Turning on the township: A contemporary genealogy of financial inclusion in South Africa

Abstract

Following Foucault, this paper is an attempt to understand how the concept of financial inclusion has functioned in our society to create human beings as subjects. Four texts from institutional, academic and local sources are analysed using a specially developed Foucauldian discourse analysis method. The comparison of the unique combination of subject positions, problematizations, strategic actions and forms of control between the texts is of interest. These four aspects of the production of subjects illuminate points of continuity and discontinuity between the texts. Discontinuities are important ways of locating potential points of failure within financial inclusion constructs. Points of continuity between the texts, on the other hand, trace the kinds of subjects that the texts, as instances of discourse, produce. The first subject is concerned with earning an income from their body as a labouring economic site. The second earns an income from a tangible property such as a shop. The third kind of financial subject owns intangible property such as a savings account. With this boundary of financial inclusion established as concerned with income and expense management, a further proposition is outlined. Asset building is proposed as a field of activity not currently considered part of mainstream financial inclusion. This proposition puts into question the terms on which individuals are to be included by the development project of financial inclusion.

Full text

9th International Conference in Critical Management Studies, 8-10 July 2015, Leicester (UK)
Towards Inclusive Development Sub-stream
Turning on the township: A comparative analysis
of institutional, academic and local discourses of
financial inclusion
Graunt Kruger* and Louise Whittaker
Wits Business School
University of the Witwatersrand
Johannesburg, South Africa
Abstract
Financial inclusion is promoted as an important economic development program to solve the
lack of access to formal financial services for billions of people around the world. The concept
“financial inclusion” has entered mainstream business and development discourses as an all-
encompassing term for innovation in financial services for the poor. South African
policymakers and financial service providers have embraced this approach to address some of
the country’s political, social and economic imbalances.
Following Foucault, this paper is an attempt to understand how the concept of financial
inclusion has functioned in our society to create human beings as subjects. Four texts from
institutional, academic and local sources are analysed using a specially developed Foucauldian
discourse analysis method. The comparison of the unique combination of subject positions,
problematizations, strategic actions and forms of control between the texts is of interest. These
four aspects of the production of subjects illuminate points of continuity and discontinuity
between the texts. Discontinuities are important ways of locating potential points of failure
within financial inclusion constructs. Points of continuity between the texts, on the other
hand, trace the kinds of subjects that the texts, as instances of discourse, produce. The first
subject is concerned with earning an income from their body as a labouring economic site.
The second earns an income from a tangible property such as a shop. The third kind of
financial subject owns intangible property such as a savings account. With this boundary of
financial inclusion established as concerned with income and expense management, a further
proposition is outlined. Asset building is proposed as a field of activity not currently
considered part of mainstream financial inclusion. This proposition puts into question the
terms on which individuals are to be included by the development project of financial
inclusion.
Keywords
Financial inclusion, inclusive development, Michel Foucault, Foucauldian Discourse Analysis,
microfinance, mobile banking, mobile payments, banking, technology, South Africa.
* Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 617 817 5304. E-mail address: graunt@gmail.com.
This research was made possible through the support of the South African Banking Sector
Training and Education Authority (BankSeta).

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1 Introduction
According to the World Bank Findex (Demirguc-Kunt & Klapper, 2012) approximately 2,5
billion people globally lack access to formal financial services – a bank account, credit,
insurance, a safe place to keep savings and a secure and efficient means to make and receive
payments – through a registered financial institution. A number of academics, non-
government organisations, corporations, research institutions, universities, private investment
firms and multilateral development groups have started to see financial inclusion as a market
opportunity and a development problem. This development agenda is driven by the belief
that access to such services has positive consequences for individuals, for example, enabling
business growth (Peprah & Muruka, 2009), increasing savings (Lee & Miller, 2010) and
enhancing efficiency and welfare (Sarma & Pais, 2011).
While a number of financial inclusion projects have succeeded - such as Mohammed Yunus’s
microfinance Grameen Bank in Bangladesh (Yunus, 2007), the public listing of Mexico’s
microlender Compartamos (Ashta & Hudon, 2009) and M-pesa in Kenya (CapitalFM, 2015) -
others have struggled. Financial inclusion as a development program has two major
challenges. The first challenge is the high level of dormancy across various services. Within
three months’ India’s “Jan Dhan Yojana” had signed up 75 million people to new bank
accounts (Agarwal, 2014). The majority of these accounts were dormant. Only about one
third of registered users on GSMA mobile money services are used mostly for airtime
purchases and not banking or other forms of payments (GSMA2014). After five years banks in
South Africa abandoned the Mzansi account due to low usage and financial losses (Cranston,
2005; Naidoo, 2011). And finally, M-Pesa in South Africa is re-launching for the fourth time
since 2010 (Goldstuck, 2014) due to poor performance of the offering.
The second major challenge is adverse inclusion. This is a situation in which, once people are
“financially included”, they end up worse off than before. Access to credit is of particular
concern. In August 2014, African Bank, the largest lender to low-income individuals in South
Africa, failed due to high levels of bad debt (Bonorchis & Spillane, 2014). The lender had
over-extended itself by issuing loans to customers who could eventually not afford to repay the
loans. Finscope (Finmark FinmarkTrust, 2013) reports that Net1’s distribution of social grants
was largely responsible for the growth in numbers of banked people in the country in 2013,
adding nearly 10 million new bank accounts to the totals. This brought South Africa’s bank
population to nearly 85%. However, in 2014 the Financial Services Board of South Africa
reported that Net1 had been abusing its position as distributor of social grants by selling other
financial products such as loans and funeral plans at distribution points (Rose, 2013).
Despite these challenges, the mainstream discourses around financial inclusion continue to
appear overwhelmingly positive and optimistic, perpetuating the assumption that ultimately
such innovations are for the benefit of the unbanked. The focus of financial inclusion remains
on targets of density, penetration and geographic access as measured in the World Bank’s
Findex, a global financial inclusion database. Practitioners and researchers tend to be
concerned with how people as borrowers, savers, bank account users and mobile phone users
access and use financial services. Yet an unexplored issue is how these subject positions came
to be, how they are maintained and the specific rationalities that accompany them.
Problems such as dormancy and adverse inclusion suggest that individuals are conceptualised
in specific ways within mainstream discourses of financial inclusion. The aim of this paper is
to uncover these conceptualisations by focusing on how human beings are made subjects in
financial discourses. The nature of the regime of truth of financial inclusion can then be
interrogated. This paper takes the form of genealogy of financial inclusion informed by the
work of French philosopher Michel Foucault. Genealogies are usually historical studies that
focus on discourse to show the constructed nature of some our commonly understood ideas

