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Fintech 'frontiers' and the platformed motorcycle: Emergent infrastructures of value creation in African cities

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Environment and Planning D Society and Space

DOI:10.1177/02637758241276324

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Andrea Pollio

University of Cape Town

Rike Sitas

University of Cape Town

Alicia Fortuin

University of Cape Town

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Concerned with financialized extraction, the exploitation of precarious workers and racialized violence, critical scholars call for greater attention to the coloniality of financial technology (fintech) expansion in Africa. In this article, we echo the utility in foregrounding coloniality, but argue that it should be read as one among multiple, specific, and entangled ways in which fintech is creating new forms of value in the context of Africa's urbanization. To make this case, we focus on the nexus between platforms, motorcycle taxis and fintech. In three different African cities, we observe how fintech maps onto the impulses and desires of the private sector and the state alike to use fintech to enact various forms of value creation. In Nairobi, the motorcycle has become the testbed of assetization experiments that seek to create data-rich and less fuel-dependent economies; in Kigali, the state-led and platform-enabled standardization of motorcycle services intends to create fiscal, planning, and regulatory values; and in Cape Town, legacy supermarket chains enroll motorcycles and fintech offerings to algorithmically integrate urban economies of labor and retail. Tracing these processes illuminates the different rationalities, ingenuities, and technological entanglements that, beyond the endurance of coloniality, shape Africa’s fintech moment.

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Article

Fintech ‘frontiers’ and the

platformed motorcycle:

Emergent infrastructures of

value creation in African cities

Liza Rose Cirolia

African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town, South Africa

Andrea Pollio

African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town, South Africa

Department of Urban and Regional Studies, Polytechnic of Turin, Italy

Rike Sitas

African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town, South Africa

Alicia Fortuin

African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town, South Africa

Jack Ong’iro Odeo

Stockholm University, Sweden

Alexis Gatoni Sebarenzi

University of Geneva, Switzerland

Abstract

Concerned with financialized extraction, the exploitation of precarious workers and racialized

violence, critical scholars call for greater attention to the coloniality of financial technology

(fintech) expansion in Africa. In this article, we echo the utility in foregrounding coloniality, but

argue that it should be read as one among multiple, specific, and entangled ways in which fintech

is creating new forms of value in the context of Africa’s urbanization. To make this case, we focus

on the nexus between platforms, motorcycle taxis and fintech. In three different African cities, we

observe how fintech maps onto the impulses and desires of the private sector and the state alike

to use fintech to enact various forms of value creation. In Nairobi, the motorcycle has become

Corresponding author:

Liza Rose Cirolia, African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town, South Africa.

Email: liza.cirolia@uct.ac.za

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the testbed of assetization experiments that seek to create data-rich and less fuel-dependent

economies; in Kigali, the state-led and platform-enabled standardization of motorcycle services

intends to create fiscal, planning, and regulatory values; and in Cape Town, legacy supermarket

chains enroll motorcycles and fintech offerings to algorithmically integrate urban economies of labor

and retail. Tracing these processes illuminates the different rationalities, ingenuities, and technological

entanglements that, beyond the endurance of coloniality, shape Africa’s fintech moment.

Keywords

Platforms, African cities, financial technologies, infrastructure, coloniality

Introduction

It is “Fintech’s moment in Africa”, reads the headline of a 2022 McKinsey blog.

At the risk

of ascribing meaning to what might be the harmless punctuation of the global consulting

firm’s media team, such a title infers what many so-called development experts seem to

believe—that the global fintech explosion has taken a detour to the African continent.

Growing Internet penetration, coupled with relatively low diffusion of legacy banking sys-

tems, promises to unleash staggering revenues for digitally enabled financial services. The

word fintech, a portmanteau of “financial” and “technology”, captures precisely this: inno-

vations in the delivery and outreach of traditional financial services, such as credit and

insurance, as well as entirely new products such as mobile money and cryptocurrencies. It

is already the case that most high-risk investments in Africa are absorbed by financial

startups (Partech Partners, 2022). Building on the financial inclusion agenda that develop-

ment institutions have embraced for more than a decade (Gabor and Brooks, 2017), govern-

ments have also taken notice of the potential of fintech, launching initiatives that have

ranged from the digitization of welfare payments (Breckenridge, 2014) to housing micro-

finance (Scheba, 2023) and the establishment of state-sanctioned digital currencies (like

Nigeria’s e-Naira). A ballooning of fintech pilots is addressing every aspect of life on the

continent, especially in the large cities where these investments are concentrated (Pollio and

Cirolia, 2022).

To make sense of this moment, a growing body of scholarship highlights the importance

of understanding fintech as an infrastructure (Bernards and Campbell-Verduyn, 2019;

Cirolia et al., 2022; Hall et al., 2023; Mann and Iazzolino, 2019). Arguably, fintech depends

on material and technological systems (cables, data centers, satellites, mobile phones) and is

characterized by the same processes of standardization, regulation, and qualification that

inform other infrastructural sectors, such as water or energy (Bowker and Star, 2000). This

fintech-as-infrastructure orientation builds both on the work of science and technology

studies (STS) scholars (Furlong, 2014; Star, 1999), who usefully expand the ontological

boundaries of infrastructure and technology, as well as the work of geography scholars,

such as Peck and Whiteside (2016) and Hall et al. (2023), who stress the importance of seeing

finance as part of infrastructural development (e.g., through investment) but also as an

infrastructure itself, fundamental to the reproduction of material, social, political, and eco-

logical worlds.

One of the offerings of this infrastructure lens is that it enables a critique of fintech in

conversation with an existing body of work foregrounding the “coloniality of infra-

structure” in Africa (Cupers, 2021). Historical, anthropological, and geographical analyses

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of the extractive nature of finance and technology have thus been woven into a critique of

infrastructural coloniality (e.g., Bernards, 2022; Langley and Leyshon, 2022; Rodima-

Taylor, 2022), which in turn builds on a rich vocabulary developed for other infrastructure

systems, such as railways, highways, and pipelines. Concepts such as “imperial invitations”

(Kimari and Ernstson, 2020), “colonial moorings” (Enns and Bersaglio, 2020) or “colonial

encounters” (Parashar and Schulz, 2021) have allowed for the exploration of the continuities

and persistence which appear—in sometimes unexpected ways—in the contemporary finan-

cial turn of African capitalism (Ouma, 2020).

Overall, as we detail later, the burgeoning of fintech in Africa has been interpreted by a

cohort of critical infrastructure scholars within the reproduction of colonial and neocolonial

logics. This body of work has offered a useful corrective to dehistoricized readings of

financialization (Alami and Guermond, 2023), attending to the evident anemia and critical

erasure of questions of race, colonization, and violence (Haag, 2022; Levenson and Paret,

2022; Migozzi, 2020). It has further enriched our understanding of financial frontiers as a

conceptual orientation that “pairs theft and dispossession with the excesses of accumulation,

[while holding] together exhausted worlds and new hopes for autonomy and even freedom”

(Ballestero et al., 2023: 311). This infrastructural perspective dovetails with debates over

“data colonialism”, an “emerging order” that, through digitally mediated relations, renders

human life a terrain of profit extraction, replicating the same expansionary logics and

patterns of western imperialism (Couldry and Mejias, 2019: xviii).

