Contesting the financialisation of remittances: Repertoires of reluctance,refusal and dissent in Ghana and Senegal

Introduction

In August 2019, the Financial Times (FT) dedicated a seven-part series to global remittances, ¹ noting that remittances had caught up with, and even surpassed, foreign direct investment as the largest flow of capital into developing and emerging economies. While remittances are depicted as an essential source of funds for many of the planet’s poorest, international financial and development organisations argue that their development impacts could be increased if some of that money was channeled into more “productive investment” (Johnson, 2019). One key approach to bringing this about is to integrate remittance recipients in countries of origin into the so-called ‘formal’ financial system via banks and Microfinance Institutions (MFIs), allowing them to not only build up savings but also access credit and insurance. ² “The rationale [is] simple: how can we make these remittances count more?”, said Pedro De Vasconcelos, senior technical specialist for the International Fund for Agricultural Development’s Financing Facility for Remittances in one of the pieces of the FT series (Johnson, 2019). At the core of what I call the ‘remittance-financial inclusion nexus’ are attempts to change the financial infrastructure and instruments with which remittances are sent, received, saved, borrowed, loaned and invested (Guermond, 2020). This paper examines how this nexus manifests itself in Ghana and Senegal paying particular attention to the ways in which remittance recipients have responded to attempts to incorporate them into global finance.

A limited number of studies have started to critically examine the differentiated attempts to incorporate remittances into global finance (see the other articles in this Special Issue; see also Bakker, 2015; Cross, 2015; Datta, 2012; Hudson, 2008; Zapata, 2013, 2018). These analyses have proved essential to our understanding of the various infelicities that the financialisation of remittances may bring out, including over-indebtedness and the side-lining of more structural causes of poverty (Hudson, 2008; Kunz, 2012). However, I argue that existing scholarship on remittances and financialisation falls short of empirically examining whether and how financial inclusion programmes can actually shape remittance recipients’ socio-economic and financial practices and, ultimately, (successfully) incorporate them into global financial circuits (although see Zapata, 2013, 2018). This, in turn, runs the risk of overestimating formal finance’s reach on remittance flows and households on the one hand, and underestimating the fragile and contested characteristics of such financial inclusion projects on the other. Drawing upon ten months of fieldwork research in Ghana and Senegal, this paper explores the ways in which remittance recipients’ socio-economic and financial circuits, practices and subjectivities interact with, are subsumed by and/or counter various attempts to nudge and replace them. It shows that attempts to format and align remittance recipients’ practices to specific behaviours deemed economically beneficial by proponents of the remittance-financial inclusion nexus are always a source of covert and overt contestation. This article proposes to conceptualise remittance recipients as ‘reluctant’ and ‘dissenting’ subjects of financialisation as well as subjects that ‘reject’ financialisation through individual and collective acts of refusals. They are “quasi-subjects” of financialisation (Berndt and Wirth, 2019: 4), that is, subjects constantly negotiating and contesting attempts to disentangle them and their remittances from already-existing circuits of finance and exchange.

