Digital Finance and Access to Credit in the Post-Covid Informal and Domestic Economies of Rural Western Kenya, 2021

Following the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic the over-indebted Kenyan state was unable to stabilise a nose-diving economy. Faced with the risk of bankruptcy and widespread defaults on loans, financial credit providers such as banks and microfinance institutions restricted access to credit. The resulting credit-crunch forced many Kenyans to turn to digital lenders and friends or kin for access to credit to pay off pre-existing debts and make ends meet. This collection comprises ethnographic data on how individual borrowers and informal savings-and-credit groups navigated this credit-crunch. In particular, the collection features information on the social consequences of financial technologies and the quantification of creditworthiness through digital data in informal and domestic economies.