In this article, we argue that charting the colonial roots and logics of emerging fintech

configurations is vital, yet insufficient to unpack the mechanisms and processes that sub-

stantiate them. In part, this argument builds on a refusal to accept linear and technodeter-

minist readings of emerging technologies—readings that place Africa as a late receiver of

innovation from elsewhere (Mavhunga, 2017). We concur with Elyachar (2023), who argues

that critical studies of financialization at large tend to imagine a western-centric “‘mobile

frontier’[,] remaking the world in its image” (p.2). These readings problematically “brush

off” (Cooper, 2005) all forms of creation, imagination, resistance, and refusal that escape

imperial and reactive relationships of power. Further, as Neferti Tadiar (2022) notes, col-

oniality as an analytic may well be a colonial gaze in itself, if it reproduces the notion that

what happens in the postcolonial world is predominantly the result of colonial relations—

“the West’s own doing”. Such diverse scholarship, often inexplicitly, has ample overlaps

with the Southern urban orientation we deploy in our methods.

These reflections on the utility and limits of infrastructural coloniality can usefully engage

the multiplicities and entanglements that substantiate contemporary fintech, particularly in

the context of African cities. We thus align with Goldman (2023), who calls for empirical

and methodological attention to fintech’s “relentless dynamism and inter-scalar hyper-

mobility of finance capital working across the postcolonial map” (p. 367). This dynamism,

according to Janet Roitman’s suggestion (2023), can usefully be articulated by observing the

different forms of value creation, rather than just extraction, that are enacted by new fintech

configurations and the diverse calculative rationalities that underpin them.

Instead of set-

tling on a specific conception of “value”, definitions of which remain elusive and diverging

even in mainstream economics (Mazzucato, 2018), the notion of value creation centers the

multiple “vernaculars”, as Fabian Muniesa explains, through which the moral horizons of

finance and innovation are imagined and orchestrated (2017). In other words, value creation

is not limited to financial value (e.g., for shareholders or investors), but extends to creative,

and necessarily virtuous, gains in social, political, and ecological domains. Of course, as

Elyachar (2023) expertly demonstrates, addressing such questions of value creation is not

banal, as “[r]evaluation and deleveraging is always a dramatic affair” (p.11).

Cirolia et al. 3

The concept of value creation pushes us beyond a discourse of fintech’s colonial exploi-

tation, rent-seeking, and extraction, to look at diverse, relational, and multiple accounts of

the entangled dynamics of economic and financial activities on the one hand, and social and

cultural life on the other (Zelizer, 2012). We do not suggest that colonial processes are

absent, but rather argue for an orientation towards fintech infrastructures that foreground

multiplicities, aiming to show that values (and indeed risks) produced in the fintech space

are circulated, refracted, distributed, and contested (Cirolia et al., 2022). This engagement

with the multiplicities of value creation also mirrors our commitment to Southern urban

theory and the “placing” of concepts and vocabularies (Bhan, 2019).

Following these insights, we ground our work in a unique (and arguably Southern) urban

economy that has been transformed by fintech and digital platforms: that of motorcycle

taxis. Common in cities across Africa (Kumar, 2011), motorcycles are a lifeline for the

movement of people, goods, and even animals. Like other informal infrastructures of trans-

portation, as Mutongi (2017) has shown in her work on minibus networks in Kenya, motor-

cycle taxis can themselves be read both as a result of colonial planning, and as an inventive

refusal to accept the structural conditions and endurance of coloniality. Today, with the rise

of information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure, motorcycle taxis are

increasingly being integrated into digital platforms (Cirolia et al., 2023; Nowak, 2023). In

this article, specifically, we focus on the fintech innovations that have facilitated and been

enabled by the “platformization” (Poell et al., 2019; Steinberg, 2020; Zhang, 2020) of riders

in Nairobi (Kenya), Kigali (Rwanda), and Cape Town (South Africa), where an ongoing

burst of digital services targets largely last-mile logistics and, to a lesser extent, e-hailing.

a study conducted in 2021 in Kigali and Nairobi—and extended in 2022 to include Cape

Town, the authors found that each city had between 20 and 25 platforms that specifically

make use of motorcycle taxis for all manner of on-demand activities, from passenger service

(e.g., UberBoda or YegoMoto) to specialized e-commerce platforms (e.g., those used for

medicine, building materials, or food delivery) (Cirolia et al., 2023).

The article’s sections are structured as follows: first, we outline our methodological

approach, foregrounding our orientation to the study of fintech and infrastructure in

African cities. We then turn to the conceptual framework for this piece, exploring the key

ideas which have shaped our thinking and analytical lens. We reflect on the structural

“duress” (Stoler, 2016) of colonial fragmentations (e.g., how value is ascribed along

expected historical lines), while considering the different rationalities and ingenuities that

shape “Africa’s fintech moment”. After providing this scaffold, we offer a description of

three empirical processes of fintech innovations in African cities: “assetization” (in Nairobi),

“standardization” (in Kigali), and “reintegration” (in Cape Town). These innovations map

onto the impulses and desires of the private sector and the state alike to use fintech to enact

various forms of value. As we discuss in the closing section, these dynamic, technological

moments are also framed as—and indeed might contribute to—overcoming structural leg-

acies and dependencies, from subordination in favor of foreign currencies, to the spatial

inequalities inherited from colonial planning. In doing so, we avoid pitting analyses of the

present against those which attend to the past—instead considering the multiple and non-

linear constructions and experiences which come to shape fintech in African cities today.

On methods: A Southern orientation to fintech

There are many ways to chart stories that, while acknowledging the coloniality of fintech,

also foreground the forms of inventive “value creation” (Roitman, 2023) that complicate

linear readings of finance and technology. In our case, as urban scholars, our

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methodological approach builds on the scholarly project of Southern Urbanism and the

concomitant need for new vocabularies (Bhan, 2019). As method, we are specifically

inspired by the possibility of “re-describing” (Simone and Pieterse, 2017) urban life, not

as an endless rediscovering of the differentiated processes of neoliberal capitalism (as work

on fintech in Africa often does), but through “speculative alternatives that can animate and

stitch together a plethora of diverse and divergent molecular experiments” (Simone and

Pieterse, 2017: 56).

Southern Urbanism, as an orientation and method, begins with the assertion that, if place

matters, processes are concurrent and messy, and experiences are connected, then different

geographies offer us diverse ways of theorizing urban life and economies. Such orientation

does not intend to ignore structural logics or generalizable insights, but diverts attention

toward mid-range, place-based theorization, avoiding both infinite particularism and crude

universalization. In doing so, it foregrounds relationships and avoids binaries (e.g., between

the local and the global), attending to world-making processes that originate in unexpected

quarters. Borrowing from cultural critic Larry Grossberg (2010: 101), “better conjunctural

stories”, in our case of seemingly predetermined processes of fintech platformization, allow

us to reveal complex relationships between technologies and systems in context and across

diverse, yet connected, places. While it could be said that much of relational scholarship

would align with these claims and the concomitant methodological implications, these

propositions have particular epistemological implications for our project, and therefore

directly shaped our research practice—including how we selected our cases, structured

data collection, engaged with emerging insights, and undertook the exercise of writing.

At the core, our three examples reflect a multi-case study of three cities in Africa; each

case is read both on its own terms and in relation to the others. The selected cases shared a

policy commitment to “become”, or a reputation as, a “Silicon Valley elsewhere”—whether

they are Capes or Savannahs (Cirolia et al., 2023; Pollio, 2020)—with significant investment

in infrastructure to support “smartness” and ICT development. Building on existing

research collaborations and networks, the three cities are, of course, quite unique. Cape

Town and Nairobi have established themselves as “fintech capitals”—with Cape Town

leading on high-value fintech services and Nairobi on the mobile money revolution.

Nairobi and Kigali, both located in East Africa, are known for their smart city commit-

ments (Cirolia et al., 2023; Guma and Monstadt, 2021), but they shore up very different

arrangements, with Nairobi well-connected to the global Internet and Kigali landlocked.