This paper not only focuses on the work of institutional development programmes and policies in shaping people’s everyday behaviours but also examines how these processes unfold on the ground in both Ghana and Senegal. In doing so, it contributes to a growing body of work that aims to decentre research on financial subject formation beyond Anglo-American economies (Lai, 2017), and the Global North more generally (Gonzalez, 2015; Kutz, 2018). It also extends the insights of an emerging literature on everyday financialisation that remains cautious about the performative power of financial discourses, devices and services to shape financial practices and subjectivities amongst household members (Coppock, 2013; Deville, 2014; Gonzalez, 2015; Kutz, 2018; Lai, 2017; Pellandini-Simányi et al., 2015). Furthermore, while the ambiguities and fragilities of everyday financialisation have long been acknowledged (Langley, 2007), it has recently been noted that the possibilities of financial accumulation are also “increasingly threatened by the growing fragility of everyday incomes in the context of increasingly widespread precarity and structural change in labour markets” (Bernards, 2019: 822; see also Christophers, 2015; Fields, 2017). Drawing upon these studies, this paper demonstrates that, in the context of the remittance-financial inclusion nexus, part of the reasons why processes of financial subject formation are contested and uncertain can be found by looking at the intertwining of remittances with ‘informal’ financial institutions, arrangements and practices. More specifically, I argue that mutual aid associations for obtaining credit and managing savings contribute to the creation of what Elyachar (2005: 143) calls “relational value”, that is, the value “attached to the creation, reproduction, mobilisation and extension of relationships”, which constitute a mode of survival and render possible the negotiation of daily life. My analysis shows that any attempts to channel remittances away from these associations and dispossess remittance recipients of their capacity to produce relational value face contestation. This explains how and why variegated financial practices and subjectivities – that differ from the neoliberal self-disciplined subject – emerge and endure. This finding furthers our understanding of financial subjectivities that characterise everyday financialisation. Rather than pushing remittance recipients to engage in financialised subject positions usually attached to neoliberal discourses and programmes – as ‘risk takers’, ‘self-disciplined investors’, ‘entrepreneurs’ or even ‘traders’ (Finlayson, 2009; French and Kneale, 2009; Langley, 2006; Thrift, 2008) – financialisation initiatives face serious limitations and can lead to variegated subjectivities of contestation (Fields, 2017; Pellandini-Simányi and Banai, 2020).

Focusing on the incorporation of remittance flows and households into global finance in Ghana and Senegal is particularly relevant, given the dramatic increase of programmes that aim to harness remittances for financial inclusion in West Africa, and the scarcity of critical studies on these initiatives (with the exception of Cross, 2015). Furthermore, remittances arguably constitute a major geographical political economy issue in both countries, and remittance-related policy agendas, which have a significant impact on the lives of millions of people worldwide, deserve continued critical scrutiny. In fact, Senegal, with an estimated 800 000 emigrants (5% of the population) remitting over US$ 2.2 billion in 2018, ranks fourth among remittance-receiving countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, third among West African countries, and seventh in remittances as a percentage of GDP (9.1%) (KNOMAD, 2019). As for Ghana, remittance inflows amounted to US$ 3.8 billion in 2018, representing 7.4% of GDP. Ghana ranks second among remittance-receiving countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and ninth in terms of percentage of GDP. Finally, it is important to note that rather than providing a strict comparative analysis of two case studies, Ghana and Senegal were chosen to explore the ways in which the incorporation of remittances into global finance unfold in countries with relatively different degrees of financial penetration and trajectories. At the time of fieldwork in 2016/17, while similar actors could be found in both countries (ranging from international financial institutions to development organisations and NGOs), levels of ‘basic’ financial inclusion differed, and so did leading private sector actors and some of the main strategies, products and services that had been put in place to incorporate remittance flows, senders and recipients into financial circuits (Demirgüç-Kunt et al., 2018) (see ‘The remittance-financial inclusion nexus in Ghana and Senegal’ section).

I proceed by briefly discussing the relevant literature and introducing the research methods. Then, I discuss the specific forms that the remittance-financial inclusion nexus takes in Ghana and Senegal. The main research findings are presented subsequently in three subsections. First, I explore the lived experiences of those remittance recipients who have experienced processes of financial incorporation and show that most of them exhibit what I call reluctant acceptance. Second, I highlight the ways in which financialisation is rejected through individual and collective acts of refusals. Third, I examine multifaceted acts of dissent in the form of self-organised financial circuits established in direct opposition to ‘formal’ finance. I conclude by highlighting the need for future research to critically examine not only initiatives that aim to replace existing social practices with new forms of debt but also strategies that attempt to draw upon, absorb and/or transform these local financial arrangements.

Financial inclusion, financialisation and remittances

This article critically draws upon the insights from existing research on financial inclusion and the financialisation of everyday life, through the lens of remittances.