3
and rationales by showing how they emerged. Furthermore, genealogies seek to uncover the
conditions that make these ideas possible.
For example, one of the core assumptions in the conceptualisation of individuals in financial
inclusion discourses is that customers exist, and it is the failure of the service providers to
reach those customers that results in financial exclusion. Moreover, it is assumed is that people
need and want formal financial services, but have been excluded from using them due to
economics of older systems that were unable to include all customers. Bank branches were
too expensive to reach all customers and hence mobile phones and retailer networks can
reach these new customers. The goal of financial inclusion is therefore attained when
members of the local economy are given bank accounts with electronic means of moving
money and making payments, facilitated by retailer networks. This means that in banking, for
example, to address financial exclusion, formal financial structures simply have to be extended
to include the previously excluded customers. Financial inclusion thus becomes a
modernisation project – a technical problem to which technical solutions have to be found.
The subsequent poor performance of those services suggests that perhaps the subjectivities as
conceived by creators are not those that are manifested by the targeted individuals. Such a
disjuncture between institutional and academic conceptions of financial subjectivities and
those at the local level is the gap in knowledge addressed in this paper.
This paper has four sections following this introduction. The next section (section two)
outlines the conceptual framework derived from the work of Michel Foucault, which also
forms the basis for the methodological approach of this paper in section three. In the fourth
section four texts from institutional, academic and local sources are compared and analysed
using concepts derived from Foucault’s work. The particular combination of subject positions,
problematizations, strategic actions and forms of control directs attention to the ways in which
subjects are produced. The detailed analysis of these aspects of production shows that
important points of discontinuity are evident between the texts. For example, local texts show
that subjects produce themselves as part of complex flows money with their family and
community. They are not devoid of financial instruments as connoted by the term
“unbanked” in the institutional text.
A second theoretical contribution arises from distilling aspects of continuity between the texts.
Attention now shifts away from asking how subjects are produce, to the kinds of subjects
produced. We argue that the four texts produce three kinds of financial subjects. The first is
concerned with earning an income from their body as a labouring economic site. The second
earns an income from a tangible property such as a shop. The third kind of financial subject
owns intangible property such as a savings account. The third theoretical contribution of this
paper arises from examining this boundary of the regime of truth of financial inclusion by
proposing that beyond this boundary are unexplored opportunities for financial inclusion to
include a focus on asset creation for individuals. These findings challenge the ways in which
mainstream institutional and academic texts conceptualise the inclusive development project
of financial inclusion. Section five concludes this study with a brief synopsis of the
methodological, empirical and theoretical contributions of this paper. The implications for
financial service providers, policy-makers, entrepreneurs and researchers are then explored.

4
2 A Conceptual Framework Informed by the Work of
Michel Foucault
2.1 Locating Foucault
Several authors (Best & Kellner, 1991; Burrell, 1988; Cahoone, 2003; Dreyfus & Rabinow,
1983; Grenz, 1996; Harland, 1987; Rabinow, 1991; Ritzer, 2003; Sheridan, 2003) have
developed excellent overviews of Foucault’s work. The purpose of this introductory overview
is merely to offer a brief synopsis of particular of the ideas contained in Foucault’s dense
volumes for the purpose of situating this paper in a Foucauldian conceptual framework
Foucault is interested in language as a manifestation of the systems of thought that are
invisible, yet pervasive in particular times. He explains that his “object is not language but the
archive, that is to say the accumulated existence of discourse” (Foucault, 1996 p25). Foucault
defines discourse as “the interplay of rules that make possible the appearance of objects during
a given period of time” (Foucault, 1972; p. 33). The focus on discourse reinforces the
separation between the object and the language that represents the object (Gutting, 2013).
Foucault believed that various human experiences, such as madness or sexuality, are
discursively constructed within rationalist and scientific frames within the discourses of
modern knowledge, and thereby made accessible for administration and control (Best &
Kellner, 1991; Hassard, 1994). The rhetorical functions are not of interest to Foucault, but
rather where discourse obscures “hidden techniques of discipline” (Burrell, 1988; p. 225) as a
way of maintaining modern society. It is through language that order is created rather than
found or discovered.
2.2 An Analytical Method for Texts
Four concepts from across Foucault’s work are outlined here and will form the basis of the
discourse analysis to identify and compare how the texts produce human beings as subjects.
Several authors (Arribas-Ayllon & Walkerdine, 2008; Coyle, 2007; Craven & Coyle, 2007;
Thompson, 2003) have used Foucault’s work to devise analytical frameworks, sometimes
referred to as Foucauldian Discourse Analysis. Yet, as Hook (2001) argues, there is no single
way to analyse discourse using Foucault’s concepts.
The process of analysing individual texts will follow the same systematic pattern. The first step
is the identification and selection of relevant parts of texts. The next step is to find the subject
positions produced in the text. The next steps are to consider the rationalities attributed to the
subject positions. These are found in how those subject positions are problematised, the
strategic actions that are legitimated to resolve the problematisations and finally the forms of
control presented. Each one of these four aspects of creation enables us to make a detailed
assessment of how the text produces its subjects.
2.2.1 Subject Positions
Foucault asserts that the theme of the subject, more than power, is at the centre of his work.
He writes that “my objective …has been to create a history of the different modes by which,
in our culture, human beings are made subjects” through discourse (Foucault, 1982; p. 208).
Discourses offer positions from which a person may speak the truth about objects (Arribas-
Ayllon & Walkerdine, 2008). Such positions are constructed and thus fictitious (Best &

5
Kellner, 1991) but nevertheless, individuals are afforded a particular set of “rights and duties”
(Arribas-Ayllon & Walkerdine, 2008; p. 102), “images, metaphors and obligations” (Coyle,
2007). A subject position provides not only a perspective from which to view a version of
reality but also a moral location in the discourse (Arribas-Ayllon & Walkerdine, 2008). Subject
positions open or close off possibilities for practice (Coyle, 2007).
2.2.2 Problematisations
For Foucault, the term problematization draws attention to the process of constituting objects
for thought (Foucault, 1977). Problematisations draw our attention to the “material practices
wherein being is rendered thinkable, manageable and governable” (Arribas-Ayllon &
Walkerdine, 2008; p. 101). At various stages in his work, Foucault used the term differently.
One possible way of applying this term to discourse analysis would be to examine situations
where such discursive practices relate to the judgment of the other (Bacchi, 2012). Another
way is by drawing attention to the individual’s practices on themselves such as referring to a
self-practice addressing the part of one’s life requiring ethical care (Gutting, 2005). By
focusing on problems created in the discourse, it is possible to show that there are particular
discursive manoeuvres that render certain aspects of being human problematic.
2.2.3 Strategic Actions
Foucault asserts that investigations of power should be directed at the minor actions of each
individual within a social body (Foucault, 1977). Power is not a property but a strategy
(Hasan, 2004) and only exists when put into action (Foucault, 1982). Strategic actions can be
identified in different spaces, but its essence is observed in the minor actions of subjects. A first
example is the strategic actions manifested in the routine, schedule and physical discipline
observed in prisoners behaviour as they comply with rules and regulations of the prison
(Gutting, 2013). Actions can also become strategic when the subject aligns them to his or her
goals as provided for by their subject position(s) (Coyle, 2007). For example, Greek public
servants enacted a form of “care of the self” as they sought to maintain their own way of life in
line with the expectations of the ruling party instead of adopting a new rationality of efficiency
brought by a new information system (Avgerou & McGrath, 2007).
2.2.4 Forms of Control
Foucault’s disciplinary technologies or forms of control are the socially dispersed techniques of
management and administration of the subject (M Foucault, 1977). Modern disciplinary
techniques comprise a combination of four forms of control in the production of docile bodies.
First, modes of authority are the experts, both visible and invisible, such as doctors, psychiatrists,
researchers, judges, bankers, loan officers – all figures who monitor and judge individuals
through direct interaction or by the examination of information and data. Second, hierarchical
observation, best understood as an architectural metaphor, seeks to induce a state of constant
awareness of visibility. Third, normalising judgment results in the ranking of individuals not as
right or wrong, but on the relative outcome against others and can result in some behaviours
labelled “abnormal”. Fourth, examination is the form of control exacted by experts from data
gathered about individuals.
3 A Contemporary Genealogy as Research Method
This paper is not strictly speaking, a genealogy of financial inclusion in that it does not trace
the historical origins of the contemporary rationales surrounding the issue. It is, however, a

