Anke Schwittay | University of Sussex (original) (raw)
Books by Anke Schwittay
New Media and International Development is the first in-depth examination of microfinance's endur... more New Media and International Development is the first in-depth examination of microfinance's enduring popularity with Northern publics. Through a case study of Kiva.org, the world's first person-to-person microlending website, and other microfinance organizations, the book argues that international development efforts have an affective dimension. This is fostered through narrative and visual representations, through the performance of development rituals and through bonds of fellowship between Northern donors and Southern recipients. These practices constitute people in the Global North as everyday humanitarians and mobilize their affective investments, which are financial, social and emotional commitments to distant others to alleviate their poverty.
Papers by Anke Schwittay
Third World Quarterly, 2019
The proliferation of Web 2.0 platforms that aim to facilitate social action, often connected to i... more The proliferation of Web 2.0 platforms that aim to facilitate social action, often connected to international development or environmental sustainability, has contributed to the ongoing popularisation of development. In this article, I argue that it has resulted in the digitally-enabled constitution of everyday humanitarians, who are everyday people supportive of poverty alleviation. Kiva.org, a US-based online microlending platform that invites everyday humanitarians to make US$25 loans to Kiva entrepreneurs around the world, is a prime site to study these processes. I show how Kiva cultivates supporters through the mediated production of affective investments, which are financial, social and emotional commitments to distant others. This happens through the design of an affective architecture which in turn generates financial and spatial mediations. While these result in microloans and attendant sentiments of affinity, they also lead to financial clicktivism and connections that obscures the asymmetries and riskscapes resulting from Kiva’s microlending work.
Third World Quarterly, 2019
The introduction to this collection brings together, under the umbrella terms of citizen aid and ... more The introduction to this collection brings together, under the umbrella terms of citizen aid and grassroots humanitarianism, interdisciplinary research on small-scale, privately funded forms of aid and development. It notes the steady rise of these activities, including in the Global South as well as North, such as in the context of the recent European refugee crisis. It considers their position vis-à-vis more institutionalised forms of aid; methodological approaches and their challenges; and asks what political dimensions these initiatives may have. It outlines key themes arising from the contributions to the collection, including historical perspectives on ‘demotic humanitarianism’, questions of legitimacy and their apparent lack of professionalisation, motivations of their founders, the role of personal connections, as well as the importance of digital media for brokerage and fundraising. Being mindful of its critiques and implicit power imbalances, it suggests that citizen aid deserves more systematic academic attention.
This article analyzes the use of human-centered design to make urban areas safer for marginalized... more This article analyzes the use of human-centered design to make urban areas safer for marginalized women. Through an empirical investigation of Amplify, the UK Department for International Development's (DFID) flagship innovation program, I ask to what extent design as a particular inclusive innovation strategy can result in gender-transformative urban safety development. I argue that on the one hand, the projects supported by Amplify reinforced instrumentalized notions of women's economic empowerment, while on the other they enabled forward-looking approaches such as the inclusion of men in anti-violence programs. Ultimately, Amplify's support for mainly small-scale, individualized and technical solutions, which resulted from its use of human-center design, prevented more transformative changes to emerge. At the same time, there are opportunities to 'design in' spaces for more structural interventions.
Through an empirical analysis of Amplify, a crowdsourcing platform funded by the UK's Department ... more Through an empirical analysis of Amplify, a crowdsourcing platform funded by the UK's Department for International Development (DFID), we examine the potential of ICTs to afford more participatory development. Especially interactive Web2.0 technologies are often assumed to enable the participation of marginalized groups in their own development, by allowing them to modify content and generate their own communication. We use the concepts of platform politics and voice to show that while Amplify managers and designers invested time and resources to include the voices of Amplify beneficiaries on the platform and elicit their feedback on projects supported via the platform, no meaningful participation took place. Our analysis of the gaps between participatory rhetoric, policy and practice concludes with suggestions for how ICTs could be harnessed to contribute to meaningful participatory development that matters materially and politically.