While the last 40 years have seen concerted efforts to harness the development potential of remittances (Gamlen, 2014), the long-standing calls for greater competition amongst money transfer intermediaries and formalisation of remittance transfers have recently been explicitly attached to the financial inclusion agenda (Anzoategui et al., 2014; IFAD and World Bank, 2015; UNCTAD, 2015; World Bank, 2013). As part of the emergence and consolidation of what I call the ‘remittance-financial inclusion nexus’, remittances are increasingly used as a tool to ‘help’ migrants and members of remittance households to gain access to formal financial products and services, including financial accounts, insurance, consumer loans, mortgages and credit cards (Agunias and Newland, 2012). More specifically, by putting in place incentives to encourage remittance recipients to keep part of the remittance they receive in savings accounts, it is argued that their savings behaviours will be fostered and lead to increased investment and higher expenditures (World Bank, 2014). Similarly, initiatives to include remittances in the assessment of creditworthiness of remittance recipients and migrants have recently come to the fore. The idea is that through regular remittance receipts, banks would be positioned to gain a better understanding of who their remittance customers are, enabling them to cross- and up-sell supplementary financial products and services (Agunias and Newland, 2012). Crucially, according to proponents of the remittance-financial nexus, two of the main barriers to remittance recipients’ financial inclusion are their “lack of financial capabilities to manage money as disposable income increases with remittances” on the one hand, and their “poor knowledge of regulated financial options” on the other (IFAD and World Bank, 2015: 27). As a result, what poor people are assumed to need is a set of devices which will improve their calculative behaviours and practices and equip them with the ‘financial capabilities’ to make the right choices.

A nascent literature has started to explore the rise of a new behaviourism in development and anti-poverty policies and programmes in the Global South, which constitutes a change of focus from the market to the market subject or, in other words, from market regulation to behavioural engineering (Berndt, 2015; Berndt and Wirth, 2019; Webber and Prouse, 2018). Behind this new behaviourism is the idea that the market, although still considered the “ideal institutional arena” for development, can no longer “be trusted to realise itself all on its own in light of the behavioural anomalies besetting the poor” (Berndt and Boeckler, 2017: 289). In turn, several critical observers have examined this behavioural turn in relation to microfinance policies and programmes (Gabor and Brooks, 2017; Mader, 2018), signaling a shift in the mission of microfinance to alleviate poverty, from microloans for entrepreneurship to a broader agenda of financial inclusion that aims to transform and/or enhance poor people’s calculative behaviours and practices (Mader and Sabrow, 2019). A small but growing critical literature on remittances has engaged in these debates and located attempts to financially incorporate remittance flows and households within broader processes of financialisation (Bakker, 2015; Cross, 2015; Datta, 2012, 2017; Hudson, 2008; Kunz, 2011, 2012; Zapata, 2013, 2018). This most recent development agenda on remittances constitutes, Cross (2015: 306) argues, a neoliberal project of financialisation that is designed to “construct markets and integrate economies into global capitalist markets”. These analyses have proved essential in understanding the disciplinary role of the agenda and exploring the potential negative impacts of the creation and expansion of markets on the back of remittances. However, I argue that narratives that underpin the ‘financialisation of remittances’ tend to overestimate the actual reach of formal finance on remittances and remittance recipients. One explanation for this is that not enough empirical attention has been paid to how members of remittance households in countries of origin have reacted to processes of financial incorporation (with the exception of Zapata, 2013, 2018). In contrast, in this article the voices, practices and arrangements of those at the receiving end of remittance-financial inclusion initiatives are put at the forefront of the analysis.

While processes of financial subject formation have extended their reach and influence dramatically in recent years, the advancement of financial inclusion, and notably access to formal credit, in emerging and developing economies has been found much more limited and uneven in practice than what is generally admitted or assumed from both critiques and proponents of the agenda (Bernards, 2019). In fact, the growth of formal credit in many low- and middle-income countries in the Global South has been “slow, deeply uneven, and even prone to reversals in particular case” (Bernards, 2019: 818). Critical observers have recently laid bare fundamental limits to financial inclusion and financialisation that have to do with “the dynamics of ‘real economies’ themselves” (Bernards, 2019: 821; Christophers, 2015; Horton, 2017; Montgomerie and Tepe-Belfrage, 2017). Briefly, Marxian perspectives highlight that finance-led capital accumulation is dependent upon processes of realisation (Harvey, 2007). What this means with regard to the remittance-financial inclusion nexus for instance is that in a context of precarious, irregular and low-incomes economic activities, the accumulation of assets (e.g. savings) and the stable production of income streams (e.g. loan repayments) upon which financial accumulation is dependent may just not be possible, despite all the financial, material, legal and behavioural engineering that contribute to the formation of the ideal-type neoliberal subject (see ‘The remittance-financial inclusion nexus in Ghana and Senegal’ section and ‘Financialisation contested: Reluctance, refusal and dissent’ section).

