{"id":130,"date":"2013-11-27T10:44:42","date_gmt":"2013-11-27T02:44:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.www.innovationiseverywhere.com\/?p=130"},"modified":"2013-11-27T10:44:42","modified_gmt":"2013-11-27T02:44:42","slug":"somali-diaspora-mobile-money-research-hawala-presented-afrikoin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/innovationiseverywhere.com\/fr\/somali-diaspora-mobile-money-research-hawala-presented-afrikoin\/","title":{"rendered":"Somali diaspora and mobile money: a research on hawala presented at Afrikoin"},"content":{"rendered":"

After a few panels and talks on mobile money at\u00a0Afrikoin<\/a>, we had the opportunity to listen to\u00a0Gianluca Iazzolino<\/strong><\/a>, a researcher from the University of Edinburgh. Gianluca studies\u00a0the way\u00a0Somali people deal with mobile money, particular as a people who are constantly moving\u00a0<\/strong>– whether as refugees or traders of gold and other goods that can be exchanged in the surrounding East African countries.<\/p>\n

The Unique Somalian Context<\/h2>\n

To understand\u00a0how Somali people interact with money<\/strong>, Gianluca suggests reading Charles Stross’s\u00a0\u00ab\u00a0Neptune’s Brood\u00a0\u00bb<\/em><\/a>\u00a0, a sci-fi book whose main hero is a banker. The concepts of\u00a0fast, slow and medium money<\/strong>\u00a0used in the book can be a first step to understanding Somali behaviour:\u00a0\u00ab\u00a0Fast is every day cash, medium is investments in infrastructure and slow is money that can only be transferred once the sender, receiver and a bank have all registered the trade\u00a0\u00bb\u00a0<\/em>(forum<\/a>).<\/p>\n

\"Martin<\/a>

A timeline of recent Somali history<\/p><\/div>\n

Gianluca led his research by exploring\u00a0Eastleigh<\/strong>, a district of Kenya’s capital Nairobi where\u00a0Somali settled<\/a>, and\u00a0 describes it as\u00a0\u00ab\u00a0a crossroads\u00a0of flows, from China to the States, from Dubai to the different diasporas of refugees and merchants, and a paradise for the informal economy\u00a0\u00bb<\/em>.<\/p>\n

A Comparison between Hawala and MPesa<\/h2>\n

The\u00a0hawala<\/a>, he explains, is a concept of\u00a0informal mobile money<\/strong>\u00a0similar to\u00a0MPesa<\/strong>, Kenya’s mobile money. It is rather divisive, \u00a0seen both as a source of terrorism financing but also as a \u00ab\u00a0lifeline\u00a0\u00bb that allows a threatened population to keep money safe.\u00a0But there are\u00a0differences\u00a0<\/strong>between hawala and MPesa. While\u00a0MPesa<\/strong>\u00a0is good for small amounts of money, it requires an ID, and is mostly limited to Kenya. The\u00a0hawala<\/strong>\u00a0on the other hand is multicurrency, international, without ID requirements and permits the exchange of large amounts of money.<\/p>\n

\"Martin<\/a>

The Somali district of Eastleigh in Nairobi, Kenya<\/p><\/div>\n

Dahabshiil<\/a>\u00a0is the\u00a0most famous transfer company using the hawala,\u00a0<\/strong>allowing its users to send and receive money. They are used by NGOs operating in Somali and the UN, so there’s little risk that it can be forced to close as their predecessors have been.<\/p>\n

The differences between MPesa, the Kenyan mobile money, and hawala, on the Somali side, is also c<\/strong>ultural<\/strong>, says Gianluca. The former is perceived within the Eastleigh communities as a service for women and students to manage their daily expenses, while the latter is considered a more \u00ab\u00a0masculine\u00a0\u00bb service as it is anonymous and ideal for larger deals.<\/p>\n

Concluding the first part of his research, Gianluca stresses that\u00a0the Somali people live in a perpetual state of multiplicity and mobility as they don’t know what is going to happen tomorrow.<\/strong>\u00a0Their activity revolves\u00a0\u00ab\u00a0around the pursuit of resources that allow crossing borders, boundaries and\u00a0thresholds, such as passports, ID documents, UNHCR mandates and hard currencies\u00a0\u00bb.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

This is an impressive glance at this angle of our contemporary world. Gianluca will spend a month in Somali and in surrounding East African countries later on so we’ll stay tuned to his research work.<\/p>\n

Martin Pasquier<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After a few panels and talks on mobile money at\u00a0Afrikoin, we had the opportunity to listen to\u00a0Gianluca Iazzolino, a researcher from the University of Edinburgh. Gianluca studies\u00a0the way\u00a0Somali people deal with mobile money, particular as a people who are constantly moving\u00a0– whether as refugees or traders of gold and other goods that can be exchanged […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":1551,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[53,47,49,51,80],"tags":[69,86,84],"class_list":["post-130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academic","category-countries","category-innovators-category","category-markets-category","category-research-category","tag-africa","tag-diaspora","tag-mobile-money"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/innovationiseverywhere.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/innovationiseverywhere.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/innovationiseverywhere.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/innovationiseverywhere.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/innovationiseverywhere.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=130"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/innovationiseverywhere.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/innovationiseverywhere.com\/fr\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/innovationiseverywhere.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/innovationiseverywhere.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/innovationiseverywhere.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}