There is a growing interest in how organizations and initiatives that innovate to use information... more There is a growing interest in how organizations and initiatives that innovate to use information and communication technologies for development (ICTD) can scale their operations, reach and impact. This article takes a systemic and socio-technical approach to analyse the successful scaling of a crowdfunding social enterprise. It traces the growth of the ‘innofusion’ network of the world's first person-to-person microlending platform, with particular emphasis on practices of balancing along three dimensions: (1) the need for standardization to manage expansion across highly diverse geographical contexts and for adaptation, customization and diversification to produce locally meaningful impact; (2) online and offline strategies and (3) business and social aspects of the organization. Processes of techno-financial scaling made possible by organizational and technological innovation at the social enterprise, which is embedded in the San Francisco Bay Area's techno-entrepreneurial milieu, also enabled financial innovation among platform partners in developing countries.
This article examines the emergence of a new group of development experts who tackle development ... more This article examines the emergence of a new group of development experts who tackle development problems in “innovative” ways: professional designers and the organizations that fund them. What has become known as humanitarian design is an instantiation of the afterlives of development, which redefines the problem of development as eliciting the needs of poor clients and creating mechanisms so that they can provide feedback on proposed solutions. This reframing results in hybrid forms of development knowledge that combine business and entrepreneurial objectives with concerns about designers’ moral responsibilities in the contemporary world. The use of humanitarian design in creating formal financial products and services for the poor is analyzed through the work of the Institute for Money, Technology, and Financial Inclusion.
Current Anthropology, 2011
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Critique of Anthropology, 2011
This article introduces financial inclusion as a global assemblage of subjects, technics, and rat... more This article introduces financial inclusion as a global assemblage of subjects, technics, and rationalities that aim to develop poor-appropriate financial products and services. Microfinance forms the foundation, but also the boundary of the assemblage, which is premised on the assumption that the 2.7 billion poor people in the world who do not currently have access to formal loan, savings, and insurance products are in need of such offerings. The work of the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion at the University of California, Irvine, with its emphasis on ethnographic research into culturally grounded monetary practices and logics, is presented as an alternative to the quantitative, economic, and financial logics that drive the assemblage.
Third World Quarterly, 2015
Information and Communication …, 2007
ICTD projects are usually driven along the three axes of technological innovation, development pr... more ICTD projects are usually driven along the three axes of technological innovation, development programs or new market creation. These drivers have to be complemented by a focus on the people served by ICT, and their needs. In this paper, we argue for the importance of human-driven design and research (HDDR) to take into account the four human dimensions of ICT: local practices; participatory design processes; sociocultural contexts, and political conditions. Building on our ethnographic and design research on the LINCOS project in Costa Rica and Hewlett-Packard's e-Inclusion program, we show how Lincos' success was impeded by its inattention to human design features, the deployment of a neoliberal discourse of community appropriation, and the market-driven focus of e-Inclusion. We conclude by situating ICTD in the larger context of human development, and with reflections on what constitutes sustainable, successful ICTD projects.
This paper presents the financialization of poverty as a conceptual addition to the literature on... more This paper presents the financialization of poverty as a conceptual addition to the literature on microfinance. It argues that for microfinance to be seen as a solution to poverty alleviation, poverty has been made into a financial problem. This is exemplified by the World Bank's global poverty line and leads to the constitution of poor people as financial subjects. In addition, thinking of poverty in financial terms enables Northern publics' engagement with poverty. Recent initiatives like Live Below the Line and Kiva.org are presented as examples of how poverty is made manageable for Northern supporters of microfinance. © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Anthropology News, 2009
ABSTRACT No abstract is available for this article.
Journal of Corporate Citizenship, 2009
Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 2014
Journal of Latin American Anthropology, 2003
A travel de la comparacion de dos movilizaciones por la tierra realizadas por un grupo de indigen... more A travel de la comparacion de dos movilizaciones por la tierra realizadas por un grupo de indigenas Kollas del Noroeste Argentino (la primera en 1946 y la segunda en 1993), este articulo explora las formas cambiantes que estas luchas han asumido en los ultimos 50 anos. La investigacion del papel que las memorias de la marcha de 1946 jugaron durante la mobilizacion de 1993 es seguida por una comparacion del lenguaje de las demandas de ambas marchas y los discursos en que estas han estado insertas. Estas demandas deben situarse en el contexto de eventos politicos y legales dentro y fuera de la Argentina. La articulacion de estos eventos con las micropoliticas locales de la lucha territorial de los Kollas es analizada etnogrdficamente a traves del cambiante significado social del t£rmino "Kolla" y de las experiencias vividas por aquellos que portan este nombre en el Noroeste Argentino. La identidad Kolla no es esencial o estrategica, sino un posicionamiento que es inherentemente inestable y que resulta de la articulacion de cambiantes fuerzas locales, nacionales e internacionales. Este articulo presta particular atencidn al papel que han jugado en estos procesos el gobierno argentino y sus instituciones indigenistas.