While the importance of remittance recipients in resisting processes of neoliberal financialisation is acknowledged in a limited number of studies (see for instance Zapata, 2013), the focus of analysis in most of the literature on remittances and financialisation has remained on migrants’ financial practices, and the numerous political and discursive attempts to shape these (Bakker, 2015; Datta, 2012; Hudson, 2008). Relatedly, an increasing number of scholars have called for caution about the performative power of neoliberal financial discourses, and the financial devices and services attached to them, to shape everyday financial practices and subjectivities (Coppock, 2013; Deville, 2014; Gonzalez, 2015; Kutz, 2018; Lai, 2017; Pellandini-Simányi et al., 2015; Samec, 2018). Briefly, neo-Foucauldian, cultural-oriented analyses of governmentality have looked at the consequences of the development of financial markets and the penetration of finance into daily life onto people’s subjectivities and practices (Marron, 2014; Martin, 2002; Langley, 2006; Pryke and du Gay, 2007). The financialisation of everyday life approach is interested in understanding how the disciplinary mechanisms of institutional reforms, financial regulations, instruments, innovations and discourses shape individuals’ and households’ attitudes towards risks and financial responsibilities. These processes constitute the construction – or the making – of financialised subjects, who are encouraged to behave in a way that is compatible with neoliberal policies and their underlying assumptions about the utility-maximising, rational agent, or Homo Economicus (Pellandini-Simányi et al., 2015). While it is certainly true that the ambiguities and fragilities of such processes of financial subject formation have long been acknowledged (Langley, 2007), the dominant use of the neo-Foucauldian framework of governmentality in the literature on everyday financialisation has led to a focus on the ways in which technologies and institutional programmes such as financial literacy initiatives and credit-scoring algorithms serve to shape individual subjects. Focusing on the causes of everyday financialisation (Pellandini-Simányi et al., 2015), this approach has tended to generate the perception of an all-pervasive, almost inescapable (Hall, 2012), spread of neoliberal financialised logic in people’s everyday lives. Very few studies, however, have committed to empirically research the ways in which the proliferation of financial reasoning, products and services transform people’s ordinary economic practices, routines and norms (although see Coppock, 2013; Deville, 2014; Hillig, 2019; Lai, 2017; Pellandini-Simányi et al., 2015). Fewer even have done so in countries of the Global South (Gonzalez, 2015; Kutz, 2018). In other words, the ways in which new financial products and services may change existing socio-economic and cultural arrangements, practices and subjectivities has tended to be inferred rather than observed (Pellandini-Simányi et al., 2015).

To understand why and how variegated financial practices and subjectivities – that differ from the neoliberal self-disciplined subject – emerge and/or endure, this article draws upon Elyachar’s (2005) concept of ‘relational value’, as well as the work of scholars on the role of social payments during life-cycle ceremonies such as naming ceremonies, marriages and funerals in West African popular economies (Arhin, 1995; Buggenhagen, 2011, 2012; Guyer, 2004; Kane, 2010). Elyachar (2005: 143) calls relational value the value “attached to the creation, reproduction, mobilisation and extension of relationships”, which are essential to processes of social reproduction. For masters working in ‘traditional’ workshops in Cairo, “maintaining the balance between a sphere of short-term exchanges, in which the pursuit of individual gain is legitimate, and a ‘cycle of long-term exchanges concerned with the reproduction of the social and cosmic order’” guarantees the durability of their economic activities (Elyachar, 2005: 148).