6
contemporary genealogy of financial inclusion since the discourses under consideration are all
current and not historical. The genealogical influence can be seen in that the concepts and
rationales are regarded as historically contingent. As such, these conceptual formations are
open to interpretation, and should not be construed as politically neutral and devoid of power.
However, instead of tracing origins of the concept of financial inclusion and its surrounding
rationalities, this paper takes a snapshot of the present and traces how concepts that are
currently in circulation seek to create and constrain current rationalities. It is a study of the
present state of financial inclusion, from the analysis of the current discourses that produce it
rather than looking for its origins in historical discourses.
3.1 Identifying the Discourse Clusters and Selecting Texts
Texts containing discourses of financial inclusion and financial practices can be grouped into
three distinct clusters: institutional, academic and local discourses. The approach taken in this
paper is to compare institutional and academic discourse clusters on financial inclusion with
local discourses of financial practices. From a methodological point of view, institutional and
academic discourses are fairly easily isolated, as they use the term “financial inclusion” in their
texts. The local discourses used in this paper are not discourses of financial inclusion like the
other two clusters, since people do not speak of themselves as financially included or excluded.
Rather, these are texts produced from ethnographic interviews specifically undertaken to
capture narratives about financial practices.
Specific texts are chosen from each of the clusters for the comparative analysis. The analytical
method is discourse analysis and it would be counterintuitive to do such a comparison at a
level above the actual texts. In other words, comparison at a level of summary or abstraction
from the findings of each of the clusters would not reveal the required level of detail. In
addition, this approach avoids the analysis being done on a set of concepts that we, as the
researchers, impose onto the texts.
First, institutional discourses is probably the most unstable category in that it covers a wide
variety of private, public and civil society organisational forms; as well as a range of published
texts, such as materials, interviews, conference presentations from government departments,
Acts of Parliament, research papers and notes produced by institutes at universities, NGOs,
international intergovernmental organisations, banks, microfinance institutions (MFIs),
technology companies, donors, philanthropists and the media. Foucauldian discourse analysis
of institutional texts is not a new enterprise1. A press release from ABSA, a private sector retail
bank with explicit intentions to provide products and services for financial inclusion, was
chosen as the example from this cluster. Relevant parts of the text are analysed in detail in the
appendix.
Second, the analytical method will be applied to academic discourses of financial inclusion
that locate themselves in the developmental discourse of poverty alleviation in Africa.
Published peer-reviewed journal articles from 2009 to 2013 make up this cluster, from which
the Acosta, Kim, Melzer, Medoza and Thelen (2011) article was chosen. The following text is
the abstract to the article:
Roughly a little under half of the world’s population is mired in poverty, most in the developing
world— about 3 billion people constitute the global base of the economic pyramid. Building on
earlier work by Banerjee and Duflo (2007), this paper uses survey data from three countries in
order to provide a clear visualization of the spatial dimension of the economic lives of the poor
and their access to markets. It develops a framework that could be used to map market
1 A notable example is the analysis of a speech by Thompson (2003) delivered by then President of the World Bank Group, James
D. Wolfensohn

7
inclusiveness, and then applies this to a number of markets that are critical to reducing poverty
and increasing human welfare: water, credit and telecommunications. These ‘‘market heat
maps’’ help to illustrate the extent of the challenges and in some cases reveal potential
opportunities in growing more inclusive markets for the poor (2011; p. 50).
Finally, local discourses are analysed. Focus is now turned to those individuals who are often
at the centre of financial inclusion discourses, and made subjects in the discourses of other
stakeholders in financial inclusion. Local discourses are drawn from Tembisa, one of the
geographic remnants of South Africa’s apartheid legacy of racial segregation and exclusion.
The texts chosen were from ethnographic interviews with Mama Thembi, the owner of a
wholesaler in the township, and the members of the ZeGa Club, a savings group, known also
as a ‘stokvel’. These interviews were conducted in Tembisa during February and April 2011.
Relevant parts of the interview texts are analysed in detail in the appendix.
Both Mama Thembi and ZeGa operate localised cash-based transactions within their
networks. Mama Thembi’s primary business may be the bulk sale of groceries but her
business requires that she enable a range of financial services for her customers. Some
certainly buy goods for cash, but others buy goods on credit, yet others as stokvels save money
on a regular basis to collect goods at the end of the year, and another group pays her in
advance for goods that they collect on an ad hoc basis. Members of the ZeGa group also
conduct the business of the their savings group in cash. Each member makes monthly cash
contributions, which is then deposited in the group’s bank account. These complex internal
workings in both cases are not transparent to the bank.
4 Findings and Discussion
When comparing the four texts noteworthy points of continuity and discontinuity are found.
Points of discontinuity show how the different texts produce human subjects and draw
attention to the terms on which this development project intends to include individuals into
formal financial systems. For example, when a bank conceives of its potential clients as
unbanked, it misses their social network as members of a savings group. They partially
operate within the formal financial system but due to social arrangements use informal
methods of exchange.
Points of continuity, on the other hand, show when the texts operate together and where
possible traces of a regime of truth of financial inclusion can be found. Upon close
examination, the points of continuity show how the texts overlap to produce certain kinds of
financial subjects. The three kinds of subjects found in these texts are those that use their
bodies as economic instruments, own tangible property from which they derive income and
finally, subjects that own intangible property such as savings accounts.

8
4.1 Points of Discontinuity
4.1.1 Are subject positions imposed or locally created?
Discourse
cluster
Institutional
Academic
Local
Local
Text
ABSA Press
Release
Acosta, Kim,
Melzer,
Mendoza &
Thelen (2011)
Mama Thembi
interview
ZeGa interviews
Subject posi-
tions for the
self
private sector
indicated by
institutional
affiliation:
World Bank,
United Nations,
Eighty20,
UNICEF
mother, business
owner, member,
creditor, debtor,
banking agent,
African, family
friends, members,
workers, officials
Subject
positions for
others
poor, low-
income,
unbanked,
underbanked,
informal, self-
employed
the poor, non-
poor urban and
rural, mobile
phone
subscribers/user
s
daughter,
customers, tuck
shop owner,
Zimbabwean
shop owner,
stokvel, bank,
grannies
friends, members,
workers, savings
group, officials,
treasurer
Table 1: Comparing subject positions between the four texts
The ABSA text positions the bank as a “private sector” formal financial services provider and
creates positions of “poor, low-income, unbanked, underbanked and self-employed” for
individual customers. These subject positions are brought to the discursive domain by ABSA,
which imposes these subject positions on the human beings it seeks to subjectify. Similarly,
subject positions are brought to the discursive domain by the researchers in the academic text
from Acosta et al. (2011). They create the positions of “poor, non-poor, mobile phone
subscribers and users” and imply subject positions for themselves as academics and
development experts by institutional affiliations, such as the World Bank, United Nations,
Eighty20 and UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund).
Within local texts, on the other hand, the subjects bring subject positions to the research
domain. Mama Thembi creates for herself the positions of “mother, member, business owner,
creditor, debtor and banking agent, African, family”. For others she creates “daughter,
customers, tuck shop owner, Zimbabwean shop owner, grannies, stokvel and bank”. The
ZeGa group creates for themselves positions of “friends, members, workers, officials” and
these are the same that they create for others. There is correspondence between the subject
positions for the self and for the other.
The discontinuity between the texts becomes apparent in the origin of the subject position and
the types of subject positions created. From the ABSA and Acosta, et al. (2011) texts, the
labels chosen for subjects do not reflect the numerous subject positions that people articulate
for themselves. The externally imposed subject positions from these two texts do not give a
sense of the person, but rather present the person through numbers or in abstract terms. Nor
do they capture the extent to which those individuals move between positions, forming one
out of the other.!