This article examines representations of financial inclusion through the lens of the CGAP microfi... more This article examines representations of financial inclusion through the lens of the CGAP microfinance photo contest. It situates the contest's winning images within current contestations surrounding global financial inclusion strategies, to show how these photos construct particular representations of microfinance that legitimize CGAP's minimalist, commercially-driven model. The production of the need for large-scale financial inclusion is key to this model, which is depicted through gendered representations of microfinance beneficiaries. On the one hand, the CGAP photos present a shift from stereotypical images of female micro-entrepreneurs in traditional contexts to more complex images that disrupt such stereotypes while at the same time reinforcing other assumptions about microfinance. On the other, they bring men back into the picture as worthy microfinance recipients. While contributing to pluralist representations that valorize photography in developing countries, the CGAP microfinance photo contest is ultimately unable to portray the complexities and contradictions of financial inclusion interventions. © RAI 2013.
This article provides a review of the academic and popular literature on new media practices in I... more This article provides a review of the academic and popular literature on new media practices in India, focusing on the country’s youth's use of mobile phones and the Internet, as well as new media prosumption. One particular feature of the Indian case is the confluence of commercial exploitation of new media technologies and their application for development purposes in initiatives that aim to bring these technologies to marginalized segments of the Indian population. Technology usage in turn is shaped by the socioeconomic location of the user, especially in regards to gender and caste. The potential of new media technologies to subvert such social stratifications and associated norms has inspired much public debate, which is often carried out on the Internet, giving rise to an online public sphere. In all of the writings reviewed here, the tension surrounding new media technologies as a meeting place of the old and the new in India is paramount.
In this article, I examine HP’s e-Inclusion program and its implementation in India to show how t... more In this article, I examine HP’s e-Inclusion program and its implementation in India to show how the high-tech industry’s efforts to alleviate poverty profitably are guided by C. K. Prahalad’s ideas about the Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP), and are framed as digital corporate citizenship activities. While the BoP highlights the importance of new markets for high-tech companies, the discourse of digital corporate citizenship creates an enabling environment in which transnational high-tech companies can gain political access to new consumers
at the BoP. The resulting digital corporate citizenship/BoP nexus leads to the extension of governments’ bureaucratic reach and the formation of electronic entrepreneurs.
Conference Presentations by Anke Schwittay
Opening Keynote at the 2017 European Conference of Socia0 Sciences (ECSS)/European Conference on ... more Opening Keynote at the 2017 European Conference of Socia0 Sciences (ECSS)/European Conference on Sustainability, Energy and the Environment (ECSEE), Brighton July 2017 1)
New Media and International Development is the first in-depth examination of microfinance's endur... more New Media and International Development is the first in-depth examination of microfinance's enduring popularity with Northern publics. Through a case study of Kiva.org, the world's first person-to-person microlending website, and other microfinance organizations, the book argues that international development efforts have an affective dimension. This is fostered through narrative and visual representations, through the performance of development rituals and through bonds of fellowship between Northern donors and Southern recipients. These practices constitute people in the Global North as everyday humanitarians and mobilize their affective investments, which are financial, social and emotional commitments to distant others to alleviate their poverty.
Third World Quarterly, 2019
The proliferation of Web 2.0 platforms that aim to facilitate social action, often connected to i... more The proliferation of Web 2.0 platforms that aim to facilitate social action, often connected to international development or environmental sustainability, has contributed to the ongoing popularisation of development. In this article, I argue that it has resulted in the digitally-enabled constitution of everyday humanitarians, who are everyday people supportive of poverty alleviation. Kiva.org, a US-based online microlending platform that invites everyday humanitarians to make US$25 loans to Kiva entrepreneurs around the world, is a prime site to study these processes. I show how Kiva cultivates supporters through the mediated production of affective investments, which are financial, social and emotional commitments to distant others. This happens through the design of an affective architecture which in turn generates financial and spatial mediations. While these result in microloans and attendant sentiments of affinity, they also lead to financial clicktivism and connections that obscures the asymmetries and riskscapes resulting from Kiva’s microlending work.
