Digital Money: A New Solution for Development

Digital technology plays a central role in development policies, in which digital money is presented as a lever for financial inclusion. The rapid diffusion of digital money is based on socio-technical promises inherited partly from the global microfinance movement. Proposing a multi-scalar approach that links micro-scale ethnographic observations to global structural trends, this article offers an analysis that is both critical of digital money and attentive to its ambiguities and ambivalences. In line with research that highlights extractivism and the reproduction of inequalities, we examine the promises of digital money in relation to examples of money and credit platforms in Africa and Asia. Our analysis, with its bottom-up approach attentive to the uses and effects of political and moral economies, is carried out through the lens of appropriation, in both senses of the term: ownership and adaptation.