9
4.1.2 Where do problems and the strategic actions to solve them originate?
Discourse
cluster
Institutional
Academic
Local
Local
Text
ABSA Press
Release
Acosta, Kim,
Melzer, Mendoza
& Thelen (2011)
Mama Thembi
interview
ZeGa
interviews
Problema-
tisations
lack of
economic
development
due to
financial
exclusion
mobile banking,
the use of a
mobile phone for
financial
transactions
linked to a client’s
account to lower
their costs of
provision and
make them more
accessible for the
low-income
population
desire not to be
poor, need to
control flows of
money, limit
communication
access, track money
from customers,
need for capital
need for social
coordination
and
organisation
Strategic
actions
understand the
market, design
best-fit
products and
delivery
channels,
savings, credit,
transaction as
way to
mobilise
financial
inclusion;
Bank enters
townships
where it has
weak footprint
measurement of
potential
customers,
measurement of
total poor with
access,
measurement of
supply side
create own
businesses, accounts
control book, three
cell phones,
separate bank
accounts, allow
advance payments,
take loan from
bank
formalised
group
structure, bank
account and
statements
Table 2: Problematizations and strategic actions identified in the four texts.
The creation of strategic actions to solve the problems for the identified subjects is also
different between the texts. For ABSA, the actions for solving the problem of lack of access to
financial services start with “really” understanding “this market in its minute detail” and then
designing the “best-fit” product and distribution solutions. Solutions include the placement of
Community Finance Officers in townships, as well as the creation of a set of bespoke
transactional, savings and loan products. Acosta et al. (2011) offer a data-driven solution to
finding the opportunities for delivering banking to locations where there may be a
combination of low banking penetration and high cell phone adoption. Their solution is the
creation of “heat maps” to indicate densities of the observed variables through colour-coded
notations on geographic maps. Again, the academics echo the bank’s desire to solve the
problem of access to financial services through geographic locations of banking capabilities
where the intended customers reside.
Mama Thembi imposes on herself the desire not to be poor and the need to control flows of
money, the need to control communication access, the need to track flows of money and the
need for capital. Mama Thembi also takes actions to get a loan from her financial institution
to purchase a vehicle, bank accounts that she uses as a way to monitor the profitability of

10
different parts of her business. She also uses a duplicate invoice book for records of savings
and credit transactions between herself and her customers. The record is necessary since these
are financial transactions and not grocery sales. For her clients she initiates a number of
bespoke financial solutions, such as extending credit or taking advance payments for goods.
The ZeGa group articulates a high need for social and financial coordination as the
problematisation of their situation. The strategic actions of the ZeGa group show a
combination of local and external solutions. They opt to formalise their own group structure
and create a governing constitution. From external sources they adopt a bank account,
monthly bank statements and Microsoft Excel to produce their spreadsheets. They
supplement that with the collection of cash from members at their monthly meetings.
In neither of the local texts are the respondents expressing a “lack of economic development”
or a “lack of financial services” as the problem that they are trying to overcome. The
discontinuity among the texts is also the agent of action. The institutional and academic texts
suggest that formal financial service providers and policy makers drive actions, whereas the
local texts indicate that the individuals involved choose the best solutions available to them
from a range of options. This means that people are moving money between each other,
sometimes through channels that the bank provides, and sometimes not.

11
4.1.3 What forms of control are created?
Discourse
cluster
Institutional
Academic
Local
Local
Text
ABSA Press
Release
Acosta, Kim,
Melzer,
Mendoza &
Thelen (2011)
Mama Thembi
interview
ZeGa interviews
Forms of
control
Community
Finance
Officers, 60%
of people are
banked, 30%
savings and
10% credit
users, implied
through access
of credit
heat maps,
UNDP
database,
policymakers,
density of
access, urban
and rural split of
banked and
mobile phone
users
self and customer,
differentiates
smaller retailers
who are
customers, bank
statements to
monitor
profitability
officials,
constitution,
strict group
membership,
formalised
proceedings
Table 3: `Forms of control indentified within the four texts.
4.1.3.1 Modes of Authority
The bank imposes external Community Finance Officers as modes of authority that are to be
deployed into the township to help people access financial services. They are intended to
physically enter the space where the subjects reside. Similarly, academics propose externally
imposed modes of authority in the form of policymakers, but these policymakers are
physically distant from the subjects. Policymakers are expected to access the heat map tool to
make better policy decisions. The subjects are thus managed through abstract and remote
means.
From the ZeGa text, individuals defer to the mode of authority of their elected officials. These
are the individuals who oversee the activities and actions of members. These modes of
authority can govern because members willingly submit to their oversight. So too for Mama
Thembi, when she deals with her customers. They willingly accept her as the mode of
authority for safeguarding their money. Not only do the local discourses reflect a mode of
authority to whom subjects willingly submit, but the mode of authority is also local, visible and
in direct contact with the subjects.
There is a clear difference here with the institutional text from the bank that opts to place
Community Finance Officers into the local environment. These employees of the bank are
not the locally recognised financial authorities as indicated the texts from Mama Thembi and
ZeGA. It is not enough that the Officers are drawn from the local community, and might
presumably have an appreciation for the existing financial practices and authorities. Their
mandates are defined within the structures of the operating models of the bank. It appears
therefore that the Community Finance Officers or policy makers would be without influence
in this environment, since both local texts exclude such entities.