Mutual aid associations for obtaining credit and managing savings have a long history in West Africa, predating the colonial era and colonial currencies (Falola, 1995). African economies – and socio-economic relationships and exchanges in particular, including traditionally non-monetary asymmetrical social payments such as bride wealth and gift exchange practices during family ceremonies – became increasingly monetised during the colonial period. This monetisation was accompanied by the preservation, evolution and even multiplication of rotating and nonrotating groups for monetary savings and credit (Berry, 1995). While these associations have expanded and contracted at different historical moments (Buggenhagen, 2012), they became even more visible in the 1980s due to the increased precariousness resulting from the imposition of Structural Adjustment Programmes (ibid). The multiplication of associations revealed the necessity for the vast majority of the populations to find other modes of resource allocation.

Saving money (including remittances) and borrowing from family, friends and credit and saving associations are very common practices among remittance recipients in Ghana and Senegal. Money is often saved in Rotating Savings and Credit Associations (ROSCAs), Accumulating Savings and Credit Associations (ASCRAs) ³ and/or handled out to susu collectors (i.e. savings mobilisers). ⁴ In turn, these contributions allow members to and exchange gifts in the form of cash or kind during family ceremonies, including naming ceremonies and marriages. They also enable them to start or stabilise their economic activities and buy furniture and household items. As such, these practices and expenditures constitute a way of not only making ends meet but also creating enduring forms of value in the context of economic instability through the creation, multiplication and cementing of social ties (Arhin, 1995; Berry, 1995; Buggenhagen, 2011, 2012; Falola, 1995; Shipton, 1995). Following Elyachar’s (2005) work, I argue that participating in these associations and ceremonies contributes to the creation of ‘relational value’. In the following sections, I show how new forms of financial products and debts can dispossess remittance recipients of their capacity to produce relational value. I also demonstrate that laying bare the significance of these enduring forms of value for social reproduction can help us understand processes of everyday financialisation as always unstable, fragile and contested.

Methodology

The research material presented here derives from a broader multi-scalar, multi-sited and multi-method research project which investigates the incorporation of remittance flows and households into global financial circuits in four cities (Dakar, Thiès, Accra and Tamale) and two countries (Ghana and Senegal). In this paper, I draw upon fieldwork undertaken between June 2016 and December 2017, which generated 92 in-depth interviews with 31 and 28 remittance recipients in Thiès (Senegal) and Accra and Tamale (Ghana) respectively. 33 of these interviews constituted revisits; 20 in Senegal and 13 in Ghana. Asking questions about money, household budgeting and other financial practices can raise suspicions and is not generally a topic people easily engage in, especially with strangers. These revisits proved to be essential in understanding household dynamics and relationships, notably between recipients and remitters, and in mapping out the diversity of financial practices, arrangements and circuits of research participants.

Interviews with remittance recipients explored remittance practices, including how remittances were received, sent, spent and/or distributed as well as processes of decision-making that underpin these practices. I asked participants about the main sources of income of their households, their different paid and unpaid activities and requested their opinions on the significance of remittances for their households. A further set of questions explored their financial practices, the type of financial institutions they dealt with, their views on so-called ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ financial products and arrangements. I also asked about the kind of changes, if any, these brought in their everyday lives.

Remittance recipients were recruited through various gatekeepers, including MFI tellers, research assistants and local associations. In Senegal, interviews were conducted in French and Wolof with the support of one research assistant while interviews in Ghana were carried out in English and Twi in Accra, and in Dagbani in Tamale, with the support of three research assistants. ⁵ All interviews were fully transcribed in either French or English; all interviewees’ names have been changed to protect their identities. Before exploring how remittance recipients responded to initiatives that attempt to financialise remittances, I briefly discuss the emergence of the remittance-financial inclusion nexus in Ghana and Senegal.

The remittance-financial inclusion nexus in Ghana and Senegal

Turning remittances into financial resources that can be leveraged for further financial inclusion depends on the capacity to get migrants and remittance recipients to channel remittances through the formal financial sector. In Ghana and Senegal, the emergence and expansion of the remittance-financial inclusion nexus has required extensive financial, material, technological, legal and discursive constructions and, importantly, behavioural engineering (Guermond, 2020). This comprises, among many other elements, the construction of remittance-linked branchless banking, the design and commercialisation of remittance-linked and remittance-backed financial products as well as the disciplining of a wide range of financial and economic practices and actors through various market devices.

