Conclusion
The age of mobile money offers the potential to open up the focus towards alternative perspectives on future studies and emerging Africa. As the greatest activity in mobile money to date has been concentrated in peripheral regions of Africa, particularly rural Africa (as evidenced by studies such as Batista and Vicente 2023), where conventional banking services are entirely lacking (Babatope and Mushunje 2020), mobile telephony and innovations offer the potential to expand and embrace alternative perspectives on future studies and rural Africa. Though Africa is the least urbanized continent, its rate of urbanization is the fastest in the world. Similarly, Uganda is witnessing significant changing lifestyles, community transformation, and spatial aspects of population density and built-up structures. Its journey into urbanization is fast shaping the country’s landscape, including in its enormous rural territories. Nevertheless, processes and developments leading to urbanization are still favoured over ruralization. In other words, traditionally rural areas are expected to adjust to changing lifestyles and community transformation and in spatial aspects of the built-up environment.
Consequently, a majority of the rural milieus or territories with an exceptionally rural feel are often categorized as below the poverty line, with one in every four Ugandans classified as marginalized. Digital technologies appear to offer appropriate tools in the context where the majority of residents have been abandoned to their own fate and detriment with no infrastructure at all, with the national government appearing to care more about the welfare of urban residents. Technologies such as mobile phones and innovations like mobile money appear more appropriate for rural populations that are caught in the poverty and deprivation trap. It is therefore not surprising that mobile money is having a significant impact in the social market of rural Uganda. Yet, beyond this, it still remains a question how the future of rural Africa in the digital age can be better envisioned; and what genuinely African futures in the digital age might look like from the rural perspective, beyond problematic fixations and conceptions rooted in hegemonic systems of modernity and capitalism.
In this article, I sought to show how with the emergence and dispersion of mobile-money services, ‘the rural’ has become more dynamic and more fluid, obtaining a new identity through varied features of lifestyle, community, traditions, and landscapes. I have explored this phenomenon within a ‘territory’ that is a traditional rural setting, and yet at the same time is representative of emerging and transformative aspects of mobile telephony such as mobile money. In my attempts to question how social life is imagined with regard to the potentiality of the rural ‘territory’ as a geographic place integrated into the mobile spatial systems that effectively negate the distance between issuer and receiver, urban and rural, and modern and traditional, I offered a snapshot of the impact of its financial services. While it is evident that mobile money is in fact integral to reimagining rurality, it is important to draw further empirical conclusions about the state of the rural.
Further research may reveal whether rural elements are in fact being preserved, changed, or recreated in urban form, and whether mobile money will eventually change how we feel about rural space, and if so what its applications, services and innovations mean for rural authenticity. It is important for future studies to examine how and to what extent an understanding of ‘rural authenticity’ in the digital age matters as African futures unfold. Finally, in the context of diminishing spaces of inclusion in the digital age, it is necessary to gain a better grasp of what kinds of disparities, vulnerabilities and exclusions are emerging or receding.