Third World Quarterly, 2019
The introduction to this collection brings together, under the umbrella terms of citizen aid and ... more The introduction to this collection brings together, under the umbrella terms of citizen aid and grassroots humanitarianism, interdisciplinary research on small-scale, privately funded forms of aid and development. It notes the steady rise of these activities, including in the Global South as well as North, such as in the context of the recent European refugee crisis. It considers their position vis-à-vis more institutionalised forms of aid; methodological approaches and their challenges; and asks what political dimensions these initiatives may have. It outlines key themes arising from the contributions to the collection, including historical perspectives on ‘demotic humanitarianism’, questions of legitimacy and their apparent lack of professionalisation, motivations of their founders, the role of personal connections, as well as the importance of digital media for brokerage and fundraising. Being mindful of its critiques and implicit power imbalances, it suggests that citizen aid deserves more systematic academic attention.
This article analyzes the use of human-centered design to make urban areas safer for marginalized... more This article analyzes the use of human-centered design to make urban areas safer for marginalized women. Through an empirical investigation of Amplify, the UK Department for International Development's (DFID) flagship innovation program, I ask to what extent design as a particular inclusive innovation strategy can result in gender-transformative urban safety development. I argue that on the one hand, the projects supported by Amplify reinforced instrumentalized notions of women's economic empowerment, while on the other they enabled forward-looking approaches such as the inclusion of men in anti-violence programs. Ultimately, Amplify's support for mainly small-scale, individualized and technical solutions, which resulted from its use of human-center design, prevented more transformative changes to emerge. At the same time, there are opportunities to 'design in' spaces for more structural interventions.
Through an empirical analysis of Amplify, a crowdsourcing platform funded by the UK's Department ... more Through an empirical analysis of Amplify, a crowdsourcing platform funded by the UK's Department for International Development (DFID), we examine the potential of ICTs to afford more participatory development. Especially interactive Web2.0 technologies are often assumed to enable the participation of marginalized groups in their own development, by allowing them to modify content and generate their own communication. We use the concepts of platform politics and voice to show that while Amplify managers and designers invested time and resources to include the voices of Amplify beneficiaries on the platform and elicit their feedback on projects supported via the platform, no meaningful participation took place. Our analysis of the gaps between participatory rhetoric, policy and practice concludes with suggestions for how ICTs could be harnessed to contribute to meaningful participatory development that matters materially and politically.
There is a growing interest in how organizations and initiatives that innovate to use information... more There is a growing interest in how organizations and initiatives that innovate to use information and communication technologies for development (ICTD) can scale their operations, reach and impact. This article takes a systemic and socio-technical approach to analyse the successful scaling of a crowdfunding social enterprise. It traces the growth of the ‘innofusion’ network of the world's first person-to-person microlending platform, with particular emphasis on practices of balancing along three dimensions: (1) the need for standardization to manage expansion across highly diverse geographical contexts and for adaptation, customization and diversification to produce locally meaningful impact; (2) online and offline strategies and (3) business and social aspects of the organization. Processes of techno-financial scaling made possible by organizational and technological innovation at the social enterprise, which is embedded in the San Francisco Bay Area's techno-entrepreneurial milieu, also enabled financial innovation among platform partners in developing countries.
This article examines the emergence of a new group of development experts who tackle development ... more This article examines the emergence of a new group of development experts who tackle development problems in “innovative” ways: professional designers and the organizations that fund them. What has become known as humanitarian design is an instantiation of the afterlives of development, which redefines the problem of development as eliciting the needs of poor clients and creating mechanisms so that they can provide feedback on proposed solutions. This reframing results in hybrid forms of development knowledge that combine business and entrepreneurial objectives with concerns about designers’ moral responsibilities in the contemporary world. The use of humanitarian design in creating formal financial products and services for the poor is analyzed through the work of the Institute for Money, Technology, and Financial Inclusion.
Current Anthropology, 2011
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Critique of Anthropology, 2011
This article introduces financial inclusion as a global assemblage of subjects, technics, and rat... more This article introduces financial inclusion as a global assemblage of subjects, technics, and rationalities that aim to develop poor-appropriate financial products and services. Microfinance forms the foundation, but also the boundary of the assemblage, which is premised on the assumption that the 2.7 billion poor people in the world who do not currently have access to formal loan, savings, and insurance products are in need of such offerings. The work of the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion at the University of California, Irvine, with its emphasis on ethnographic research into culturally grounded monetary practices and logics, is presented as an alternative to the quantitative, economic, and financial logics that drive the assemblage.
