VALUING THE INFORMAL
An Introduction to
The Banker Ladies, by Dr. Caroline Shenaz Hossein
FORTUNATELY DIGITAL: SWARMSome local innovations are informal institutions. They are known by vernacular terms that mean something to the members who create these institutions. Have you heard of Ajo, Osusu, Sandooq, Altin, Partner, Chit, or Arisan? These are the cultural names for member-owned institutions – or banking co-operatives – used by people around the world. Other institutional names include Ghana’s Susu, the Chinese Hua, and Sri Lanka’s Cheetu5. These co-operative banks are known by academics as rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs). (I also use the terms money pools, self-help groups, co-operatives, and banking co-ops interchangeably with ROSCAs.) ROSCAs are hidden forms of co-operatives that Black/African descent women – and many diverse groups – practice in Canada, the United States, the Caribbean, and elsewhere in our world.
Many of the women I met while doing my research have engaged in ROSCAs their whole lives – indeed, ROSCAs are a tradition among African diasporic groups. Migrating to another country is a struggle; when people move, they turn inwards to form ROSCAs to address livelihood-related needs as well as to build friendships and form ties with people in their new lands. For this reason, ROSCAs are seen as a form of mutual aid: people can count on others for financial assistance as well as for social connections. The racism and exclusion immigrants encounter in their new countries can, in a peculiar way, bond them with people of the same race and socio-economic background6. The co-operative banks they form are made up of voluntary members who, together, decide on the rules and make regular contributions to a fund that is later given either in whole or in part to each member in turn. Ordinary people jointly create the rules according to the interests of their members.
Black women in charge of these financial services for their communities – known as the Banker Ladies – have much to teach us through their contributions to politics and economics. A longstanding saying in the Black Muslim community (among American Muslims especially) holds that “politics without economics is symbol without substance.” This adage suggests that politics and voice is limited if people are struggling economically7. The Banker Ladies are the vanguards, the keepers, and saviours of mutual aid and economic co-operation because they demonstrate the ability to build and mobilize capital from within society and achieve it from inside of a group. In Reversed Realities, development scholar Naila Kabeer explained three decades ago that “power within” is a vital concept for marginalized women because they are the ones who can band together to bring sustained changes in society8. The Banker Ladies whom I have studied for years know full well that, without economic clout, little can be done to bring lasting change to their communities. The Banker Ladies are aware that any change to their position or status in society must work in tandem with internal collective organization.
A longstanding saying in the Black Muslim community (among American Muslims especially) holds that “politics without economics is symbol without substance.”
For generations, Black and African descent women have taught one another how to save and lend to each other co-operatively and outside of formal institutions12. During the COVID-19 lockdown in April 2021, one of my community partners familiar with ROSCAs in Toronto’s west end proposed we launch a Partner Savings (Jamaican name for a ROSCA) workshop for young women using my funding for social innovations within the Black Social Economy. Hiring Banker Ladies to offer training on a Partner Bank was a trying process because university financial personnel would scrutinize my projects and insinuate that my Banker Ladies were “frauds.” I think it was viewed this way because the idea of Black women teaching others about money systems is “unknown” to most people. The perception that ROSCAs are a form of “fraud” is commonplace. Whether intentional or not, this negative framing reveals an example of systemic racism at work, one in which white (and typically cis-het male) people refuse to see the Banker Ladies as equipped to lead financial training sessions. Such responses from university administrators undermines my body of work acknowledging informal co-operatives of people of the Black/ African diaspora.
This book, The Banker Ladies, will demonstrate that ROSCAs are indeed co-operatives – and anything but underdeveloped. Millions of people around the world are participating in the ROSCA system. In fact Grassroots Finance Action, using the World Bank’s Findex21 report13, estimates that there are at least 419 million ROSCA users in the Global South amassing between 50–100 billion in savings14. That is a lot of people choosing to selforganize and to assist one another through informal co-operative banks. Given the deep-seated exclusion felt by certain groups, or people who do not trust commercial banks, ROSCAs must often function underground, as noted in the Canadian case in this book. Forming co-operative banks informally is one way to push back against an elitist Babylon (Jamaican word for establishment) and a racial capitalist system.
Forming co-operative banks informally is one way to push back against an elitist Babylon and a racial capitalist system.
My goal as a researcher is to change society for the better; making ROSCA systems known comes with a degree of risk – or at least it used to when this work began in 2014 in the Canadian context. I have since been attuned to the possibility of legal issues, and that authorities may pressure me to give them my data; still, I have chosen anonymity and confidentiality in all instances. I have been careful with legal issues that may arise out of this work and changed the names of individuals afraid of reprisal. In recent years, a few of the Banker Ladies have chosen to be known and seen, and even refer to themselves as the Banker Ladies as a symbol of pride. In any case, I have erred on the side of caution and sought legal advice. This project went through an escalated ethical clearance process to ensure that no legal authority could contact any of my subjects because all materials have been destroyed at the time of production and the completed peer review process. My duty is to respect the ethical research guidelines under which I operate as a researcher16.
