Remittances and Financial Inclusion

This book comprehensively explores the messy and contested relationship between everyday practices of remittance sending and receiving, processes of market making, and operations of micro- and global finance.

Remittances and Financial Inclusion critically investigates a global migration-development agenda that aims to harness remittances for development by incorporating remittance flows and households into global financial circuits. The book develops a multidisciplinary perspective and combines insights from economic, development, and financial geography as well as international political economy and economic anthropology. It sets out a geographies of remittance marketisation approach to investigate the intricate and grounded ways in which remittance markets are constructed, the extent to which remittance flows and households can be (re)configured and incorporated into global finance, and why such processes are always fragile, contested, and in need of constant renegotiation. Drawing on extensive fieldwork research, the book provides an in-depth critical interrogation of the policies and initiatives that underpin remittance marketisation in Senegal, Ghana, and beyond.

This volume will be especially useful to those researching and working in the areas of international development, contemporary geographies of finance and market making, and migration and remittances. It should also prove of interest to policymakers, practitioners, and activists concerned with the relation between migration, remittances, and finance in the Global South.

"Vincent Guermond provides the essential critical guide to the remittances-financial inclusion agenda with this definitive account of how migrant payments have become marketised. Built on rich empirical data, this book delivers a textured and intricate analysis both of the political and behavioural engineering involved in remittance market-building and of the ways ordinary people are contesting the burgeoning digital poverty finance agenda."

Dr Phil Mader, University of Sussex, UK

"This book investigates the complex relationships between migrant remittances, financial inclusion and economic development. It unearths a universe of rationalities, practices and social networks stretching from the local to the global made invisible by standard accounts of migrant experiences. An exquisite writing combining theoretical freshness, empirical wealth and policy-relevant perspectives."

Dr Ndongo Samba Sylla, Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, Senegal

"Remittances and Financial Inclusion offers a brilliant and timely investigation of the integration of remittances into global finance. Drawing on wonderfully rich ethnographic material, Vincent Guermond takes us on a fascinating journey to Ghana and Senegal, demystifying the making of remittance markets, and revealing the everyday experiences and repertoires of contestation of remittance receivers. A must-read if you care about the concrete workings of the global political economy."

Dr Rahel Kunz, Université de Lausanne, Switzerland

"For advocates and critics, remittances, mobile payments and FinTech either advance financial inclusion and improve global development prospects, or serve to newly incorporate populations in extractive circuits of financial capital. Vincent Guermond’s insightful geographical investigation of contingent and contested processes of remittance marketisation shows how neither position holds."

Professor Paul Langley, Durham University, UK

Vincent Guermond is a Lecturer in the Department of Business and Society at Queen Mary University of London. His research interests are in the areas of the geographies of debt, finance and market making, climate adaptation, migration and development, and social reproduction. Vincent has published in leading academic journals in geography, development studies, and international political economy, including Progress in Human Geography, Antipode, Geoforum, Environment and Planning A, Review in International Political Economy, World Development, and Development and Change.

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