Third World Quarterly, 2015
Information and Communication …, 2007
ICTD projects are usually driven along the three axes of technological innovation, development pr... more ICTD projects are usually driven along the three axes of technological innovation, development programs or new market creation. These drivers have to be complemented by a focus on the people served by ICT, and their needs. In this paper, we argue for the importance of human-driven design and research (HDDR) to take into account the four human dimensions of ICT: local practices; participatory design processes; sociocultural contexts, and political conditions. Building on our ethnographic and design research on the LINCOS project in Costa Rica and Hewlett-Packard's e-Inclusion program, we show how Lincos' success was impeded by its inattention to human design features, the deployment of a neoliberal discourse of community appropriation, and the market-driven focus of e-Inclusion. We conclude by situating ICTD in the larger context of human development, and with reflections on what constitutes sustainable, successful ICTD projects.
This paper presents the financialization of poverty as a conceptual addition to the literature on... more This paper presents the financialization of poverty as a conceptual addition to the literature on microfinance. It argues that for microfinance to be seen as a solution to poverty alleviation, poverty has been made into a financial problem. This is exemplified by the World Bank's global poverty line and leads to the constitution of poor people as financial subjects. In addition, thinking of poverty in financial terms enables Northern publics' engagement with poverty. Recent initiatives like Live Below the Line and Kiva.org are presented as examples of how poverty is made manageable for Northern supporters of microfinance. © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Anthropology News, 2009
ABSTRACT No abstract is available for this article.
Journal of Corporate Citizenship, 2009
Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 2014
Journal of Latin American Anthropology, 2003
A travel de la comparacion de dos movilizaciones por la tierra realizadas por un grupo de indigen... more A travel de la comparacion de dos movilizaciones por la tierra realizadas por un grupo de indigenas Kollas del Noroeste Argentino (la primera en 1946 y la segunda en 1993), este articulo explora las formas cambiantes que estas luchas han asumido en los ultimos 50 anos. La investigacion del papel que las memorias de la marcha de 1946 jugaron durante la mobilizacion de 1993 es seguida por una comparacion del lenguaje de las demandas de ambas marchas y los discursos en que estas han estado insertas. Estas demandas deben situarse en el contexto de eventos politicos y legales dentro y fuera de la Argentina. La articulacion de estos eventos con las micropoliticas locales de la lucha territorial de los Kollas es analizada etnogrdficamente a traves del cambiante significado social del t£rmino "Kolla" y de las experiencias vividas por aquellos que portan este nombre en el Noroeste Argentino. La identidad Kolla no es esencial o estrategica, sino un posicionamiento que es inherentemente inestable y que resulta de la articulacion de cambiantes fuerzas locales, nacionales e internacionales. Este articulo presta particular atencidn al papel que han jugado en estos procesos el gobierno argentino y sus instituciones indigenistas.
This article examines representations of financial inclusion through the lens of the CGAP microfi... more This article examines representations of financial inclusion through the lens of the CGAP microfinance photo contest. It situates the contest's winning images within current contestations surrounding global financial inclusion strategies, to show how these photos construct particular representations of microfinance that legitimize CGAP's minimalist, commercially-driven model. The production of the need for large-scale financial inclusion is key to this model, which is depicted through gendered representations of microfinance beneficiaries. On the one hand, the CGAP photos present a shift from stereotypical images of female micro-entrepreneurs in traditional contexts to more complex images that disrupt such stereotypes while at the same time reinforcing other assumptions about microfinance. On the other, they bring men back into the picture as worthy microfinance recipients. While contributing to pluralist representations that valorize photography in developing countries, the CGAP microfinance photo contest is ultimately unable to portray the complexities and contradictions of financial inclusion interventions. © RAI 2013.