However, they have both made national commitments to invest in ICT development, across

scale (Cirolia et al., 2023). Both Kigali and Cape Town are often presented as “outliers” on

the African continent; Cape Town for its level of wealth and infrastructure, and Kigali for

its levels of state control. Overall, each city provides us a unique perspective on the “fintech

moment”, and through collective lines of questioning around motorcycle paratransit, allow

us to see different dimensions of how fintech has developed.

Our Southern orientation was articulated through some more, and some less, conven-

tional methods for data collection and sense-making. In each city we developed a long list of

platforms which deploy motorcycles for last-mile delivery, B2B services, and ride-hailing.

Using this list, we built a taxonomy of ways that fintech was featuring in each of the

ecosystems. We outlined how value creation was understood by the actors involved in the

fintech offerings within the platform motorcycle economy, using this framework to develop

a shared protocol for interviews. Working in teams of two people per city, we conducted

interviews with actors involved in developing, financing, testing, and expanding various

fintech-motorcycle taxi innovations. In addition to these interviews, we “scavenged”

(Seaver, 2017) online, looking at startup promises and promotional materials; news items

Cirolia et al. 5

in business and politics; reports on venture-capitalist investments; and policy documents.

We downloaded the web-based applications that are being used to facilitate these networks

and systems, playing with them, paying for things, calling customer support, and exploring

their interfaces. We took public transport, observed at street corners, went on collective field

trips, and had many informal conversations with motorcycle riders as we moved ourselves,

and things we bought, around the cities. Alongside this, over the two-year period, we shared

insights with one another—from news articles about regulatory changes in the fintech land-

scape to voice notes about motorcycle taxi rides—via our WhatsApp group. In doing so, we

created our own archive of the ongoing dynamics of each city, and the relationships between

them. To nurture spaces for collaborative analysis and conceptual rigor, in 2022 we came

together for a virtual reading group, a research workshop, and a writing workshop. The

writing workshop solidified the narrative of each of the cases, deploying “value creation” as

a methodological and conceptual entry point. We believe that the insights in this piece

would have been impossible without the breadth and situated insights garnered from our

methodological approach.

In undertaking these case studies, our method was also infused by the research ethics and

politics of our Southern orientation. Despite the importance of understanding the lived

experience of financial technologies, we did not want to depend solely on the work (includ-

ing emotional) of vulnerable people (such as riders or borrowers), who are often fatigued by

endless academic inquiry with little evidence of material shifts in everyday experience. We

found, instead, other ways to understand and make sense of value creation through the

tracing and placing of technological arrangements which are “peopled” in all manner, and in

multi-scalar ways. This approach should be read together with a growing scholarship on

African platform labor (Anwar and Graham, 2020), even though the focus is different.

Further on the front of ethical knowledge production, we were adamant about avoiding

problematic divisions of global research labor, whereby data is mined in Africa and proc-

essed elsewhere (Mama, 2007); as such we focused on empirical and conceptual collabora-

tions across sites, whereby research teams were based in each of the cities we focused on.

Our methods included a strong politics of knowledge production which dislocated “field

work” from a particular temporal moment. As the researchers leading the studies of each

city were in fact living, working, and “from” the fields we explore, this allowed for a unique

orientation and embeddedness, drawing on personal experiences and networks.

Beyond the coloniality of fintech in Africa

An expansive view of both finance and technology would suggest a long history of co-

constitution; after all, double entry accounting would have been a challenge without the

ledger itself. However, fintech, as it is used within the debates in question, is more specif-

ically about digitally enabled logics of change and disruption. This innovation-speak is

evident in the glossy reports and public accolades through which the development sector

in Africa has for some time celebrated the ways in which digital innovation in finance has

expanded the frontier of bankability, disrupted dated legacy systems, enabled data-driven

decision-making, and used cities as “testbeds” of innovation. The critical corollary of this

optimism, reflected in scholarship and activism, bemoans fintech’s active production of

financialized subjects and subjectivities (Gabor and Brooks, 2017). Critics argue that the

rapid expansion of fintech has increased the scope and depth of extraction and inequality,

expanded surveillance and behavior manipulation, and extended historical patterns of neo-

liberal capitalism. As Bateman et al. (2019: 480) point out, the “pillars of the global

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development establishment and global financial industry have wholeheartedly embraced the

new fintech narrative”.

Critiques of fintech projects and programs have taken issue with both their ideological

bases and their practical results. Scholars have reviewed the outcomes of financial inclusion

initiatives, pointing to the delivery failures of their promises (Bernards, 2019; Bernards,

2022a). At the most basic level, such programs have tended to target people already included

in financial systems. Where frontiers were in fact pushed and inclusion achieved, the pledged

benefits often never materialized (e.g., in the DeSoto-inspired site and service schemes, few

were able to capitalize on these assets). More importantly, these scholars attest, such pro-

grams—where they work at all—produce financialized subjects, families and communities

stuck in steep debt traps, constantly disciplined by technologies that they have no control

over (Aitken, 2017; Guermond, 2022; Torkelson, 2021). These financialized subjects operate

not with the agency imagined by the development project, but rather for the benefit of

global capital accumulation. Financial inclusion, and the associated fintech projects, form

the “frontiers of neoliberal financialized capitalism in the global South” (Langley and

Leyshon, 2021: 377). Africa’s “fintech moment” should thus be read within a longer gene-

alogy of attempts at turning poverty into profitable markets (Roy, 2010).

Within this broader critique of fintech in Africa as an infrastructural offshoot of global

capitalism, a productive line of scholarship has challenged dehistoricized readings of finan-

cial technologies as “disruptive innovation”, and charted the various colonial legacies that

are embroiled in these projects (see Langley and Rodima-Taylor, 2022). For example,

Langley and Leyshon (2022) focus on data-driven credit scoring, one of the key technolog-

ical configurations through which financial inclusion becomes platformized in the African

context, to argue that these sorting mechanisms at once enroll racially excluded populations

and replicate the same colonial logics that previously marked their exclusion. Fintech, they

argue, generates credit relations that are neocolonial in nature, as they extract rent not

through empowerment but through racialized debt subjugation. In a similar vein,

Campbell-Verduyn and Giumelli (2022) reflect on the “hype” around the blockchain cryp-

tocurrency and challenge the argument that cryptocurrencies contribute to a decolonial

financial agenda. Reflecting predominantly on sanctioned countries outside of Africa

(China, Russia, etc.), they argue that efforts to advance cryptocurrency are re-wiring exclu-

sionary relations in ways that extend rather than overcome colonial legacies (Campbell-

Verduyn and Giumelli, 2022).

They hold out this critical caution to Africa, contending that

there may be “decolonial possibilities offered by blockchain” (p.535), but ultimately arguing

that “[e]xperimentation with blockchain technologies across the African continent risks

being enrolled [in] socio-technical relations that [...] are persistently exclusionary” (p.536).

In more fine-grained analyses of the coloniality of fintech, other scholars have focused

instead on the historical financial infrastructures that emerged out of colonialism and are

now reinscribed into practices of financial innovation. Under the rubric of racial capitalism,

for example, South African experiments with digitally enabled cash transfers (Torkelson,

2020), datafied credit-scoring for house seekers (Migozzi, 2023) have been shown to latch

onto the colonial technologies of the apartheid state, while replicating the relationship of

indebtedness that benefited its racial economies. Bernards (2022b), on the other hand, maps

the uneven distribution of mobile money transactions in Kenya onto the uneven develop-

ment of banking infrastructure that was germane to the financial geographies of British

colonialism. Despite predictions of “leapfrogging” the country to a new era of equal access

to financial services, he writes, “fintech has largely worked through pre-existing patterns of

uneven development” (p.709) along the traces of imperial topologies. Similarly, Perticone

et al. (2022) remark on the coloniality of inclusive insurance platforms—another fintech

Cirolia et al. 7

product that has generated great hype in the African context—and note that data standards,

collection, and appropriation rehash and entrench historical racial hierarchies between

states and between peoples.

