How Mobile Money Changed My Grandmother

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.

Last month her phone screen cracked, and there was a family crisis about replacing it that involved four phone calls and a formal negotiation. The new phone is a smartphone. She uses exactly one app plus the dialer, and she has already asked me, twice, whether it is true that the phone can show her the price of maize in Arusha. It can. Next month, I suspect, she will be arbitraging.