Instead, mobile money is the kind of application that people take up so they are able to carry on living their lives just as they did before it existed. In fact, mobile money seems to enhance rural lifestyles of communities through which people who are registered are able to ‘connect to all’ including their kin, friends, and community. It seems to provide opportunities to establish and maintain community, collaboration, and access.
Its very nature allows a collective manner of operation in a territory of scarcity and lack of abundance. Rural residents do not necessarily have strong incentives for purchasing personal phones. Mobile money thus facilitates the ease of phone sharing by smaller units in rural spaces between homes, between friends and family, or centrally at an agent shop or stand in the nearest town or community itself. This, in fact, occurs to the extent that the low teledensity in the locality does not in any way imply a lack of mobile-money use or spread. Just one mobile phone will become available to the entire village. This reality draws a lot from connections, community, and networks. In this way, mobile money seems to draw its acceptance largely from village communality and earlier patterns of livelihood. This endears it to the fluidity of rural society, lifestyle, and solidarity.
For many, mobile money is a socioeconomic tool for reaching out to close networks. Many use the system to balance social obligations with economic cooperation. Mobile money is used to strengthen social and economic connections through extended family networks, group-specific associations, and social networks. Beyond making it easier to fulfil social obligations, mobile money plays a critical role in enhancing economic networks as well. I found that for households that adopted mobile money, benefits were more cautioned from economic risk, in that they were more dependent and reliant on such real-world social ties in times of need. The ability of mobile money to truly cushion households and enhance the financial lives of underserved people is one of the reasons it has continued to be a central monetization mechanism for many households – in other words, a door-opener for the capitalist economy in rural environments. This explains its dramatic uptake, which itself is partly due to its ability to leapfrog traditional barriers including social, economic, and ecological impediments, transform the rural and rural life, and bring financial services closer to rural populations. Mobile money plays a significant role in facilitating new forms of social interaction and maintaining inherent forms of community largely founded on long-standing cultural rules and traditions.
Thus, mobile telephony is used to strengthen communal and social networks, through necessitating social payments that are often the norm when organizing key social ceremonies such as (traditional) weddings and funerals of particular kin. In Uganda, family members, kin, and friends participate in frequent and temporary borrowing and lending during special occasions in everyday contexts, and the favour is expected to circulate over time, or at least require and invite reciprocation in the future. To this end, mobile telephony then becomes a means for maintaining presence in absence by keeping these foundational ideals alive. People are able to keep in close contact with friends and family, and their needs regardless of geography or dispersion. People are able to live up to their responsibilities through the almost mandatory reciprocal exchange of wealth, money, and gifts imperative for social sustenance and economic survival.
In addition to strengthening village sociality and solidarity, mobile telephony has also been useful in promoting micro-enterprise development in Uganda’s rural markets. As the service has matured, financial institutions in particular are beginning to grow their presence strongly and are now casting their nets even wider, this time looking for potential in rural areas. Through mobile-phone-based support initiatives, financial institutions are greatly influencing the rural economy, which has been taking a giant leap forward in the past few years. As Martin and Abbott (2010: 1) argue, their influx into rural agricultural areas, for instance, represents ‘one of the most profound changes in rural Uganda and many other developing countries in the past decade’. Rural residents used the service for maintaining close networks mostly through organizing savings groups, often in association with SACCOs in the region and/or solidarity organizations and associations. Women especially have established savings groups amongst close-knit friends and relatives.
Social groups and gatherings are fundamental in the rural areas, affording groups the opportunity to interact and network amongst themselves to form more targeted groups and instigate new networks and collaborations. One group that has benefited greatly from using mobile money among its services is the Responsible Motherhood Savings Group in Masaka, a key focus group in my field research. Its members said they didn’t have to worry about carrying money. They didn’t have to worry about carrying cash in bulk or standing in long bank queues to buy cheques. Besides the tangible benefits, mobile-money services have enhanced, among these women, a community spirit as well as collective action. They have reinforced the feeling of community among members of the village. When one of the members faced a challenge, everyone in the group gave their individual contributions, sometimes through mobile money. Such actions gave people a sense of togetherness and strength so that people seemed to be closer to each other than was the case before. The group members argued that mobile applications such as mobile money allowed more transparency as well as more connectedness amongst themselves. Through mobile-money services, participants claimed that they had a more transparent way of pooling resources and redistributing them both according to need and also in a way that reflects a feeling of oneness and spirit of communality in how resources are owned and shared or allocated. As one of the interviewees claimed:
The rate of poverty was so high, we had less knowledge about how to save our money. But nowadays, as the projects are there, we are able to save money.