Even the fintech enrollment of informal financial infrastruc-

tures such as mutual savings groups, Rodima-Taylor (2022) argues, is shaped by colonial

remains that, through digital platforms, carry forward inequalities that were scripted into

the extractive logics of settler capitalism. The fintech-driven assetization of mutual net-

works, she notes, is a form of dispossession through which marginal economic lives are

kept at the margins of financialized capitalism. Despite this bleak assay of African platform

economies, Rodima-Taylor draws on Achille Mbembe to remind us that there is much to

miss in analyses that perpetuate the same colonial tropes that they are meant to critique: in

narratives defined by the past, where “the future horizon is apparently closed” (Mbembe

2001: 16, cited in Rodima-Taylor, 2022). African economies appear confined to a recursive

set of critiques “that continue to deny postcolonial Africa its multiplicity and dynamism” (p.

431).

In many ways, this cautionary suggestion points to the work of scholars who have long

challenged “frontierist” readings of science, technology, and (more recently) finance in the

African continent. Historian Clapperton Mavhunga (2017), for example, makes the crucial

point that a diffusionist model of technological transfer primes much critical scholarship on

African technological configurations. Like coloniality, he explains, innovation is assumed to

come from elsewhere—an imposition of sorts. When scholars write about the makings of

platforms in Africa, they often focus on practices of tinkering, copycatting, resistance, and

adaptation. Accordingly, this innovation-as-imposition perspective empirically neglects the

many mathematics of value and modes of technicity (Simone, 2021) through which individ-

uals and collectives define their access to and use of the economies of technology (Nowak,

2023) and, in our case specifically, to digital platforms in Africa. Underpinning this argu-

ment is a challenge to what constitutes technology itself, beyond the universalizing catego-

ries of western thinking (Hui, 2017). While we do not have space to address this broader

philosophical question here, in our reading this is also an invitation to avoid technodeter-

minist claims about what fintech is said to be doing—claims that are more likely to fall into

the trap of one-way-vector thinking about technology—and foreground instead the con-

junctural ambivalence of these new financial configurations and devices. Ambivalence, as we

deploy the term, engages the uncertain, unstable, and indeed multiple realities and futures

that live within technologies. This ambivalence animates various aspects of fintech, from

modes of datafication to the regulation of new platforms and systems, and, this article

argues, its different horizons of value creation.

A techno-ambivalent perspective on fintech also resonates with STS-inspired analyses of

financialization in Africa. In this sense, as Roitman (2023) writes, we are wary of setting up

a sort of common binary between big tech/big finance (structural and bad) and African

everyday life (which resists and tinkers with these systems). This binary does not only

reproduce the frontier thinking that Mavhunga (2017) laments, it also overlooks the various

forms of value creation, rather than extraction, that are beholden to platform economies

(Goodfellow, 2020; Nowak, 2023; Roitman, 2023). Reflecting on the question of financial

technologies, for example, Mizes (2023) argues that efforts to advance African capital

markets hold within them the potential for new “financial publics”; such a reading chal-

lenges the idea that both the desire and instruments which animate these processes can be

reduced to neocolonial financialization. Further, confining fintech to historical logics of

Africa’s subjugation and dependence is at odds with the ways in which fintech is seen,

imagined, and experienced in context. We begin with the belief that unpacking the

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perspectives of those involved with making and using technology in particular places and

scenarios is important for retheorizing finance (Mizes, 2023). Like for other financial instru-

ments more broadly (Mizes and Donovan, 2022), fintech entrepreneurs, proponents, regu-

lators, and investors, as we will see, view fintech within bigger projects of value creation

linked to economic independence and technological statecraft. We do not need to take these

perspectives at face value to recognize that, alongside historical continuities of coloniality,

fintech is enrolled into projects of transformation and sovereignty that produce messy

interfaces with existing African urban economies—as with the example of the platformiza-

tion of motorcycle taxis that we will explore in the following pages.

Platformed motorcycles and fintech: Nairobi, Kigali, and Cape Town

In general terms, “platformization” refers to the process of incorporating existing econo-

mies, or creating entirely new ones, through digital infrastructures that enable multi-sided

markets and produce value through data-driven intermediation between different actors in

these markets (Poell et al., 2019). In the African context, this process is increasingly pred-

icated on the possibility of enrolling and making legible informal economies.

Activities that

have thus far seemed to escape both the control of the state and the circuits of global capital

are now imagined as a frontier for the expansion of digital platforms, whose capacity to

garner and analyze data offer a response to the quandaries of unknowability and riskiness

often associated with these economies.

Among the many informal systems with which platform companies and startups are

experimenting, our focus is on motorcycle taxis. In urban Africa, riders “fill the gaps”

(Goodfellow, 2020) of both commuting and last-mile logistics, in the absence of extensive

public transport networks, and in the context of urban fabrics that require agile, cheap

vehicles. Through the digitization of motorcycle taxis, a diverse variety of platforms are thus

producing “algorithmic sutures” (Pollio et al., 2023) to splintered urban infrastructures and

economies. It is in this context that a swelling number of experiments with fintech are

targeting precisely the platformed motorcycle, mainly through four different yet often over-

lapping financial configurations: payment platforms which link riders to e-commerce (and

thus to suppliers and buyers of goods and services); platforms that link riders to state-

monitoring systems for tax collection; insurance products specifically designed for motor-

cycles and riders; and asset financing products that enable the purchase of motorcycles and

other riding equipment.

Yet, even if there are commonalities across cities, the value-creation rationalities and the

outcomes of these fintech experiments are often different, and follow divergent vectors. We

will see how Nairobi has become a testbed for the development of the interface between

material value (in the form of assets) and datafied speculation. We will explore how fintech

in Kigali is a practice of state-led regulatory standardization. And finally, in Cape Town, we

will observe how fintech preceded and indeed boosted the uptake of motorcycles, which in

turn helps legacy supermarket chains that, through last-mile digital platforms, are seeking to

create new markets beyond the historical edges of a racially segregated city. To be clear, the

aim of this section is not to disavow the importance of colonial histories or the violence and

extraction evident in African cities today. Rather, it is to consider how technologies, when

enrolled in different African contexts, present different and diverse rationalities of value

creation, within which there may exist alternative possibilities.

Cirolia et al. 9

Datafied assetization: Nairobi

“Nairobi is a technological melting pot”, observed a program manager at one of Nairobi’s

most popular startup incubators, while sipping coffee on the rooftop of the building. As she

further explained, in places like that rooftop, Kenyan startuppers rub shoulders with their

European and American counterparts, but also with increasing numbers of Asian investors

and African venture capitalists. The incubator itself had recently been taken over by a

Nigerian company with pan-African ambitions, something that, in her view, signaled

Nairobi’s capacity to attract people and capital to its “Silicon Savannah”, a growing eco-

system of tech companies, fledgling startups, incubators, co-working spaces, government

programs, and fast-paced investment cycles (Rosenberg and Brent, 2020).

A city often presented as ungovernable and in constant flux, Nairobi had indeed built a

reputation as one of Africa’s leading startup hubs, with fintech as one of its core areas. To

explain this primacy in Africa’s tech economy, our informants pointed to many different

factors: from the Kenyan state’s investment in ICT infrastructure and uptake of digital

technologies, which had begun in the late 2000s with nation-wide developmental programs

(Ndemo and Weiss, 2017); to the diffusion of mobile money (M-Pesa) and its early adoption

as an alternative to both cash payments and bank saving accounts (Ngugi et al., 2010); to

the availability of affordable phones that had begun in earnest after the government

removed import duties on foreign technology; to the city’s fame as a seat of multilateral

organizations, such as UN agencies. Overall, these favorable conditions have generated a

growing number of experiments with fintech platforms: experiments large and small, boot-

strapped and highly choreographed, internationally and locally funded.

