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Abstract: The vision that digital finance can achieve universal financial inclusion is premised on the rarely questioned assumption that the world is rapidly moving towards universal literacy and numeracy. In fact, text and arithmetic notation shape the relationship between formal finance and about a billion of the worldrsquo;s poorest adults. This “oral” population, stranded outside the reach of formal employment, have neither the capabilities nor the incentives to engage in digital finance as it is currently being offered. Empirical observation of the actual capabilities and incentives of oral adults can offer transformative solutions for mobile wallet providers, NGO projects, designers and governments.
Keywords: Gender and diversity, Labor and livelihoods – Microfinance, Technology, Sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia
1、Introduction: a tale of two worlds
We live invested in an electric information environment that is quite as imperceptible to us as water is to fish. Marshall McLuhan (1969, 22)
We – readers of books such as this – are so literate that it is very difficult for us to conceive of an oral universe of communication or thought except as a variant of a literate universe. Walter J. Ong (1982, 2)
In an era when a single human invention – the mobile phone – has reached 5 billion individual subscribers in less than two decades,1 it seems paradoxical that a technology much more deeply embedded in the modern economy – writing – still has not reached about a billion adults aged 15 and over, even after a 5,000-year journey.
Literate people struggle to appreciate how complex a social process the emergence of mass literacy is, or how significant is the resulting oral-literate divide. The further in the past this transition recedes, the harder it seems to become to appreciate the divide. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) reported in 2005 that “[t]he transition to wide- spread literacy, once initiated, is not inevitable and may stagnate” (UNESCO 2005, 198). To Earl Hunt, a widely cited researcher on human intelligence, literacy is a “meta invention” that stands far above most other technologies “because societies and individuals who use [it] have a huge advantage over those who do not” (Hunt 2011, 283). In Huntrsquo;s definition, literacy includes numeracy.
While technologies can “leapfrog” over traditional infrastructure endowments, they cannot leap- frog over traditional human cognitive endowments. Oral culture co-existed with writing for thou- sands of years before Johannes Gutenberg invented the first metallic type printing press in Europe. Neither printing nor literacy – unlike todayrsquo;s mobile phone – were embraced quickly. The Gutenberg Bible was in Latin, a language spoken only by the elite, as were 76% of the print editions produced in Europe from the 1440s until 1500.2
In other words, the “literate divide” of the fifteenth century was initially widened by the supply-side response to the invention of printing. Today supply-side actors are widening the “digital divide” with obscurantist financial equivalents of High Latin Mass that belong in a nineteenth century banking hall, not a twenty-first century mobile wallet.
Digital finance interfaces involve several codes that all literate and educated adults take for granted, but which are rarely learnt without adequate schooling by illiterate ones – a majority of the financially excluded population. These codes are centred on:
- Arithmetic notation
- Calendar and clock time
- Modern iconography grounded in geometric and other literate abstractions.
The literate world has been forming and gradually moving away from its oral progenitor for thou- sands of years. Like a cognitive analogue to continental drift, the process is stranding the oral world on other side of an increasingly widening divide.
National census data estimates that over 750 million adults were illiterate in 2015, of whom over 64% were women. Global illiteracy has dropped only 14% since 1990, and a dismal 4% since 2000 (UNESCO 2015, 13–14). Census data are based on self-disclosure at the doorstep. Direct functional literacy assessments by UNESCO suggest that the true figure today is very close to 1 billion, with a similar gender gap (UNESCO 2015, 140ff.).
The face of oral culture is increasingly feminine, and not just because girls face discrimination in basic schooling. Womenrsquo;s work is less formal, less well paid, and less likely to be banked. Gender norms constrain the use and acquisition of the cognitive skills required to adapt to the formal financial system more tightly.
Research on oral capabilities, culture and behavior exists. However, most of it resides outside of the discourse on financial inclusion. This is unfortunate, because the goal of financial inclusion – for poor women most of all – would benefit substantially from deeper engagement. This article starts by reviewi
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