Olga Morawczynski is a doctoral candidate at the University of Edinburgh and has spent more than a year investigating customer adoption and usage in both urban and rural Kenya. Today she begins a series of occasional blog posts based on that work.

During the coming weeks, I will post a series of blogs. These will describe observations made during my fourteen month ethnographic fieldwork. Such fieldwork focused on understanding the adoption, usage and impact of M-PESA in two low-income communities. It began in an informal settlement on the outskirts of Nairobi called Kibera. The money trail was thereafter followed to a small village in Western Kenya called Bukura.  This blog will reveal the first observation, which is on usage.

M-PESA flows reversed during Kenya’s political crisis, with rural users sending money to urban contacts.

As I noted in a previous post – “Why has M-PESA become so popular in Kenya?” M-PESA was used predominantly for the transfer of remittances in the two research sites. Usually these flowed from urban centres like Kibera to rural villages like Bukura. However, there was a reversal in such flows during the post-election crises in Kenya. Urban migrants were receiving money and airtime from their rural relatives.

During this period, money and airtime cards could not be physically transported across the country. Many of the roads were blocked by rioting youth, and the railway was dismantled. This was problematic for many of the urban migrants. They needed money to escape the threat of ethnic violence, and airtime to communicate about their situation.

Some of the migrants received such support from friends and relatives in the village, who transferred both money and airtime via M-PESA.  Others withdrew cash from M-PESA if they had a balance in their account.  Most banks remained closed during the violence, which further made it difficult to access money. Some agents located in urban areas, which were affected by the violence, confirmed this finding. They asserted that the demand for services was high during this period. They further explained that the nature of transaction had changed—urban customers were making withdrawals rather than deposits.

This example highlights one of the major benefits of M-PESA—it reduces spatial and temporal constraints for money flows. Through the temporary conversion of cash into digital form, money can travel almost instantaneously into many parts of the country. In Kenya such reduction is vitally important. Roads are often in poor condition outside of Nairobi, which makes it difficult to transfer money even during periods of stability. Money travelling physically is also at risk of being lost or stolen along the way, either by highway robbers or relatives transferring the cash. Many noted that this was a significant disadvantage of the other money transfer channels.

Next, I will discuss one observation on impact. In particular, I will note how M-PESA users changed their remittance patterns with increased usage.