Over time, some of these experiments began to target motorcycle taxis, a ubiquitous

urban fixture across Kenya (Pollio et al., 2023). In recalling the COVID-19 explosion of

homegrown digital platforms in Kenya, a Singaporean fintech entrepreneur explained that

the first fintech operators entering the market were providing asset financing options to

riders for the purchase of their motorbikes. Using the existing mobile money infrastructure

to enforce repayments, and the motorcycle as collateral, these companies offered credit to

riders that would otherwise not be able to access bank loans and would normally resort to

informal loan makers. The model, however, was flawed, our informant concluded. These

credit offerings drowned, and continue to drown young drivers in expensive debts.

Repossessions are common, and many companies have resorted to unsavory practices

such as debt shaming. In 2022, even the Central Bank of Kenya, usually permissive with

platform operators, forced the shutdown of many lending wallets.

Why is the asset-based financing business model flawed? Our informants would often

explain that riders’ income fluctuates wildly and is unpredictable. So too are their incidental

costs. And data is hard to compile, as riders work across multiple apps, and often offline. As

a response, delivery companies had started hiring boda boda (the Kenyan term for a motor-

cycle taxi) riders, rather than relying on their inconsistent gig work. The growth of e-com-

merce platforms in the years of the pandemic had allowed last-mile companies to become

specialized business-to-business operations, offering plug-and-play services to any kind of

online marketplace—from the delivery of groceries and consumer goods, to the distribution

of drinking water and cooking fuel. But the issue of asset financing remains a challenge and,

therefore, a potential opportunity for business models.

In May 2022, we sat down for an interview on this topic with a bank consultant who had

become an expert in financing models for informal businesses. He admitted that until then it

had been hard to convince credit institutions to finance boda boda riders, even for small

loans. For that reason, many riders resorted to predatory lending wallets, which use mobile

10 EPD: Society and Space 0(0)

money data to develop credit scores (and often also personal data to ensnare debtors).

Donovan and Park (2022) have carefully termed this regime as a “zero-balance” economy,

one in which credit serves to “buy time” in a context of volatility and lack of liquidity. But

our financial expert believed that a new generation of business models was about to take off.

These business models, borrowed from startups that were innovating warehouse restocking,

offered a new mode of experimenting with data-rich credit profiles for riders.

In fact, many trials were already under way. Several startups had been conducting

lengthy testbed experiments alongside the electrification of motorcycle fleets. The electric

bike, whether an entirely new vehicle or an older scrambler retrofitted with a battery, played

into the green transition rhetoric on the one hand, but also offered entirely new possibilities

for capturing better data about its rider. Better data, in turn, would allow these e-mobility

operators to better craft their asset-based financing schemes, particularly given the higher

capital expenditure necessary to purchase an electric vehicle—or to electrify a legacy bike,

for that matter. Some companies, therefore, were planning to retain ownership of the bat-

tery and use the bike as collateral. Others would incorporate pay-as-you-go mechanisms,

already tested for solar kits, into the bike itself. Some planned to use the charging stations,

too, as both data-capturing devices and real-life interfaces with the riders. Overall, the

working hypothesis of these companies was that e-mobility financing would also generate

value for bike operators by reducing their running costs, both for repair and for recharging.

And to test this hypothesis, trials were proliferating.

These experiments were diverse in nature, reflecting different possible business models of

asset financing and entry points. They were also run and funded by different entrepreneurs:

from small European startups with access to development money to local teams supported

by domestic or regional venture capital. Overall, one of our informants had counted more

than 20 different pilot projects in Nairobi alone. He knew about all of them because, he

explained, they had formed an informal group. Another interviewee, the program manager

of a solar kit company venturing into the motorcycle industry, explained that although they

were competitors and often secretive about their intellectual property, working together was

necessary because they had to interface with state regulators to ensure compliance with

future standardization policies that they all saw coming. Collectively, these fintech/e-

mobility startups were also pledging to create value for the Kenyan state itself, and not

just by gathering better data about mobility that could be used for better urban planning (a

wishful vow of value creation in itself). At the core of their promise was fiscal benefit to the

state coffers.

In the Kenyan context, utility companies currently oversupply (largely renewable) energy

and would benefit from a transition from fossil fuels to electricity uptake. Meanwhile, the

Kenyan economy is negatively affected by increases in the price of oil, but also by the

volatility of the shilling against the dollar, which has been used to purchase oil on the

global market since 1974. Unsurprisingly, the government has often had to intervene with

fuel subsidies to cushion domestic markets from price spikes

—costs that are heavy for an

indebted and inflation-prone national economy. Therefore, by transitioning a large, vital

mobility system to electric power, fintech operators promise to enact value for the state,

making it less dependent on fuel imports and, as a consequence, on the US dollar. One of

our informants even boastfully suggested that the state should offer subsidized electricity to

e-mobility operators, given that they were absorbing surplus electricity and reducing

Kenya’s reliance on foreign imports (and, therefore, dollar-based payments). In fact, in

the latest tariff review, the country’s Energy and Petroleum Regulatory Authority provided

a special e-mobility tariff to incentivize the e-mobility sector. This aligns with larger matters

of statecraft and monetary independence that Mizes and Donovan (2022) highlight

Cirolia et al. 11

elsewhere, suggesting that financial experiments in Africa are often framed as critiques

against the inequalities of global capital markets.

Whether or not these manifold promises will materialize in practice is beyond our pur-

view, or the scope of this article. It also remains to be seen if, among these many choke

points of value creation, the riders too will benefit from these processes of datafied asseti-

zation. So far, it may seem that such data practices are simply increasing the capacity of

digital platforms to algorithmically manage an unwieldy urban system. But perhaps this too

is an oversimplification of the new rationalities of knowledge, risk, and financial sovereignty

that are injected and reconfigured through fintech. What the Kenyan case shows, in our

reading, is a broad range of scripts through which values are imagined and potentially

enacted—not just extracted. These form along vectors that diverge from the seemingly

predetermined one-way legacies of coloniality. For instance, the transition to electric

vehicles through fintech-based asset programs articulated value-creation promises of

energy and monetary sovereignty, as well as optimized lending protocols. A confirmation

of these statecraft rationalities came as we were writing the article, when the Kenyan gov-

ernment announced a dedicated program for accelerating the shift to electric boda bodas.

Interestingly, as we have shown, these large-scale policies follow in the footsteps of tentative,

experimental fintech devices, which operationalize informal economies as real-life, data-rich,

platform-enabled testbeds of new modes of value creation.

Regulatory standardization: Kigali

In the streets of Kigali, Rwanda’s capital and most populated city, two things seem ubiq-

uitous: motorcycle taxis, with their red-vested motaris (riders), and mobile money outlets,

with their bright yellow advertisements emblazoned on buildings, street poles, and kiosks.

Just like Kenya’s mobile money market is (almost) the monopoly of telecom operator

Safaricom, in Rwanda the yellow signs symbolize the dominance of another provider,

MTN, whose mobile money (MoMo) has become the backbone of financial transactions

across the country. But while MTN’s legacy in Rwanda since the late 1990s has laid the

foundation for MoMo’s dominance in the sector, behind the scenes there are increasing

numbers of competitors in the fintech space.