Taking these in turn briefly, financial inclusion market makers as well as banks, Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) and other commercial service providers such as mobile network operators recently turned to branchless banking through retail agents to deliver formal financial services to so-called ‘unbanked’ and ‘underbanked’ populations. Branchless banking constitutes a new way of distributing financial services outside bank premises allowing customers to make not only financial transactions such as deposits, withdrawals and loan repayments but also domestic and international remittance transfers at a whole range of retail agents. Two main models of branchless banking have emerged over the past ten years: one led by financial institutions (i.e. banks and MFIs) and the other by non-bank financial actors, most often mobile network operators (Noor and Thomas, 2013). In Senegal for instance, the for-profit MFI Baobab rolled out an agent-banking network that allows its customers to conduct various types of transactions at a Banking Correspondent’s location, including deposits, withdrawals, loan repayments as well as money transfers from one account to another (Baobab, 2017). Banking Correspondents are shops (e.g. grocery stores, airtime vendors) that have been carefully selected by Baobab. In Thiès, they are scattered all across the town. Interestingly, most Banking Correspondents selected by Baobab were existing domestic and/or international money transfer point-of-services. While not necessarily being a pre-planned strategy, this is not coincidental. These shops are street-front boutiques that have the required physical and technological infrastructure and skills as well as enough cash flow to operate with. Most importantly, they are embedded in the community they live in and have served remittance customers for a long time. In Ghana, mobile network operator-led branchless banking, or Mobile Money, is more prevalent. Mobile Money only started to grow in Ghana when a new e-money guideline came into effect in 2015, allowing mobile network operators to issue electronic money alongside regulated banks. A regulatory framework for Mobile Money agents was also established alongside the 2015 e-money guideline. It emphasised the key tenets that underpin any contract between an agent and the “principal” (i.e. the e-money issuer). These contracts established new relationships of obligations, rights and monitoring but also of mutual reliance. One of the new “permissible activities” of agents was the active “marketing of credit, savings and insurance products offered and underwritten by duly licensed financial institutions” (Bank of Ghana, 2015: 8).

Mobile network operators and MFIs in Ghana and Senegal have begun to form partnerships with financial institutions to offer remittance-linked and remittance-backed financial products. Remittance-linked products are products such as savings accounts, insurance and loans that become available for remittance recipients, whereas remittance-backed products such as remittance-backed mortgages and loans are products which use remittance receipts to assess and provide credit loans (Agunias and Newland, 2012). One such product in Ghana is QwikLoan, a mobile-based nano-loan product offered by MTN, the leading mobile network operator in Ghana in partnership with a non-banking financial institution (AfB) and a Fintech company (Jumo). Through market devices such as text messages and credit-scoring algorithms, remittance recipients using Mobile Money are implicitly and explicitly encouraged to frequently perform transactions on Mobile Money – sending and receiving money, purchasing airtime, paying bills among others – for a relatively long period in order to become eligible for various financial products (Ghana Chamber of Telecommunications, 2019). In Senegal, Banking Correspondents are trained and supported by the MFI Baobab to push their customers to open bank accounts and promote other Baobab financial products. Their social embeddedness acts as ‘nudges’ that encourage customers, including remittance recipients, to incorporate their money into formal financial circuits (Guermond, 2020).

Despite all these efforts, the advancement of financial inclusion in general, and of the remittance-financial inclusion nexus in particular, over the past decade has been far from clear-cut in both countries. The percentage of the poorest 40% who saved at a financial institution increased from 5.4 to 13.5% in Ghana between 2011 and 2017 whereas the percentage of the poorest 40% in Senegal only increased from 1.4 to 3.3%. In Senegal, it even decreased between 2011 and 2014. In addition, access to formal credit has remained very low for the poorest 40%, with only 7.9% who reported having borrowed from a financial institution in Ghana and 3.3% in Senegal in 2017 (Demirgüç-Kunt et al., 2018). The growth of formal credit has also been slow in the two countries, with only a 3.1-point increase in Ghana and a 0.8-point increase in Senegal between 2011 and 2017. As for remittance recipients, only data about the ways in which domestic remittances are received are available. Among domestic remittance recipients, the percentage who reported receiving any money using a financial institution account or mobile money account increased dramatically between 2014 and 2017, from 30% to 59% and from 5% to 49% in Ghana and Senegal respectively (Demirgüç-Kunt et al., 2018). However, this does not say anything about the uses of other financial products and services. In the next section, I explore the different responses of remittance recipients to these attempts at financial incorporation.