With these and many other projects, poverty alleviation appears to be a more achievable goal. Many mobile-money systems and applications have been promoted in the rural areas and have helped in organizing women’s movements in the region. Women’s groups have mobilized fellow women into women’s associations and committees, which have been involved in setting up income-earning opportunities. Women have increasingly formed self-help groups supported and sustained by mobile-phone applications such as mobile money. Instead of radical changes, many women have experienced subtle reforms in daily life, family life, community, and networks. Women describe a better life as the ability to be a good person in the contexts of family, community, and society. They seem content with the idea of being in small family groups in which they could express their opinions, concerns, and wishes. Besides, they claim to dress better, eat better, decorate their houses and take much better care of their gardens and animals. As the cashier of a local affirmative group argued:
Before mobile money, we were left behind and excluded. Today with access to phones and money, we feel included. We feel empowered. We are even able to save up to cope up with droughts, disasters, and times of crisis through our networks who are now closer with mobile money. In times of crisis and need, I think it is a great system. Once we have got texts on the mobile phone, we can get the money immediately from our kin. There is no need to travel long distances.
Phones have intensified the kinship system in the rural areas and made rural communities far more resilient against external shocks, whether social, economic, or environmental. In times of crisis, mobile money allows last-mile resilience, where cash assistance in extremely remote areas becomes possible and much safer. This is especially relevant given that rural communities in the past have been vulnerable and not as accessible. Enhanced options for mobile payments and savings improve living conditions and drive inclusion for households and communities.
This notwithstanding, symbolic fields such as kinship and rituals represent dominant practices and enduring meaning structures that cannot be ignored by the rural residents or overlooked when interpreting village life. To entirely understand this connection with social life in rural Uganda is to understand the idea of gifting up and down generations. It is to understand how young people give to parents, grandparents, and other close kin in their parents’ generation. In this way, mobile money is able to enhance inherent informal risk-sharing networks. Most users in Southern Uganda use it to support friends, family, and relatives. It is a method for social gifting and sometimes contributing to ceremonies and social rituals and functions. In rural Uganda, sending money is closely connected to the practice of chatting or texting. Mobile money transfers between the urban and rural dwellers almost always follow a chat, a text message, a beep (or intentional ‘missed-call’), or a call between the two. Mobile money in Uganda has acquired an etiquette that is often followed when using the mobile phone. Participants often indicated that they commonly used their gadgets to maintain relationships through sending money, airtime, and similar gifts.
I found that mobile-money systems were an important means through which individuals in groups and networks spread risk amongst themselves. It had the potential to allow more efficient risk sharing, whereby it expanded the geographic reach of community group-specific networks. Mobile money facilitated timely savings and the transfer of small amounts of money. For instance, Mwanje, a retired local government official in Kakoma, Kalisizo, a Muslim with three wives and 22 sons and daughters, talked about how he used SMS messaging in 2014 to organize his extended family group to send contributions to him for an emergency. The payments in total, he noted, amounted to 5,000,000 Ugandan shillings ($2000).
In another case, a 63-year-old widow used MTN mobile money to occasionally receive upkeep from her grandchildren, who took care of her by helping to maintain her basic needs and her farm. She used the credit to purchase goods and services and maintain her day-to-day business at home. Through mobile money, she was able to save time and avoid the hustle of Ugandan public transportation from her village to town. She was also able to avoid queuing at the bank for credit and saving. She often reviewed, accounted and budgeted her transactions on her phone’s memory.