A visit to Norrsken, a renowned startup hub in Kigali, offers a glimpse into the enthu-

siasm driving the expansion of this sector, which leverages Rwanda’s Regulatory Sandbox, a

regulatory platform facilitating digital innovation. Here, startups such as SPENN and

Payingtone are experimenting with the expansion of fintech products, from retail to asset

financing. The acceleration of digital offerings has a lot to do with Rwanda’s commitment

to ICT-led development since its Vision 2020

(published in 2000), which included the goal

of “transforming the country from an agrarian economy into a knowledge-based economy”.

Through the state’s investment in infrastructure and innovation over the past 20 years,

Kigali has captured imaginations as a leading smart city in Africa and, although very dif-

ferent to Nairobi, has also been framed as a Silicon Savannah. In Rwanda, the national

commitment to the development of ICT infrastructure and digital connectivity has been

particularly public and, as some interviewees noted, arguably sensationalized.

Unlike in Kenya, where innovation is distributed among a number of actors, in Rwanda

the national and highly centralized state plays a significant role in the way in which fintech

has both evolved and interacts with everyday life. This is not always about financial value

capture, but also has a lot to do with making informality manageable and governable

through standardization. This uniformity is an everyday reality and striking feature of

Kigali’s public transport sector—a sector that is infamous for the use of motorcycle taxis

12 EPD: Society and Space 0(0)

for all manner of mobility (Goodfellow, 2015). Everywhere, and at all times of day, a sea of

red helmets and vests darts in and around the city streets.

Whereas other cities, like Nairobi and Cape Town, have a wide range of motorcycle

mobility service providers, YegoMoto is the dominant player in Kigali (Martin et al., 2023).

This dominance is largely due to YegoMoto’s Intelligent Connected Fare Meter (ICFM).

Within 10 years from conception, YegoMoto fitting centers are packed with motaris updat-

ing hardware and software, installing or repairing devices on their bikes, and ensuring their

bikes are fit for the road. The ICFM’s history began in 2015, during the Transform Africa

Summit, when the government expressed a need to develop a granular, individualized, dig-

ital monitoring tool. The proliferation of motorcycle taxis across the city was recognized by

the Rwandan Utilities Regulatory Authority (RURA) as an opportunity to capture more

than monetary value, by bringing motaris into a formalized system. In response to such a

need, the initiators of YegoMoto, a Rwandan registered smart mobility company with

Singaporean origins, conceptualized a digital fare metering and monitoring platform that

later became the ICFM.

While the ICFM was initiated by a private company, it is the government that took a

central and active role in ensuring its full operationalization and that worked to formalize

and standardize what was initially an experimental digital gadget into an inescapable reg-

ulatory instrument. The government also issued successive regulations fixing the ICFM’s

technical specifications and fare rates, and even devised a mechanism to easily provide

ICFM devices to motari (given freely on a two-year loan basis), in addition to import-tax

exemptions for the devices. These interventions focused on the supply side of the ICFM.

Another set of government interventions aimed to tackle the demand side of the ICFM.

These consisted essentially of legally binding regulations making the ICFM obligatory to all

motaris, who must prove they either have or are waiting for the ICFM when stopped by the

traffic police. For RURA, standardization is seen as having a number of different value

offerings. In essence, the state has signaled a move away from taking a punitive stance on

informal economies, choosing rather to include them more systematically within formal

systems.

According to state officials involved in the program, bringing both the riders, users, and

authorities into a single system makes the motari “manageable”. The red vests are both a

striking branding exercise and serve to differentiate between the “professional” (legal and

ICFM-connected) motaris and the “non-professional” (illegal) ones. They also signal the

state-mandated organization of motaris into cooperatives, district unions, and a national

federation through the motari number emblazoned on vests and number plates. Motorcycles

can be dangerous modes of transport. Regulating the asset, movements, and motari,itis

argued, allows for greater safety and accountability for riders and passengers. This legibility

goes beyond the red-vested motaris themselves, and renders an historically invisible econo-

my legible to the state. Rendering the moto economy visible also makes it taxable. This type

of public financing, much like financing within the real estate sector, enhances value through

infrastructural investment or regulatory changes in a bid to eventually recuperate the sur-

plus value in part or in whole. While it is difficult to measure income accurately, the gov-

ernment has resorted to a monthly tax of around 5 000 Rwandan Francs ($4) (Frw).

Digitization through the ICFM standard, it is believed, will ultimately provide more precise

data about taxable incomes. In addition to taxation of this sector, platformization through

the ICFM is touted as being valuable for data-led decision-making around economic and

urban planning. Furthermore, state officials argue that the ICFM helps expand government

services to motaris. An example of these services includes the enrollment of ICFM-registered

motaris in the “Ejo Heza” life insurance and pension scheme, in which motaris contribute at

Cirolia et al. 13

least 2000 Rwandan Francs ($2) per month and can in turn gain not only pension savings

but also indemnity in case of terminal illness or death. Such efforts, from taxation to

improved planning to the expansion of insurance, do not negate the potentially controlling

or extractive role of the state, but they do suggest that value creation is taking place.

Despite these promises, there is resistance to joining the platform by both motaris and

passengers. Passengers are skeptical about the increased cost of travel. Motaris are reluctant,

citing fears of income loss associated both with fare capping and taxation. Due to these

tensions, as of 2023, the ICFM is still being contested—with the local media weighing in

regularly. This context leaves many uncertainties. However, it equally offers insights into

platformization processes led by states (see Steinberg et al., 2024) wielding more or less

capacity to compel enrollment. While Kigali may be an extreme case, it shows the active role

of state rationalities (also evident in both the Cape Town and Nairobi cases) in the in the

fintech-value creation nexus. In contrast to much of the fintech imagination, Kigali is not

the Wild West or an unwieldy frontier—it is actually a site of careful statecraft in which

technology plays a complex role beyond extraction and involves the deployment of supply-

side measures through nomenclature and provision, and demand-side measures through

regulation and policing by the government.

Algorithmic integration: Cape Town

Following decades of state investment in ICT and technological infrastructure (Boyle et al.,

2023; Odendaal, 2016), Cape Town has positioned itself as one of the leading “fintech

capitals” of Africa. Testament to these focused efforts (see, for example, the “Silicon

Cape” partnership), the city has birthed (and incubated) all manner of startups that aim

to address challenges unique to African urban contexts—from overcoming the absurdly

high fees for pan-African remittances, to integration of informal businesses into logistical

value chains (Pollio and Cirolia, 2022). In the face of considerable contestation and anger,

Cape Town has also attracted global tech giants; as a panelist at a local networking event

remarked:

It is a common myth that Africa does not have the talent to service this astronomical growth in

demand for fintech skills, specifically software engineering skills. South Africa, specifically, has

some of the most skilled engineers in the world. Just ask Amazon, [which is] setting up [its]

global tech hub here.

In contrast to many African countries, South Africa—Cape Town included—has a small

motorcycle taxi sector (see, for example, the Bishop and Courtright 2022 report, which

estimated only six hundred thousand motorcycle vehicles across the country as of 2020).

Having never been widely used for passenger services, the rise of the two-wheeler has gone

hand-in-hand with the rise of platformed and on-demand services, particularly related to

food value chains. Today, it is rare to find a shopping center or popular restaurant in Cape

Town that does not have a group of riders, with branded vests and vehicles, waiting for

orders to come through on their phones.

In the early stages of this research on African fintech and platformed motorcycles, Cape

Town felt like an outlier next to Kigali and Nairobi. While prepared-food delivery compa-

nies, such as UberEats and the locally developed Mr D, were busy “discovering” the value of

the two-wheeler for improved last-mile business processes, fintech companies were focused

on developing their own advanced and niche financial products, e.g., Luno’s cryptocurrency

wallet and Yoco’s payment systems for small businesses. Cape Town’s fintech boom was not

14 EPD: Society and Space 0(0)

only set against the afore-discussed investments in ICT infrastructure and the startup econ-

omy, but also against South Africa’s highly advanced banking sector. Notwithstanding (or

possibly because of) colonial and apartheid legacies, which have resulted in a handful of

major banks controlling much of the finance space, the sector has made considerable (albeit

insufficient) strides in terms of ensuring basic inclusion (in part driven by the need to dis-

burse various forms of social grants in the context of deep and racialized poverty)

(Torkelson, 2020). This has provided the foundation for the fintech platform boom we

see today in Cape Town.