This article provides a review of the academic and popular literature on new media practices in I... more This article provides a review of the academic and popular literature on new media practices in India, focusing on the country’s youth's use of mobile phones and the Internet, as well as new media prosumption. One particular feature of the Indian case is the confluence of commercial exploitation of new media technologies and their application for development purposes in initiatives that aim to bring these technologies to marginalized segments of the Indian population. Technology usage in turn is shaped by the socioeconomic location of the user, especially in regards to gender and caste. The potential of new media technologies to subvert such social stratifications and associated norms has inspired much public debate, which is often carried out on the Internet, giving rise to an online public sphere. In all of the writings reviewed here, the tension surrounding new media technologies as a meeting place of the old and the new in India is paramount.
In this article, I examine HP’s e-Inclusion program and its implementation in India to show how t... more In this article, I examine HP’s e-Inclusion program and its implementation in India to show how the high-tech industry’s efforts to alleviate poverty profitably are guided by C. K. Prahalad’s ideas about the Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP), and are framed as digital corporate citizenship activities. While the BoP highlights the importance of new markets for high-tech companies, the discourse of digital corporate citizenship creates an enabling environment in which transnational high-tech companies can gain political access to new consumers
at the BoP. The resulting digital corporate citizenship/BoP nexus leads to the extension of governments’ bureaucratic reach and the formation of electronic entrepreneurs.
Opening Keynote at the 2017 European Conference of Socia0 Sciences (ECSS)/European Conference on ... more Opening Keynote at the 2017 European Conference of Socia0 Sciences (ECSS)/European Conference on Sustainability, Energy and the Environment (ECSEE), Brighton July 2017 1)
In this presentation for a workshop on visual solidarity in international development at the Univ... more In this presentation for a workshop on visual solidarity in international development at the University of Manchester, I analyzed the production and reception of images on Kiva.org, a microfinance crowdfunding platform.
In this workshop presentation I ask whether inclusive innovation is possible at the BoP through e... more In this workshop presentation I ask whether inclusive innovation is possible at the BoP through examining an urban sanitation project in Ghana.
In our talk, we explore models for innovative university-based research institutes that bring tog... more In our talk, we explore models for innovative university-based research institutes that bring together academics, practitioners and policy makers. Using the example of the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion (IMTFI), established and run by Professor Bill Maurer at the University of California, Irvine with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, we present a number of ways in which academic research, in this case on poor people’s everyday innovations with mobile money, can be made actionable. We focus on four aspects of IMTFI’s model in particular: its open source approach; its external advisory board made up of industry and NGO practitioners; its use of design to generate actionable research and its building of research capacity in the Global South by funding local researchers.
We will conclude our talk by exploring what a similar academic research model could look like for a research institution focusing on humanitarian innovation and design.
Using the example of microfinance – the provision of small-scale financial services to poor peopl... more Using the example of microfinance – the provision of small-scale financial services to poor people – we argue for a form of everyday humanitarianism that constitutes Northern publics as microfinance supporters. This humanitarianism works through the mobilization of affective investments, which are financial, social and emotional commitments to distant others to alleviate their poverty through microloans. Within this economy of affect, microfinance appeals to its supporters through images of smiling women entrepreneurs, through its obligatory success story of development with the help of microenterprise, and through mediated encounters with micro-borrowers through online lending platforms. One of the most successful of these websites, particularly in the US, has been Kiva.org, which was established in San Francisco in 2005 and has since grown to include more than 1 million lenders and borrowers, facilitating loans of more than 600 million US dollars.
In our presentation, we compare the mediated space created on the Kiva.org website with the seemingly more direct and personal – albeit still technologically-linked – connections established via Kiva Zip, which is a mobile phone platform that lets lenders communicate directly with their borrowers in the US and Kenya. Examining the interactions among lenders and borrowers on the website and on the zip platform, we analyse the affordances of mobile technologies for affective investment and for everyday humanitarian communication.
Over the last decade, traditional development institutions have joined market-based actors in emb... more Over the last decade, traditional development institutions have joined market-based actors in embracing inclusive innovation to ensure the sector’s relevance and impacts. In 2014, the UK’s Department for International Development’s (DFID) Innovation Hub launched Amplify as its own flagship initiative. The programme, which is managed by IDEO, a Silicon Valley-based design consultancy, aims to crowdsource new ideas to various development challenges from a broad and diverse group of actors, including poor people themselves. By examining the direction, diversity and distribution of Amplify’s work, we argue that while development innovation can generate more inclusive practices, its transformative potential is constrained by broader developmental logics and policy regimes.