Remittance micro‐worlds and migrant infrastructure: Circulations, disruptions, and the movement of money

Abstract

Remittances are increasingly central to development discourses in Africa. The development sector seeks to leverage transnational migration and rapid innovations in financial technologies (fintech), to make remittance systems cheaper for end‐users and less risky for states and companies. Critical scholarship, however, questions the techno‐fix tendency, calling for grounded research on the intersections between remittances, technologies, and everyday life in African cities and beyond. Building on this work, we deploy the concepts of “micro‐worlds” and “migrant infrastructure” to make sense of the complex networks of actors, practices, regulations, and materialities that shape remittance worlds. To ground the work, we narrate two vignettes of remittance service providers who operate in Cape Town, South Africa, serving the Congolese diaspora community. We showcase the important role of logistics companies in the “informal” provision of remittance services and the rise of fintech companies operating in the remittance space. These vignettes give substance to the messy and relational dynamics of remittance micro‐worlds. This relationality allows us to see how remittances are circulations, not unidirectional flows; how they are not split between formal and informal, but in fact intersect in blurry ways; how digital technologies are central to the story of migrant infrastructures; and how migrants themselves are compositional of these networks. In doing so, we tell a more relational story about how remittance systems are constituted and configured.

Enabling connections between a multi-country urban research programme and the practices of an African urban research centre

“…By way of example, in terms of new technologies, one of the ACC's projects explored the emergence and adoption of new technologies in relation to a long-standing area of focus for the ACC, that of migrant labour and the informal sector in Cape Town 25 . As previous scholarship by the ACC has highlighted, challenges faced by undocumented migrants in the informal economy in South African cities are significant, and are the result of larger-scale structural inequalities that often place documented migrants-and undocumented migrants in particular-in vulnerable socio-economic positions 26,27 .…”

“…Via complex interlinkages between formal and informal practices (included coded text in ledgers, WhatsApp messages between Cape Town and the DRC to indicate monies should be released to recipients, and the use of official platforms such as Airtel Money Wallet to receive funds) informal migrants are able to bypass legacy systems such as Western Union and regulation by the state. When combined, the emergence of this new socio-technical 'fix' to move money quickly, easilyand perhaps most importantlycheaply and with almost complete anonymity, across the continent was seen to have the potential to disrupt not only the hegemony of legacy systems but also our pre-existing conceptualisation as to what regulated financial institutions can mean and may mean in the face of technological change for the future for cities 25 . In addition, this work made the case not only that digital technologies are fundamental to our understanding of migrant infrastructures and their socio-material formations on the continent, but alsoand just as importantlythat migrants themselves are a key and compositional part of these networked infrastructures.…”

Rethinking the geographies of finance for urban climate action

“…I use the term financial relations to highlight how different actors are connected through the use of these instruments (e.g., debtor/creditor, service user/service provider). This in turn enables me to reflect on actors' agency, as financial relations are configured through various material and legal artefacts, as well as political and social relations, which also include moral judgements (as described by relational theorisations of finance and money, e.g., Berndt & Wirth, 2018; Cirolia et al, 2021; Hall, 2012; Harker, 2020; Lai, 2016; Langley & Leyshon, 2017; Rydin et al, 2015). These artefacts include, for instance, certification schemes and reports assessing the impact of a project on carbon emissions to guide investment decisions (Hilbrandt & Grubbauer, 2020; Langley et al, 2021; Rydin et al 2015), or technologies such as prepaid meters and mobile phones that allow people to pay for electricity (Baptista, 2015).…”

Precarity, Permits, and Prayers: “Working Practices” of Congolese Asylum-Seeking Women in Cape Town

“…It also involves trips to Johannesburg to purchase foodstuffs from Mozambique to sell to the Congolese diaspora in Cape Town. These networks transfer not only goods but also money, and in the period of lockdown in South Africa, we learnt how money was regularly sent from the DRC to family members in South Africa (Cirolia et al, 2021). The micro-circuits of cross-border trade are dominated by women, and contrary to the view that there is one-way traffic of goods from South Africa to other countries, research reveals multi-directional flows of foodstuffs, goods, and money between the Congo and South Africa.…”