In contrast to the Kigali and Nairobi cases, these platform innovations, in the context of

Cape Town, took place in technology itself—the software as a service (SaaS, sometimes

referred to as platform as a service, PaaS). SaaS refers to a cloud-based model where soft-

ware applications are provided over the Internet. Overall, the platformization of motor-

cycles required the integration of existing digital payment systems and a linking together of

the e-commerce and last-mile logistic platforms. Companies like Mr D and Picup do exactly

that by operating as a SaaS application in two particular ways: first, by providing an online

platform and mobile app to customers to order food and groceries from restaurants and

supermarkets; and second, by operating as business-to-business platforms that allow restau-

rants and supermarkets to make use of their rider network and other integral services such

as order management, real-time tracking and route optimization, data analytics, reporting

capabilities, and customer services. These platforms ultimately act as digital markets con-

necting restaurants, supermarkets, customers, and riders. This has allowed retailers and big

supermarkets to diversify their offerings to customers while also allowing new businesses to

emerge—such as the “dark kitchens” (virtual restaurants that operate via food delivery

apps) across the city—through optimized delivery services and operations. A slew of services

(and thus jobs) that were not available before has emerged. Moreover, the proliferation of

SaaS business models allows us to see Cape Town as a site of homegrown innovation and

not just as a receiver of innovation from elsewhere (Roitman, 2023).

Perhaps the most pronounced indicator of value creation has been the clear expansion of

supermarket chains, most of which have, over the past four years, created last-mile delivery

apps which include digital payment options of various sorts and rely on motorcycle riders to

deliver goods on demand. South African supermarkets have, for decades, been instrumental

in shaping urban economies (Battersby and Peyton, 2014). However, this platformization of

payments, logistics, and work reflects a new space of innovation (what might, to some, be

seen as a frontier). A good example of this is blue-chip retailer Shoprite Holdings Ltd,

Africa’s largest supermarket chain, headquartered in Brackenfell, Cape Town. Shoprite-

owned Checkers (a brand targeting middle-income customers) launched its own on-

demand grocery delivery app in 2019—Checkers Sixty60. This platform is a product of

Shoprite

, the Shoprite Group’s in-house innovation incubator business unit (Ndzendze,

2022). Shoprite further invested in a local technology startup company, Omnisient, a con-

sumer data platform. “We are excited by local startups that are creating value for our

customers and partner businesses, whilst having privacy at the core of their offering,”

noted the Chief of Strategy and Innovation at Shoprite

in an interview in 2022.

Shoprite/Checkers was also able to collect and track consumer data through its Checkers

Xtra Savings rewards card. In part owing to the careful deployment of data and software,

the success of Checkers Sixty60 exceeded expectations, resulting in the further rollout of

stores where on-demand services would become available, including previously overlooked

areas of the city, such as lower-middle-income areas. After Shoprite launched a Checkers

Sixty 60 app, there was a cascading effect which snowballed into other supermarket chains

expanding their offerings into last-mile delivery. All the major supermarkets now have

Cirolia et al. 15

platforms which use motorcycles for delivery. For example, in 2022 Spar launched

SPAR2U; in 2021 Pick ‘n Pay launched ASAP!, and in 2020 Woolworths launched Dash.

Turning attention to the rider, the Cape Town case is again unsettled and multiple.

Notably, and unlike the cases in Kigali and Nairobi, the riders themselves are not a key

target of fintech innovation. Despite the need for more affordable insurance and asset

financing options, interviewees argued that there is too much uncertainty and risk in financ-

ing riders or their vehicles. The fact that the sector’s labor is dominated by what is com-

monly referred to in South Africa as “foreign nationals” has added layers of perceived risk

to an industry already on the margins of profitability and legality, and has resulted in a

focus on other sites of fintech innovation. Without in any way aiming to minimize the

violent and extractive nature of digital platforms, the expansion of the fintech-

supermarket network through the use of platformed motorcycle taxis has, however, created

a whole new economy in Cape Town. For many foreign-national riders, who have limited

rights to work in South Africa, this is the only option for work, however precarious.

Overall, the use of fintech to enable on-demand food delivery—both for supermarkets

and for prepared foods—reformats the food landscape (e.g., including dark kitchens in new

logistical networks), changing how food providers “see” customers, and how people, in

return, engage with food economies. Coupled with the expansion of prepared-food delivery

through services like UberEats and Mr D (owned by e-commerce giant Takealot), these

platforms are using motorcycles to provide the missing link in the ecommerce/goods distri-

bution system—shifting the value configurations and optimizing various parts of the busi-

ness process. These services are not only used by South African elites, but also by the middle

and lower middle classes. For example, most of the major supermarkets have expanded their

delivery offering to lower-income areas of the city, including the Cape Flats (a large expanse

of the city where most Black, Indian and Coloured citizens were forcibly removed to under

apartheid, and which continues to be economically marginalized). In other words, a new

value economy of ease and convenience is emerging in parts of the city that, under the

infrastructural violence of segregated planning, were by design disconnected from basic

economic rights and possibilities. These are undeniably new frontiers of profit for super-

markets and their pick-up offerings, and other parts of the city continue to be excluded; yet

these platformed services are also the sites through which households that were previously

factored out because of their geography can now opt into very mundane services like receiv-

ing groceries at home. In the Cape Flats, besides supermarkets, other small businesses have

started to take advantage of the possibilities of diversifying their offerings through dark

kitchens, expanding their customer base through motorbike-enabled delivery services in

neighborhoods where this was previously not considered or even a possibility. At the

same time, the deployment of SaaS by supermarkets extends beyond the development of

payment platforms for e-commerce—supermarkets are now involved in all manner of fin-

tech innovation (e.g., remittances, lending, etc.) (Cirolia et al., 2022). Unusual contenders in

the data and tech game, supermarkets may play an even more central role in questions of

urban development in the future. Ultimately, with their SaaS infrastructure and their fleets

of motorcycle riders, they are already foreshadowing a horizon of value in the reintegration

of small and large businesses, workers, and consumers in a divided, sprawling, worlding city.

Beyond fintech as exploitation: towards an ambivalent reading of value creation

In African cities, the “recursivity of colonialism” (Parisi and Dixon-Roma

´n, 2020) continues

to animate debates about technological transitions. Undeniably, fintech infrastructures are

also shaped by durable legacies that have invariably disadvantaged people, firms,

16 EPD: Society and Space 0(0)

companies, and states in persistent (and, in fact, violent) ways. And, while not all these

processes center on the West (Campbell-Verduyn and Giumelli, 2022), it remains useful to

critique the ways—both new and emerging—whereby colonial extraction, control, and

exclusion remain central to technological configurations and their outcomes.

At the same time, as this special issue intends to do, the cases presented in this article

challenge us to consider how—beyond the lens of coloniality—these financial infrastructures

reconfigure economic processes with interesting socio-spatial effects. As the platformization

of motorcycle taxis has created new avenues for the expansion of financial technologies in

African cities, motorcycle economies (as well as the riders and users of these platforms) are

enrolled in both the imagined and actualized value registers that emerge from these plat-

forms. The choice to focus on value creation is as much a response to the empirical reality of

the cities in question, as it is a pragmatic (and possibly even political) impulse.