12
4.1.3.2 Hierarchical Observation
The concept of hierarchical observation connotes a situation in which subjects feel that they
are under constant observation. Evidence of this was not found in the ABSA or academic
texts, but aspects of it were found in the local texts. Mama Thembi demonstrates a
management rationality that does not enable any form of hierarchical observation by external
parties. She uses a bank loan in the personal name of her business partner for the acquisition
of a business vehicle, and records the movement of her customers’ money in a paper-based
record book. Members of the ZeGa group are perhaps the best example of where hierarchical
observation is in evidence due to the closeness of the group members as friends. There is also
the constant monitoring of their behaviour in the group through meeting attendance and the
flow of money between individuals and the group.
4.1.3.3 Normalising Judgment
The ABSA text invokes normalising judgment by drawing on the scientific discourse of the
research done by Finmark Trust. Some of the results of this research are quoted as “30% of
people have savings accounts and 10% of people use credit”. The text laments specifically that
the numbers reflect the low penetration of bank accounts, savings and credit. The Acosta et
al. (2011) article uses heat maps as a tool for comparing mobile phone usage against bank
account usage. The authors also rely on FinScope data, and indicate that in urban areas, 43%
of the poor adult population has access to a mobile phone, while only 32% of these adults are
banked. Similarly, 31% of the poor have a mobile phone, while only 19% of them are
currently banked in rural South Africa. Both texts seek to imply that the desired state should
be closer to 100% in all instances and portray gaps as something lacking from the ideal state.
Normalising judgment appears in the text from Mama Thembi when she describes the
differences between herself and other retailers. So too, the ZeGa group express normalising
judgments through their restrictions on membership which they delimit to employed men
who own property in Zebiedela (a rural hometown) and live in Gauteng. Members entrust the
enforcement of the rules for membership to the group.
What becomes clear is that the imposition of normalising judgment from an external source,
such as the bank and the academics, is with the intention to define numerical categorisations
and labels for a distant group over which the judgment is imposed. This is different from the
segmentation that Mama Thembi employs to differentiate herself, or the ZeGa group to
control membership, where normalising judgment is used as a device for self-identification.
4.1.3.4 Examination
The academic text is probably the best example of where external examination is thought
possible because of the production of “heat maps”. They propose that policymakers, civil
society and business stakeholders should be able to “keep track of demand and supply”
(Acosta, et al., 2011; p. 59). The data is expressly intended for these users, away from the
subject. Similarly, while it may not be explicitly stated in the text from the bank, data
produced through banking practices is used in internal reports for the analysis and reporting
of business and product performance inside the organisation.
Examination is also found in the lending practices of banks. The ABSA text refers to business
owners as the “self-employed part of the market” with “turnovers of between R15 000 and
R500 000 per year” and intends to make available a “micro enterprise loan” for them. For
business owners to gain access to this credit, they will have to comply with a strict set of
criteria. Some of the supporting materials that the business would have to provide include

13
proof of business registration, proof of tax registration and payment, projected budgets, credit
history and financial management reports, such as income statements, cash flow statements
and balance sheets. The bank uses those documents to do a range of calculations, such as
affordability of the loan for the business. The documents also serve as evidence that the
business owner is able to manage the business well enough to repay the loan.
However, local discourses of financial practices are not devoid of examination activities. In
both local texts, their scope of desire for control is internally focused either on the stock and
customers for Mama Thembi or the members’ and officials’ activities for ZeGa. This is in
contrast to the orientation observed in the ABSA and Acosta et al. (2011) texts at a spatial
level in that these discourses seek to examine subjects with whom they are not in direct
contact. Examination between Mama Thembi and her clients is through a combination of her
record book and the client receipt. She retains a record of the transaction and so does the
customer. There is no need for external oversight or monitoring of these transactions as those
roles of accountability and trust are established between her and the customers. ZeGa also
exhibits highly controlled activities with regular meetings, minutes of meetings, bank
statements and contributions tracked on spreadsheets.
The major discontinuity, therefore, is that neither the bank with its solutions, nor the
academics with their sophisticated heat maps can examine the activities of Mama Thembi
and her customers, or of the ZeGa group members’ savings. They are therefore isolated from
external examination. Such isolation has disadvantages. For instance, there is little evidence
that can support their actual financial standing. Neither is their well-managed conduct visible
within the systems of banks or other providers of financial products and services. This is not to
say that either situation is better, but rather to draw attention to this important point of
discontinuity between the texts.
4.2 Turning to Points of Continuity
Finding points of continuity in the four texts can paradoxically point to limitations on
rationality imposed by a regime of truth. Evidence in the previous section detailed how the
different texts operate to produce human subjects. This section outlines the evidence for how
the texts operate to produce similar kinds of subjects.
As Avgerou and McGrath argued, individuals are seldom forced to conform, but of their own
accord accept the rationalities conveyed by a regime of truth (Avgerou & McGrath, 2007).
Moreover, discourse analysis cannot make pronouncements about the extent to which social
actors are aware of their actions in replicating macro-structures (Thompson, 2003). The
points of continuity could reveal a subconscious level of confluence.
Upon examination, we find that the ABSA text produces three kinds of subjects. The first kind
is individuals who need access to formally provided “transaction accounts” to manage the
money they receive. The second are the “self-employed part of the market” who own
businesses. The third are those individuals who need access to “savings” accounts. The Acosta
et al. (2011) text produces individuals who are “the poor, non-poor urban and rural, mobile
phone subscribers” who, through mobile phones, will be able to make payments. The
individual is therefore produced as an economically active person who gets, holds and moves
money. These subjects are identified through a physical mapping tool that matches mobile
phone ownership against bank account ownership. Mama Thembi produces her customers as
individuals who get, hold and move money. Pensioners bring their monthly social grants to
pay for bulk-sized groceries. Tuck shop owners leave surplus money with her as advance
payment for stock. She produces herself as the owner of a shop through which she earns in
income. The ZeGa group also produce themselves as economically active individuals who

14
earn salaries, need to move money between themselves and save money safely for future
expenses.
Individual subjects, across these four texts, are created as being concerned with the ability to
manage income and expenses through ways of getting, holding and moving money. There is a
difference in how that income is derived. The first is the individual who earns an income by
virtue of their body as an economic site. The second kind of subject is the individual that owns
productive property and financial activities for this individual relate to how this property is
used to earn an income. The third kind of subject is the individual who is able to own
intangible property and the financial activities relate to how this intangible property is stored
for later use. The table below summarises the analysis showing the three economic sites that
underpin the three kinds of financial subjects common to the texts.

15
Text
ABSA Bank
Acosta
Mama
Thembi
ZeGa
Group
Problemati-
sations and
Strategic
actions
savings,
credit,
transaction
accounts as
way to
mobilise
financial
inclusion,
bank enters
townships
where it has
weak
footprint
mobile
banking (M-
banking), the
use of a
mobile
phone for
financial
transactions
linked to a
client’s
account to
lower costs of
provision,
make them
more
accessible for
low-income
population
own
businesses,
Accounts
control book,
three cell
phones, bank
accounts
formalised
group
structure,
bank account
and
statements
Economic
site
Body
unbanked
and
underbanked
who need
access to
credit
(borrowers)
and bank
accounts
(customers)
mapping of
the physical
location of
user of
mobile
phones
compared to
bank account
users
pensioners
bring their
monthly social
grants to pay
for bulk-sized
groceries,
account
holders
members are
workers who
earn salaries
Tangible
property
SME owners
who need
financial
services are
borrowers
tuck shop
owners who
leaves surplus
money with
her as
advanced
payment for
stock
Intangible
property
unbanked
and
underbanked
savers who
need access
to savings
accounts
savings groups
who bring
regular lump
sums for the
end-of-year
purchase
group
savings
account for
future
expenses
Table 4: Comparing points of continuity in the four texts shows that three kinds of financial subjects are created
depending on the economic site of their income and expense management.
4.2.1 Individuals and Their Bodies as Financial Subjects
The first kind of subject is the individual who uses their body as an economic site. Within this
conception the cross-spectrum of financial activities are those that enable the individual to get,
hold and move money. The individual subject position is the starting point and can be traced
by the particular financial rationalities enacting certain financial solutions and practices.

