How Mobile Money Changed My Grandmother

My grandmother, Bibi Rehema, is eighty-one years old. She has never set foot inside a bank. Banks, in her long experience, were buildings in town where men in suits lost other people's money. She kept her savings the traditional way: in livestock, in maize, and in a tin under a floorboard that every thief in the village somehow knew about.

Then, about fifteen years ago, my uncle registered her for mobile money so he could send her cash from Mwanza without paying a bus conductor to carry an envelope. The plan was that she would walk to the agent, withdraw everything immediately, and put it in the tin. That is not what happened.

What happened is that Bibi Rehema discovered the balance. She discovered that money in the phone did not need to be guarded, did not get eaten by weevils, and did not die of East Coast fever. She began leaving it there. Then she began asking neighbours to pay her in it, for eggs, for vegetables, for renting out her ox plough.

Today she runs what I can only describe as a village credit institution. She lends small amounts — school fees, clinic fees, a bag of fertiliser — and records everything in a school exercise book in handwriting only she can read. Her interest rate is flexible and denominated partly in respect. Her default rate, she claims, is zero, 'because everyone knows I know everyone.'

Researchers call this financial inclusion, and the numbers are genuinely staggering: mobile money accounts in East Africa now outnumber bank accounts several times over. But the phrase makes it sound like something that was done to people like my grandmother. Sitting with her, you understand it was something she did.