While we did not aim to define value itself, we have shown how “value creation”—as a

multiple horizon of action and speculation—is articulated. Namely, each of the three cases

provided us with a glimpse of the specific manners in which value (of various sorts) is

created and captured in ways both expected and surprising. In Nairobi we have seen how

fintech platforms imagine new data-rich environments for asset-based value creation that

would, in turn, foster the transition to less fuel- and US dollar-dependent mobility infra-

structures. In Kigali, we have observed the ways in which platforms aim to create value for

the state, through both the collection of taxes and data for planning. And in Cape Town we

described fintech platforms as driving new forms of convenience and work that reintegrate a

splintered city. While we have used each case to foreground a particular value creation

process, these processes are by no means exclusive to that case. The standardization push

that is emblematic in Kigali, for example, is also present in the context of Nairobi’s e-

mobility space, with the interoperability of batteries and charging stations a site for business

model development and state negotiations. In the case of Cape Town, where we see the

lower middle-income consumers being integrated into convenience economies, there are

parallels in Nairobi’s platform expansion. At the same time, the sites where value extraction

accrues in more exploitative and extractive ways can also be seen across the cases (e.g., the

ways in which data on riders is collected by companies), albeit, we argue, in variegated and

often quite different ways.

Beyond these multiple sites of value creation, our cases confirm that Africa is not simply

experiencing a moment in global fintech’s spread (as the McKinsey headline might suggest),

but is central to the making and remaking of these new techno-financial infrastructures.

Firms—many of which defy the local/global dichotomy (Cirolia et al., 2023)—are using

fintech for a wide array of reasons, enabling the everyday economies, social worlds, and

political arenas of cities to function and transform in a context of contestations and trade-

offs. Fintech platforms are being made from scratch, remade, circulated, adapted, glitched,

and appropriated—by people, firms, and even states—in ways that reflect their contested

nature and contingent futures. We argue that, as much as we need to be wary of the ways in

which such platforms risk consolidating power and subjugating fintech users to various

forms of extraction (we are not blind, for example, to the ways that the state in Kigali,

and the supermarkets in Cape Town, are benefiting from these processes), a wide range of

rationalities and explanatory logics coexist.

By centering African cities in these processes of fintech innovation, we challenge the

current critical scholarship on the coloniality of fintech, which actively reduces African

innovation, and those involved in these economies such as states and startups, to reactive

participants in a preordained script—resistance or adaptation. This commitment to recen-

tering African experiences is inspired by Mavhunga (2017), who questions the reduction of

Cirolia et al. 17

Africa’s relationship with technology to a discourse of global imposition and local tinkering,

reminding us that different sites and processes of value creation, in this sense, operate as

heuristics that overcome derivative and reactive readings of African technological experi-

ences. We believe such a perspective is as much empirical as it is political. Like scholars who

have sought to challenge simplistic readings of financialization and platform extraction (for

examples, see Elyachar, 2023; Mizes, 2023; Nowak, 2023), we seek to foreground multiple

sites of agency, imagination, and claim-making beholden to fintech infrastructure—espe-

cially as they relate to the question of value creation (Roitman, 2023).

We now turn to the political, and indeed propositional, impulse which this orientation

offers us. If, as many texts in fact do, we only see these processes as expansionary frontiers,

the possibility of what might be engaged productively and propositionally becomes void.

Such a mode of critique also fails to attend to ways that colonial constraints might also be

undone, or challenged, in this way. On a deeper level, this reflects a call for a conceptual

shift towards seeing fintech itself as an “ambivalent” infrastructure. Not to be confused with

neutrality, ambivalence decouples the material technology from the ways in which particular

aspirations, desires, and moralities might be embedded in such technicity (Cupers and

Meier, 2020; Simone, 2021). It presents technology generally, and fintech as an instance

of such, as suspected between possible futures in the making, and subject to a range of plural

rationalities and political projects (Pollio and Cirolia, 2022). The ambivalent infrastructural

nature of “fintech”—the sites of hard investment, softer calculations, discursive imaginaries,

and the like—provides a scaffold for us to ask an important question: if fintech infrastruc-

tures are not overdetermined by colonial processes of value extraction, can their potential

for value creation be harnessed otherwise?

This ambivalence is deepened through our Southern orientation and method; we as

researchers live and work alongside these technological innovations, and have ourselves

benefited in disparate ways from their development. As we have endeavored to show,

starting from African cities as sites of fintech innovation released our contribution from

the frontier discourse, allowing us to see more than as well as the contours of the realities of

coloniality and capitalism. In practice, Africa’s urban economies are increasingly plat-

formed, with all the ensuing contradictions. At the same time, people in Africa (like every-

where in the urban world) need functional financial products—formatted to the needs of

their lives, livelihoods, and aspirations. Conceptually, if we fail to engage productively with

these needs, we may conflate fintech with a modernizing project, and fail to “see” the

productive, emancipatory, or simply enjoyable aspects of technological deployment. In

doing so, we lose a valuable opportunity to actively consider (and even co-create) the

terms and conditions of just technological and financial futures in Africa.

Acknowledgements

The authors appreciate the support of the Volvo Education and Research Foundation (VREF) and

Mobility and Accessibility in African Cities program (MAC) for their funding and ongoing support.

Special thanks to Armin Beverungen, Marc Steinberg and Randi Heinrichs who provided useful

feedback. Additional thanks to the SI special issue editors, Kenny Cupers and Ernest Sewordor and

the three anonymous reviewers who offered exceptional and useful critiques, which improved the

article greatly.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/

or publication of this article.

18 EPD: Society and Space 0(0)

Funding

The authors received funding from the Volvo Education and Research Foundation (VREF) under the

Mobility and Accessibility in African Cities program (MAC). Andrea Pollio was supported by a

Horizon 2020 Marie Curie Fellowship grant no. 886772. Liza Cirolia and Andrea Pollio were partially

funded by the Volkswagen Foundation as part of the grant ’Smartness as Wealth’. Jack Odeo was

partially funded by the Carl Mannerfelt Fund.

ORCID iDs

Liza Cirolia https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5850-2327

Jack Ong’iro Odeo https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3214-5311

Notes

1. https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/sustainable-inclusive-growth/chart-of-the-day/fintech

s-moment-in-africa. It is important to acknowledge that finance and technology have always been

co-constitutive. However, the fintech described in this piece relates to a set of innovations and

disruptions at the interface between digital advancements and financial transformations.

2. For a similar argument drawing on Singapore’s fintech ecosystem, see Woods et al. (2023).

3. The past five years have seen a surge in offerings. In 2018, Uber launched its motorcycle offering,

Uber Boda, in several East African countries. This followed the introduction of ride-hailing

platforms in West Africa. See https://marketingedge.com.ng/the-battle-of-bike-ride-hailing-taxi-

in-lagos-market/

4. These arguments fall within a much broader scholarship that has denounced the algorithmic colo-

nialism of digital technology in general (Birhane, 2020; Couldry and Mejias, 2019; Gravett, 2020;

Mouton and Burns, 2021), and race scholars whose work has shown, against the purported neu-

trality of data-driven platforms, the permanence of racialization (Benjamin, 2020; Chun, 2021).

5. Note, however, that there exists a set of scholarship on biometric identification for fintech that has

been more attentive to its ambivalence (e.g., Breckenridge,2010; 2014).

6. Across the developing world, a major argument for fintech has been addressing informal and illicit

flows of money, for example, from the informal economy. For a broader perspective, see Surie and

Huws (2023). For reflections on cashless economies and tax enrollment in India, see the helpful

work of Athique (2019).

7. The 2023 and 2024 protests in the country exemplify and draw attention to this.

8. https://faolex.fao.org/docs/pdf/rwa149721.pdf

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Cirolia et al. 23

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