16
These subject positions are distinguished by their sources of income, and the money-networks
are evident in the actions of handling expenses. A variety of subject positions, such as worker,
borrower and pensioner fit into this category.
For workers, the body is deployed as a labouring property for which a salary or wage is
earned. Financial activities pertain to those who deal with income and expense management.
At issue is the ability of the individual to enact a range of self-management techniques to
govern their bodies to be able to earn that income. As an account holder the individual
complies with the rules and regulations set by the provider. Expenses are managed to
maintain the continuity in productivity of the body.
Borrowers rely on the future potential of their body to earn the income to repay the loan.
Unsecured credit and credit for consumption fit into this category. Individuals who opt to buy
property by accessing home loans would also fit into this category, since the property that they
buy is not earning an income for them, but is a liability until such time as they realise capital
growth, or rent it out to earn an income from it. The individual subjects him- or herself to the
routine of regular payments.
For the pensioner, it is the aging body that is the site on which financial services are enacted.
The individual is willing to subjectify him or herself to the external judgment and
normalisation of their situation and their body because it brings an income. Monthly grants
are delivered through a transactional financial product or service such as payment cards or
bank accounts.
4.2.2 Individuals with Tangible Property as Financial Subjects
For the second kind of subject, the concern is with tangible property over which the individual
can exercise ownership to earn an income. Examples of these kinds of property include the
ownership of a shop, a house (or part of a house) that is rented out and ownership of a vehicle,
such as a taxi. Financial services procured are those that support this activity, such as a loan to
buy a business, a fixed asset loan or a working capital loan insofar as it supports value derived
from existing business assets. Transactional services, such bank accounts, point-of-sale systems
and insurances for stock and property are also included here.
Services can be procured from so-called formal or informal providers with the owner deciding
the extent to which they are willing to comply with the requirements for accessing particular
services. Banks require detailed financial statements during a loan application to support the
affordability of the loan. The example of Mama Thembi shows that business owners may take
loans in their personal capacity to acquire business assets. Secondly, the business owner did
not have any form of financial reporting and would thus not be able to access business loans
from banks. Trade finance is often easier to secure based on trading history between the small
business and the wholesaler.
4.2.3 Individuals with Intangible Property as Financial Subjects
The third kind of subject is one who owns intangible property in the form of financial assets,
such as savings balances or money placed with a wholesaler in advance. Savings groups either
keep money in the bank or with a trusted retailer in advance of the end-of-year collection of
bulk groceries. As far as this category of property is concerned, savings are for future
spending. Future shocks of unexpected life events, such as births and deaths, compel some
individuals to undertake savings. The interest rate for balances is not of concern, and
therefore income is not earned from the savings balances. This situation suggests that the

17
intangible properties are not treated as assets. The individual is never regarded as an investor
that expects the assets to accumulate in value. Savings accounts are thus not seen as assets that
should, if not accumulate in value, at least retain their value over time against inflation.
!
Instead, the!evidence shows that individuals are using each other as money-guards. This was
found between shopkeepers and customers, as well as within the savings group. The money-
guarding phenomenon is a form of control that the individual enacts to protect the money
from themselves or others. It appears that the lack of interest earned by this money in bank
accounts, even if it is less than inflation, is outweighed by the desire for control over the safety
of the money.
4.3 Implications: Beyond the boundary
The theoretical model proposed here seeks to show the regime of truth of financial inclusion
as creating kinds of three financial subjects who are concerned with getting, holding and
moving money. Another way to think of this kind of money management is as income and
expense management. Personal financial well-being concerns more than income and expense
management. We therefore propose that asset building is a possible expansion of the current
boundary of financial inclusion.
According to Gutting, “Foucault’s project is not designed to discover what is impossible for us
to do or to know; but to uncover the possibility of no longer being, doing or thinking what we
are, do or think” (2005; p. 59). Arising within this stance of understanding the origins and
conceptual boundaries and limits of our thinking, is the potential for alternative ways of being,
knowing and thinking. Such a perspective exposes the possibilities of the new, while
recognising and making transparent the old. How then can we think beyond the boundaries
of financial inclusion as it is currently instantiated in discourse and practice?
As a starting point, it is important to revisit the fundamental rationale for financial inclusion.
Are financial services an end in themselves, or are they a means to an end? If financial
inclusion is the means to an end, consider that the end should be the financial wellbeing of
citizens who can thus ultimately move out of poverty. How do we measure financial
wellbeing? Three measures of financial wellbeing are as follows: getting enough income,
managing cash flow to meet long- and short-term expenses and, finally, building wealth. So
far, financial inclusion has been aimed at the first two of these objectives, ignoring the third,
and thus leading to increased demand for unproductive borrowing, for example. However, if
poverty is to be alleviated in a meaningful way, individuals need to be able to move beyond
income and expense management to include wealth management in their realm of
possibilities. We therefore propose that asset building is a possible expansion of the current
boundary of financial inclusion.
Asset building is shown as an extension and not a replacement of the current regime of truth
of financial inclusion. The continuous combination and forming of subject positions,
economic sites, problematisations, strategic actions and forms of control already present in the
income and expense management approach of financial inclusion can form the basis of the
asset-building perspective.
We make this theoretical contribution and proposal knowing that these overtures can be
difficult to reconcile with the Foucauldian conceptual framework that repudiates the notion of
grand theoretical constructs. Perhaps Foucault would have also taken umbrage with the way
in which we have used his concepts in as structured a manner as we have done here. He
would not have taken kindly to attempts to “discipline his thought and turn it into an
orthodoxy” (Rabinow & Rose, 2003 p1).

