Fintech and digital financial services involve the delivery of financial products and services through technology. Fintech companies are part of a financial lending infrastructure claiming to offer an alternative to ‘big banks’, and are often touted as digitally disruptive technology that is rapidly reshaping financial inclusion agendas and improving the lives of the poor. For many refugees living in camps and informal settlements in Kenya, fintech is often the only viable option for credit or microfinance aid. While refugees are often excluded from credit, the spread of fintech as a solution for direct peer-to-peer aid transfers from the Global North to refugees has resulted in the uneven distribution of credit access and livelihood support. Through fintech, private citizens and groups in the Global North are able to disrupt and subvert refugee assistance, deeming some worthy of aid while others face ongoing exclusion. While fintech remains a hopeful source of greater efficiency and empowerment, the direct transfer of aid money masks profit and corporate power by only extending assistance to those refugees who are appropriately entrepreneurial, that is to say those who will start small businesses and pay back their loans. This paper argues that processes of financial inclusion carried out by and through fintech are still distinguished largely by exclusion. In so doing, this paper highlights a theoretical position that refugee governance is embedded in racial forms of capital accumulation and expropriation.
3.5 million people currently live without adequate housing in France with some 10 million others in sub-standard accommodations without secure and affordable rental tenure. In Paris, homelessness has increased a staggering 84 percent since 2005 due to cuts in social service expenditure and the downloading of poverty management onto cities. Since 2015, the European Union has seen a large influx of refugees from protracted conflicts problematically referred to as the European migration crisis. Although France has amongst the highest rates of refugee application rejections in Western Europe, Paris is increasingly becoming a hotspot for displaced people who are fleeing improper treatment in frontier states. The Paris case illustrates 'actually existing' racial neoliberalism pointing to both the material and ideological features of refugee marginalization. The purpose of this article is two-fold: First, it highlights the various issues of political and shelter-based survival for urban refugees-an aspect understudied especially in cities in the global North. Second, the article aims to overlay pre-existing crises of homelessness, inadequate housing, and poverty with the racialization of refugees within the European migration crisis.
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