Collegium Helveticum
Switzerland
fellow
Emma Mavodza
2023-2024
Discipline(s)
Others
Theme(s)
Inequalities, inclusion & Social Innovation; Other
Fellowship dates
›
Biography
Emma Mavodza (born 1986 in Masvingo, Zimbabwe) is an avid development researcher. Her academic research focuses on broad, transdisciplinary topics, including the politics of financial inclusion and exclusion, gender and development, indigenous knowledge systems, and digital financial service innovations.
Emma received her PhD from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. In her doctoral thesis, she examined the social life of mobile money in Eswatini and Zimbabwe. Based on her rich ethnographic data, she rejects some framings of mobile money as a tool for financial inclusion and demonstrates how it is grafted into the existing social relations, structures, practices, and social meanings of the adoptive communities.
During her doctoral studies, Emma received the Wits Post Graduate Merit Award and an Erasmus+ Global Mobility Scholarship for an exchange program at the University of Agder in Norway. She has presented her work at regional and international policy dialogues and conferences in Germany, Ghana, India, Norway, and the United States. Before joining the Collegium, Emma was a ZUKOnnect fellow at the Zukunftskolleg of the University of Konstanz in Germany.
Research Project
The Role of Social Norms in Digital Financial Inclusion of Women in Eswatini
The project takes an ethnographic approach to address two key questions: First, what are the existing social norms on financial access and usage? And secondly, how do these existing social norms moderate mobile money access and usage among unbanked women in the informal sector in Eswatini?
In this project, Emma suggests that limited financial access and provision of unsuitable services continue to be a catalyst for the reproduction of socio-economic marginality. She explains how existing social norms moderate mobile money access and usage experiences of women in the informal sector in her aim to demarginalise and politicise their diverse experiences and plural voices. Emma strives to understand financial inclusion and/or exclusion from the women’s perspective, specifically, their understandings of how mobile money use generates new forms of social and economic opportunity and vulnerability. She further explicates, how, through references to existing social norms of reciprocity, solidarity, and mutuality, different sets of financial relationships and transactional practices emerge as pre-existing payment structures are able to reproduce themselves in new fields of digital economic activity.
Research Interests:
social norms; financial inclusion; reciprocity