18
The notion of assets and asset building is not completely outside the domain of financial
inclusion. There are alternative discourses to the mainstream discourses of financial inclusion.
The alternative discourses of interest are those that indicate the link between financial
inclusion and asset building as illustrated by the following examples. The G20’s “Principles for
Innovative Financial Inclusion” refers to the importance of moving beyond enabling
payments and that “it is important to consider that financial capability will have the potential
to involve the poor in more advanced financial services and focus on engaging the poor in
asset building with more comprehensive savings products where appropriate” (GPFI, 2011; p.
53). A second example is the book Portfolios of the poor (Collins, Morduch, Rutherford, &
Ruthven, 2009) that offer an analysis of individual assets. The initial study was
groundbreaking in that it showed that poor people already manage complex financial
instruments and have a range of assets. The researchers used a balance sheet to capture the
financial position of the subjects. A third example is the book Banker to the poor by Mohammed
Yunus (1998). Part of the establishment of the village bank was to give ownership to the
village-based borrowers. Borrowers would own the bank and each have shares in the profits of
the bank. A fourth example is the publication by the South African National Treasury “A
safer financial sector to serve South Africa better”(Gordhan, 2011). In the publication, the
National Treasury recognises the myriad forms of informal savings groups, including those
that use the group savings model to invest in the stock market. It is however our contention
that these examples are not mainstream in the discourse.
In addition, we are aware that our proposal exposes our desire to empower individuals to
make what we consider to be better financial decisions. When individuals are able to make
financial decisions for their own benefit, they are fundamentally eroding the current regime of
truth of financial inclusion. We are proposing a new financial ideology. Postmodernists, like
Foucault, would not make such pronouncements since they believe that their objective is to
render any ideology weaker and fragmented (Cahoone, 2003). For them, there can thus be no
essentialist understanding of people since our very identities are fragmented (Alvesson &
Deetz, 1992) and human agents cannot be regarded as a “holistic and bounded cognitive
universe” (Hassard, 1994).
Despite this caution, we offer here an expansion to the current regime of truth of financial
inclusion. It is our belief that efforts to pursue financial inclusion will intensify. Rather than
argue for dismantling the entire project, we argue here for enhancing the project to consider
more deeply the outcome and consequences for the individual subject. We suggest that a clear
focus on the transactional financial wellbeing of individuals (as measured through a
combination of a healthy cash flow and safe ways to get hold of and move money) should be
combined with the objective of building financial assets. With this objective, financial
inclusion has the potential to fundamentally contribute to asset poverty alleviation in addition
to income poverty alleviation.
5 Conclusions
Foucault (1994) asserted that the political task in society is to identify and criticise institutions
that appear neutral and independent. The objective is to take aim at the political violence that
is exercised through these institutions. This call to action can be interpreted as the effort to
unmask and attack targets that fit the traditional, mainstream concept of institutions. The
evidence in this paper shows that power lies elsewhere. The political enemy is the routinised
self-exclusion practices uncovered through the discourses from local contexts. It is in the
minutiae of everyday acts that individuals find themselves trapped. This is not to say that
individuals are to be blamed for their plight. Rather, the proposal is to examine society’s
boundaries and work at making its institutions more benevolent to individual financial

19
prosperity. This paper shows that unless work is done at the local and individual level, such
efforts are futile.
With these three kinds of financial subjects and their particular rationalities - formed in
response to and within a particular regime of truth - now in view, it appears that individuals’
financial ambitions are constrained to income and expense management. From local
discourses, it is clear that the financial practices that are invoked by the individual as self-
disciplinary techniques within a particular set of socially available options. The discourse
analysis shows that individuals create themselves in ways that include financial service
providers only to the extent that the product or service meets their needs. The findings
showed that individuals engage a set of forms of control that are not aligned to those
articulated in mainstream institutional and academic discourses. These findings reinforce
Foucault’s proposition that power lies not in the institutions and structure of society, but in the
everyday actions of every individual.
With the financial subject as the starting point, it is possible to understand the use or rejection
of particular financial products and services. The endurance of financial practices can be
explained when looking at the interplay of the subject position, problematisation, strategic
actions and forms of control. From this point of view, old practices persist, but new ones can
also be created.
The concern with income and expense management appears to be where the conceptual
boundary for financial inclusion has been set. Local discourses of financial practices reinforce
this boundary, despite the fact that, as the evidence shows, local practices take place within,
and outside, formal financial services.
When financial inclusion is said to be concerned with giving access to formal financial service
to 2.5 billion people around the world (Demirguc-Kunt & Klapper, 2012) it is effectively
claiming that current informal systems are insufficient for helping people adequately perform
their income and expense management. Solutions such as mobile banking, mobile money
transfers, low-cost branches and access to microloans, are positioned to help people manage
their income and expenses. Therefore, they intend to replace existing ways of income and
expense management with new ones. That implies that external solutions are better than
existing local solutions. Such a perspective leads to the criticism that financial inclusion is a
project to embed people in the global capital system, and make them dependent on the
technologies and systems that ultimately are not to their benefit.
These findings highlight the expectation from the institutional and academic discourses of
financial inclusion that a form of disciplinary power can be exerted over people’s financial
lives through the regulation and ordering of banking products and services. The discourses of
financial inclusion seek to enrol the individual, their body and their property into a
programme of observation and measurement. As a form of discipline, this financial regimen is
gentle and works not directly on the body, but through the body on the mind and will. The
docile subject, as the academics and the banks conceive it, is classified, measured, compared,
evaluated and described. These discourses seek to subject the individual to expert examination
by meticulous micromanagement not only of what is to be done with their money, but also
how it is to be done. Such a desire for the regularisation of behaviour makes financial
inclusion a discursive deployment to unify the social body. For this project to work, individuals
need to subjectify themselves to its power. In other words, individuals need to exact forms of
self-disciplinary power on themselves aligned to the rationalities of the institutional and
academic discourses. Evidence suggests that this is not the case.
Texts from local sources show that the kinds self-management that individuals enact upon
themselves are discontinuous with the mainstream discourses of financial inclusion.
Individuals in local contexts articulate financial practices outside of the organising structures

20
of the institutional and academic discourses. The organising logic of the inclusive
development project known as financial inclusion is questioned by such positions. On whose
terms should this inclusion take place? To whose benefit and at what cost?
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en.html.

APPENDIX A: ABSA Press Release - Financial Inclusion in South Africa – the silent
revolution
Text
Subject
position
Problematisation
Strategic
actions
Forms of control
Enough evidence exists to argue that access to formal financial
services further economic development. The general perception is
that the poor and low-income in Africa is still largely unbanked
(no access to formal financial services) or under-banked (poor
access to formal financial services). Most studies indicate the
formally banked in Africa to be somewhere around 20% on
average. This means that the majority of people in Africa
make use of informal financial services or, if stated
differently, are excluded from the formal financial
services where inclusion would assist in furthering
economic development.
Poor and low-
income
Unbanked,
under-banked
creating problem of
lack of economic
development due to
no inclusion
As low as 20%
formally banked vs.
informally banked.
As inclusion is a factor of being formally banked, and this can come
in many product or service forms (savings, transaction and
credit) it is difficult to state an overall inclusion factor, but even if we
look separately at savings and credit the 1994 figures were mostly
in the 30% to about 10% range respectively for South Africa’s
poor and low income.
The poor and
low income
Market insight
Savings,
credit,
transaction
products
30% savings,
10% credit users
However, the challenge is not only a government and NGO
challenge, it is indeed also a private sector challenge, and the specific
question is what the private sector, more specifically the banks, are
doing to address this problem. Internationally the argument is that …
there is a role and responsibility for the private sector to play a role as
well. Thus, to follow a commercial and profit-driven approach to
address the financial services and products demand of the poor (the
Private
sector

24
base of the pyramid approach).
What about the self-employed part of the market? Here Absa also
engaged and started a unit at the end of 2007, the Micro Enterprise
Finance Unit. This Unit is tasked to build a model that Absa can
scale to also serve this side of the market. After some experimentation
and testing the Unit is now focusing on a micro enterprise loan
for businesses with annual business turnovers of between R15 000
and R500 000 per year.
Self-employed
micro
enterprise loan
The initial learning and experience is that more than 80% of their
clients are women, and more than 80% of clients open a bank
account for the first time. To date the unit reached 17 000 clients
from 22 outlets called Micro Enterprise Service Centres.
The Unit’s Community Finance Officers work from these
Centres to reach their clients at their homes and places of business, in
a way, bringing banking to the people. Thus a focused move to
improve financial inclusion and running the efforts of a commercial
basis, rather than a corporate social responsibility drive. The unit’s
charter clearly states a for-profit objective, as well as a community
and economic objective.
Women as
clients
Community
Finance Officers
However, many challenges exist. First is to really understand
this market in its minute detail, as only then you can design
the best- fit products and delivery channels that will
actually be used by clients. The approach is not to panel beat
existing products and services focused on the middle and affluent
market to fit the poor and low-income as that is the kiss of death for
the cost structure of the product or service.
Service
provider
Market
Poor and low
income
to really
understand
this market in
its minute
detail, design
the best- fit
products and
delivery
channels that
will actually be
used by clients
!
!