Financialisation contested: Reluctance, refusal and dissent

This section provides new insights on the ways in which remittance-linked socio-economic and financial circuits, practices and subjectivities interact with, are subsumed by, or counter various financialising attempts to replace them. I advance the understanding of members of remittance households as “quasi-subjects” of remittance financialisation (Berndt and Wirth, 2019), emphasising the fragile and contested nature of processes of financial subject formation. They constitute (1) reluctant subjects of remittance financialisation; (2) subjects that reject financialisation through individual and collective discourses and acts of refusal; and (3) dissenting subjects that set up local, self-organised financial circuits and practices in order to directly contest the seemingly all-encroaching processes of financial inclusion.

Conclusion

This article has explored the ways in which members of remittance households respond to attempts to disentangle them and their remittances from already-existing circuits of exchange. In contrast to many institutional accounts that portray these borrowing and savings practices and arrangements as ‘traditional’ obstacles that need to be overcome, I argue that they in fact produce relational value that is essential to the social reproduction of remittance households. It is from this understanding of ‘informal’ financial circuits and practices that I conceptualise members of remittance households as “quasi-subjects” of remittance financialisation (Berndt and Wirth, 2019). In fact, processes of financial subject formation constitute practical accomplishments that are always in the making. This advances our understanding of everyday financialisation as processes that can generate not only the adoption of ideal financialised subject positions but also variegated forms of contestation and resistance (Fields, 2017; Pellandini-Simányi and Banai, 2020). Moreover, I have shown that a grounded exploration of the remittance-financial inclusion nexus reveals fundamental limits of ‘development’ projects that attempt to expand the possibilities of financial profits in postcolonial economies where everyday incomes are fragile and precarious, and remittances often not sufficient or regular enough.

I call reluctant subjects of remittance financialisation those participants who, despite their awareness of the limited benefit and potential harm of being financially included, felt they had no choice but to comply to the disciplinary powers of formal finance. My findings show that, for some of these participants, new forms of debts can dispossess them of their ability to produce relational value. In turn, subjects that rejected financialisation are those who, through discourses and acts of indifference and refusals, did not have, or no longer had, any relations with financial institutions. The risk of not being able to repay loans and the fear of the consequences that such inability to pay back would bring are important factors that explain such decisions. Finally, dissenting subjects of financialisation were those who, sometimes in direct opposition to formal finance, set up and join ROSCAs and other forms of savings and credit associations. My evidence suggests that these arrangements represent spaces within which decisions can be made collectively and alternative processes of financial valuation (of interest rates, for instance) are possible. While remaining aware of the risks of romanticisation and co-optation, future policy on remittances and financial inclusion must acknowledge these circuits of exchange, saving, borrowing and investment as socio-economic and financial organic practices that should not be nudged and financialised but rather recognised and valued in their own terms.

These experiences arguably offer compelling ways to think about already-existing modes of resisting and boycotting the market economy from below. In fact, Federici (2018) hints at the idea that they may represent an example of anti-capitalist money commons. Yet, it is also important to remain alert to not only projects that aim to replace existing social practices with new forms of debts but also strategies that attempt to draw upon, absorb and/or transform these financial arrangements. In fact, in countries such as Ghana and Senegal, increasing efforts of financial institutions to co-opt these circuits of exchange have come to the fore. More research on the impacts that digital financial products, including Mobile Money, may have on the relations, financial logics and subjectivities at play within these arrangements will prove essential (see for instance Natile, 2020). At the heart of the matter will be the tensions between the ‘commoning of money’ on the one hand (Federici, 2018) and the financialisation of ‘informal’ social relations, practices and arrangements on the other.