Reimagining Money

Digital payment technology is rapidly changing the way we think about money. Digital payment has been slow to take off in the United States but is rapidly displacing cash in countries as diverse as China, Kenya, and Sweden. In Reimagining Money Sibel Kusimba offers a rich portrait of how this technology changes the economic and social landscape, allowing users to create webs of relationships as they exchange, pool, borrow, lend, and share digital money in user-built networks. These networks, Kusimba argues, will shape the future of financial technologies and their impact on poverty, inclusion, and empowerment. She describes how urban and transnational migrants maintain a presence in rural areas through money gifts; how farmers coordinate sales and transport of livestock via mobile money to present them at coming-of-age rituals; and how families use crowdfunding software to assemble donations for emergency medical care. The author presents fascinating accounts that challenge accepted wisdom by examining the notion of money as wealth-in-people—an idea long-cultivated in sub-Saharan Africa and now brought to bear on the digital age with homegrown financial technologies such as digital money transfer, digital microloans, and crowdfunding. The book concludes by proposing a new theory of money that can be applied to designing better financial technologies in the future.