25
APPENDIX B: Extracts from Mama Thembi interview transcript
Text
Subject
positions
Problematizations
Strategic
actions
Forms of control
INTERVIEWER: Mamma Thembi I think you took up
three phones.
THEMBI: Which means I am loaded. [01.43] to be poor,
poverty I don’t like it…I refuse and [01.53] to be poor, I
don’t like poverty.
INTERVIEWER: Tell me what is poverty?
THEMBI: To be lack of everything, I am old but I am still
trying.
Desire not to be poor
Cell for each of the
three groups she
interacts with,
control access they
have to her
THEMBI: So I am still pushing my life forward and upward. I don’t
want to ask my daughter to help me every time, saying a Refilwe I
don’t have tea bags, Refilwe I feel like I want ice-cream can you do
this and this for me, she will end saying, eish, this old woman is
worrying me too much,
Daughter
mother
THEMBI: So the guy who was the manager whom I prayed for he
said to me these old directors are saying can you sell this, iron and
everything and put their money into their accounts. I said to
myself, but I want to talk to them if possible I just want to
try to do something. He said to me sisi can you manage. I said to
him God will do. God will do.
Business
owner
Own business
INTERVIEWER: So are you saying that the fellow South Africans,
other South Africans don’t want to form a buying club, they don’t
want to support each other.
THEMBI: Ja they laugh, they even laugh at you, you can’t
do this and you can’t manage. We have got this Great
Thembisa Chamber of Commerce. I used to go there and I used to
raise things like this.
African
Member
Discouraging
sentiments from
fellow Africans
THEMBI: I am giving some accounts to those Zimbabwean
people who have got some tuck shops, I am giving them
Creditor
Zimbabwean

26
and they are doing very well because from their taking like
R3,000 but at the end of the end of the week they will come
and give me that amount and take another stock.
shop owner
THEMBI: These three phones, I must just start with this
one. This one is for Standard Bank, I can deposit, people
can withdraw with this phone, they can buy grocery, I can
sell airtime with this one, it’s very important and it’s
doing something wonderful for me. It’s from Standard
Bank. This one is my personal for me, my family and my
other relatives.
INTERVIEWER: So they know that number.
THEMBI: They know this number. This one is for my
customers. Sometimes if I am not around I just leave it
open, they will leave the messages.
Family
Customer
Banking agent
THEMBI: Ouma Goggo’s they have got so many stories, they will
never end.
INTERVIEWER: Who they are buying for, how many people in the
house. Because often the grannies they are not living alone, they are
buying …
THEMBI: Most of them they have got these grandchildren
and some are stubborn, some they steel their monies so
they decided to buy something big than …
INTERVIEWER: So they don’t have any cash, they just buy
food.
Grannies
Grannies can’t keep
cash
Enable them
to buy goods in
bulk
INTERVIEWER: So they, someone that comes from the stokvel or
the club, and then they give you the money at the end of the month
right, every month, and do you record it somewhere, do you have a
book?
THEMBI: Yes, we ring it in a till for them to be satisfied, we ring it
in the till and then we write it in a book, excuse me – I am
sorry, this one I don’t have, my till was not working so I
don’t have this slip, but usually we ring it and we clip it
Stokvel
Track money for
customers
Accounts book to
record transactions,
self and customer
agree on terms of
engagement

27
here and then we write everything we give her the copy.
THEMBI: No, it’s not the same every month. Like, this
one. This one has got a tuck shop, let me show you.
[01.14.08 – vernacular]. He gave us like R10,000.00, so he
was taking groceries bit by bit, he gave us like R10,000.00.
And then he will come and get the stock as he needs it.
Tuck shop
owner
Differentiates
smaller who are
customers
INTERVIEWER: And the business is with?
THEMBI: Nedbank. But we were thinking because we want
to separate some of these things, if things goes well we are
going to open another one in Standard Bank.
Need to control flows
of money
Separate bank
accounts for lines of
business, monitor
profitability
THEMBI: When we started our business we didn’t borrow
any money from anyone. We didn’t, the only way we
borrowed money was from Standard Bank.
INTERVIEWER: And the interest is very high you say.
THEMBI: Ja, we are crying, we can’t just keep quiet.
INTERVIEWER: You have to cry.
THEMBI: We have two, and then the other loan is for the
car, for the bakkie.
INTERVIEWER: Okay, so car finance.
THEMBI: But he did it again in his name, not for the company but
we were thinking from last week that we want to go to the bank and
change everything into the business name.
Debtor
Need for capital to
buy a car
Take on a loan
from the bank
Business partner
applies for loan in
personal capacity
!

28
7 APPENDIX C: Extracts from ZeGa Savings Club members’ interviews transcript
Text
Subject
Positiions
Problematizations
Strategic
actions
Forms of
Control
“We come from the same place in Limpopo. We will get buried
there. It is a way of keeping the friendship. If you get
married, have a funeral in your home we assist you.”
Need for social
coordination and
organisation
We get together on the second Saturday of every month at one of the
member’s homes. Everyone contributes R120. R20 goes to the
host for food and R100 to the club’s account. It’s strictly a
BOYB. You have to bring your own booze.
Money
contributions are
part of the rules of
group membership
Today we need to deal with the issue of one new member. Actually
he’s not new. He was a member and then he stopped coming.
Member
If you have a wedding we need 3 months advance notice. Even
for a tombstone unveiling.
Social coordination
That’s what friends are for.
Friends
Jack: I have a another club at work. It’s a savings club with
colleagues. I am a correctional services officer in Boksburg. It’s called
Bravo Clubs. Seven of us contribute R500 every month. We divide
up the money for school uniforms and school fees. Usually on 15
December.
Worker
The treasurer must deposit the money on the first Monday after
the meeting. If not, the Treasurer pays R100 fine, the R20 for every
day after that until the money is in the account.
Treasurer
Bank account
Strict rules of
membership
Zega is three years old. The club was started because we are friends
and then on weekends we call around to find each other to drink
together. “Now we know where to find each other instead of
calling around at night.”
Need for social
coordination
Today we have an election. We have to choose new officials.
Last month we nominated new officials, four for each position.
Formalised
group

29
structure
If you don’t have eight members you can’t have a meeting. If you
don’t have a quorum we can’t have a meeting. A meeting means we
agree on the agenda, we go through minutes of the
previous meeting. We are supposed to start at 3 o’clock. That is
the time in our constitution. After 3 there is a fine of R20 if they
come late.
Members
Formalised
proceedings,
constitution
Peter: When you are friends, all this is just easier. I know this guy. I
look at his face and I can see he’s angry.
Friends