According to Nakijobe, a 75-year-old mother of nine, all of whom work in the city, Nakijobe had only been able to talk to her daughters and sons about once a year before the arrival of a mobile phone in the village. Nakijobe would endure long trips to the city when she needed some money for fees and medication, whereas now the daughters and sons are accessible to their parents through the phone and its SMS and mobile-money applications. Najijobe’s testimony from Kako in Masaka was not necessarily an isolated incident as it matched the other testimonies from Kakoma, a parish in Kalisizo, Kyotera district.
Altogether, these structures exist in motion, providing a basis for generating diverse positions and views, which will be discussed in the next subsection. Inherent in their portrayals are dominant practices that enable a re-imagination of emergent rural futures, supported by a multiplicity of symbolic alternatives, as well as rural-urban and rural-rural connectivity.
Identity
Mobile phones are increasingly conferring on village society characteristics of urban settings. With the inevitable and ongoing processes of modernization and globalization, it’s not uncommon to find a myriad of new shops and kiosks or stalls in villages – influenced, reinforced and strengthened for the most part through mobile-money services and operations. Despite inherent challenges such as cost, maintenance and repair, mobile money seems to have added social value to rural life. It has become a complex entity, one associated with a multitude of geographical transformations far beyond the dominant images that portray social backwardness, suffering, and oppression. The research participants’ social constructions of the rural presented in this chapter are deeply embedded in everyday rural-life contexts and are far from the generally cold and remote depictions in the media that invoke a territory inhabited by ‘backward natives’. But this is perhaps also because, as John, a local resident of Kako village, argued, his village was not as remote and distant as one would normally expect a rural area to be, and it is also more dynamic and fluid now that it used to be before the advent of mobile money:
Major challenges had to do with insufficient infrastructure systems and services, as well as lack of private and non-government investment in rural areas. My village is about ten minutes from the nearest town by car. But taxis were hardly available. Transportation is no longer difficult. Access to a fair diet is no longer a constant challenge. All because I am now in a position to access credit through mobile money. While cities are often privileged to have more and better roads, hospitals and schools, people are able to choose from the few available options that are emerging here.
The rural, as one would want to think of it, is not by nature static or as self-sufficient as it used to be. While rurality has nonetheless been strengthened even further by mobile gadgets and mobile-money services, a different conception of space that relies on aspects of urbanity is emerging in many places.
A new identity is emerging in relation to much broader networks. A matrix of cultures, identities, and behaviours has become visibly apparent. Shared characteristics or traits are loudly visible, both spatially and geographically. There are many common traits of Ugandan rural communities that are becoming more apparent today and which stem from mobile phones. Mobile phones have reinforced traits and notions of diversity among social groups and rural communities. The rural has attained a new identity through varied features of lifestyle, traditions, and landscapes, especially with regard to how groups and individuals balance their social and economic capital, create and maintain ties and social networks, and share or circulate money among themselves, and also how they mediate the conflicts that are created between social obligations and personal economic needs. With these, new and specific patterns of behaviour such as maintaining family ties, closeness of communities, as well as the importance of humanity have emerged. These are mediated over the phone through mobile-money platforms provided by mobile-network operators.
The other aspect that is perhaps very clear in Masaka and Kyotera is the motivation to adopt mobile money in the rural areas. Unlike in the urban areas, where it is sometimes about class, convenience, networking, and merely the position of the consumer, rural residents initially migrated away from their existing ways only then when they were sure that the newly emerging ways were better than the ones they had been accustomed to. It was not about abundance or convenience, but rather about need and desire. It was about how one product/service was proving to be better than the existing product/service. As such, they adopted mobile money because its applications provided solutions. Whatever mobile applications were used in a community and locality, it was because of their ability to offer realistic and innovative solutions and forms of access for the individual, for a group, for a community, or for the entire village. From my observations it became obvious that its applications were appreciated for nothing other than their ability to solve genuine problems that the people faced, such as rescue in times of need, or payment of water bills or tuition fees.
