Financial inclusion and the contested infrastructures of cash transfer payments in South Africa

Abstract

Across much of the South, digital technologies are increasingly central to the expansion of state social protection systems. Supported by major development agencies, many of these distributive technologies are developed and implemented by financial technology companies with the specific aim of accelerating financial inclusion. While researchers have documented the influence of these financial actors and logics over social policy, we know less about how these interventions are transforming the experience of receiving social protection. Based on qualitative and observational research with social grant recipients in South Africa, this research demonstrates how digital and financial technologies produce confusion, informational opacities and new forms of exclusion among grant recipients. It suggests that the increasingly prominent role of financial technologies in the delivery of social protection undermines state capacity and further entrenches the influence of neoliberal logics over social policy. Finally, the article suggests that these technologies may be transforming the nature of social citizenship in South Africa, undermining efforts to advance universal and redistributive social protection policies.

The commodification of poverty in the Global South: The emergence of a social policy market (São Paulo, Brazil)

“…Indeed, the aim is to understand ‘how market participation has come to predominate both social policy making and ordinary people’s strategies for livelihoods and wellbeing’. In Brazil, the implementation of social policies creates a market on their own, as it inserts the poor in the universe of consumption, partly by the financialization of social policy (Webb and Mgijima, 2024). These inter-related dimensions contribute, globally, to the commodification of poverty in a context characterized by high levels of structural informality.…”