Particularly interesting is the experience of one health worker who said she had not returned to her home village since her father died in 1998 as she no longer had any reason to go back just to pay homage to an almost ‘empty’ village. However, she further intimated that when she finally travelled to the village over 15 years later, she realized how much the rural area had changed, and explained how she had been making plans to settle and set up a mobile clinic there to make good use of mobile-money applications (and be able to save) in the village. In another interesting narrative one herdsman excitedly described how with his smartphone he will take a picture of a sick cow and explain to his boss with details about what and where the problem is. He said he will then receive money for its treatment through mobile money, or be advised to sell it in the market, upon which he will then immediately send profits over to his boss through mobile money. As the LC 1 Chairperson for the village would confidently add, ‘today, the village is not just for the poor, the old or the sick anymore; it is clear from the mobile phones that communication and the frequent use of mobile money are getting people out of the circle of total poverty’. From all these and similar responses it was possible to read the enlightenment on the faces of the participants as they pointed out how they had become educated and financially able people.
However, with the urbanization of African villages – i.e. the change of lifestyles, the transformation of community, and the spatial aspects of population density and built-up structures – the rural is losing much of its idealistic image. This is so much so that the rural is emerging as a model of ‘modernity’ in contrast to ‘rural identity’ in part due to globalization and rural-urban/urban-rural travels, but this is also the result of the usage and uptake of mobile-money services.
Even for businesses in the private sector – like the mobile-network operators, banks, and financial institutions – the rural is increasingly becoming a more dynamic and competitive environment such that they are finding that the only way they can survive is to adapt fast enough. Infrastructural changes which are largely taking root and the ever-increasing presence of mobile services are increasingly influencing lifestyles, and this in turn has necessitated new models of survival. More access and connectivity have meant more access to infrastructural facilities, and ultimately, more transformation in the traditional and conventional image of the rural, rural life, and rurality.
Suddenly, in many parts of the country, rural areas are emerging as global, dynamic, multi-faceted territories, so much so that rural life is increasingly being reshaped, redrawn, reconstructed, and generally transformed. This was sometimes surprisingly described to me by some residents as a danger for traditional forms of rurality for the residents, with some intimating rising concerns about the possibility of protecting, or at least paying more attention to, the rural and its aspects and ideals. Some residents argued that it was becoming obvious that rural areas were losing their identity. Some of these concerns are best captured in the following narratives:
I always thought that if I got the opportunity to go to the village, I would not hesitate. I used to think that in the village there was no hustling and bustling like is the case in towns and cities. I used to think that village people live ‘down-to-earth’ lives and hardly complain about poverty as we did in the city. I used to think that if I ever had the chance of getting employment here in the village, I wouldn’t hesitate to grab it. I used to think that the village was the place you face nature in its natural non-tainted form. Not anymore.
It’s just that my village is no longer the typical traditional self that it once was. I think that urbanization is beginning to have a real impact here as the face of the city is increasingly being threatened and destroyed by these new innovations. The village is not as rural and traditional as it used to be. I do like the clean water, electricity, radio and TV, roads, cellphones, etc. But I mind that visiting it is no longer like going back in time. It’s more like a change of scenery. I still yearn for the traditional life. The rural life. Many youths in the villages now have smartphones, which they use to access services. It’s very weird.
In sum, rural areas have acquired a specific internal dynamic of changing and adapting. Although my research and fieldwork mostly focused on mobile money users’ agency, it is important to add that, while mobile telephony and mobile money was primarily driven by the private sector, the government has also played a key role in shaping and determining the success of mobile-money markets’ expansion in the rural regions. For instance, the Ugandan Central Bank has cleared the path for mobile finance, a shift that has forced a few banks to look seriously at the low-income consumer-banking market in the rural areas for the first time. Major commercial banks in Uganda such as Equity Bank, Opportunity Bank, and other micro-finance institutions have begun to extend their distributional channels to the communities that I visited. They have partnered with key mobile-network operators, leading to across-the-board cost reductions in consumer transactions, thereby integrating unbanked populations into the formal financial sector. These include those who live in rural areas, in part through rural-oriented initiatives that have been supported and enabled largely through initiatives led by mobile-network operators. With such services, products and initiatives, new alternatives to traditional banking are emerging as viable tools of financial inclusion, where these are likely to further shape Africa’s rural futures and economies in quite spectacular ways.