The foundation of the ROSCA system is based on community, sharing, and giving. Njeri Kinyanjui’s work highlights that redistribution is critical to Kenyan Vyama groups since the sharing of funds is how this form of business financing works17. The fact that these women save funds and share them with one another to help advance each other’s life goals is compelling. It demonstrates how care for one another underpins these money pools, and reveals another way to organize the financial economy. ROSCA systems give time and attention to sharing funds while also undertaking the social work of repairing harms done against Black women. ROSCAs create a safe space for folks to be heard, exert their citizenship, and access the goods they need.
ROSCAs create a safe space for folks to be heard, exert their citizenship, and access the goods they need.
To make sense of how ROSCAs help women, it is imperative to know how they use these funds. Jamaican higglers (small business traders) I interviewed told me that they used Partner funds to pay for their travel to Panama or Miami; they also used the Partner hand to buy consumer goods they could then to sell in Kingston’s markets18. Fishmongers I met in Accra’s Makola (in Ghana) in 2017 explained how Susu helped them purchase freezers to prevent spoilage. A Bajan entrepreneur based in Montreal recounted (2016) how she had drawn on Meeting Turn to start up her catering business; she continues to use ROSCA systems regularly to help expand her business. A Guyanese mobile hairstylist in Scarborough (Toronto’s east end) confided in me (2017) that Boxhand money helped her purchase a second-hand car, which has allowed her to attend to more clients, including clients in areas of the city where public transportation is limited. The diamante poem below offers a quick glance at what a ROSCA represents and how it helps the women who use these community banks.
Many of the women I interviewed identified themselves as casual employees or self-employed, lacking in benefits they may require on short notice. Many do not have extended health care benefits and need money for dental visits, injury care, and counselling. There are times when a group will organize a ROSCA to help a member who has just lost a loved one to gun violence, and these funds are raised as a gift to the grieving family, or to help with funeral costs. Some women reported using the money for travels to visit family, conduct home renovations, and engage in other activities in the name of joy.
The Black women who lead ROSCAs are not the only ones involved in this financial self-help model. They are the ones, however, whose contributions to inclusive financial economies are ignored – even stigmatized – when alternatives to exclusion are being discussed. Or men will take to the platform to analyse and assess what is very clearly feminist, and clearly women’s, work. ROSCAs are an example of the Black Social Economy in action19, where members tap into good will, mutual aid, and reciprocity to confront violence and exclusion20.
Collective organization can be threatening to those who want certain groups managed and contained. The very idea that Black women – often not schooled in corporate finance due to systemic barriers – are able to communalize money systems to do good and assist in economic development exposes the elitism within commercial economic systems. By emphasizing collective financial action by the oppressed, Black Social Economy Theory looks to the possibilities of politicized co-operation where people choose to come together to pursue a business activity. Black Social Economy Theory asserts that the Banker Ladies deliberately take up space in the informal arenas by organizing ROSCAs to counter various forms of social exclusion. By doing this work largely out of sight, The Banker Ladies expose the lies, hubris, and deeply embedded exclusion – largely a result of colonialism and the vestiges of white supremacy – that lurk in development and solidarity economics, a field built to ignore the presence and potential of community focused economies.
Women around the world who draw on ROSCA systems are in it for what it represents as a collective – the opposite of individualized concepts of only one.
ROSCAs teach us that solidarity matters.
1. Arturo Escobar, Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible. Durham: Duke University Press. 2020.
2. Drucilla K. Barker, Suzanne Bergeron, and Susan Feiner, Liberating Economics: Feminist Perspectives on Families, Work, and Globalization. 2nd ed. Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan University Press. 2021.
3. Stuart Hall, “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power.” In Formations of Modernity, edited by Stuart Hall and Bram Gieben, 275–331. Cambridge: Polity Press.1992.
4. Ash Amin, The Social Economy: International Perspectives on Economic Solidarity. London: Zed Books. 2009.
5. Alaine Low, A Bibliographic Survey of Rotating Savings and Credit Associations. Oxford: Oxfam. 1995.
6. Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez, Bonds of Mutual Trust: The Cultural Systems of Rotating Credit Associations among Urban Mexicans and Chicanos. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. 1983.
7. Louis Farrakhan, Back Where We Belong: Selected Speeches by Minister Louis Farrakhan, edited by Yusuf Jah. Los Angeles: KingDo Media. 2019
8. Naila Kabeer, Ratna Sudarshan, and Kirsty Milward, Organizing Women Workers in the Informal Economy: Beyond the Weapons of the Weak. London: Zed Books. 2013.
9. Dianne M. Stewart, “Collecting on Their Investments, One Woman at a Time: Economic Partnerships among Caribbean Immigrant Women in the United States.” International Journal of African Renaissance Studies 2, no. 1 (July): 35–57. https://doi.org/10.1080/18186870701384244. 2007.
10. Eudine Barriteau, “Theorizing the Shift from ‘Woman’ to ‘Gender’ in Caribbean Feminist Discourse: The Power Relations of Creating Knowledge.” In Confronting Power, Theorizing Gender: Interdisciplinary Perspectives in the Caribbean, edited by Eudine Barriteau, 27–45. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press. 2003.
11. Paul Alfred Barton, Susu Economics: The History of Pan-African Trade, Commerce, Money and Wealth. Part 1. First Book Library, self-published. 2000.
12. I use the terms “Black people,” “African-descended people,” and “people of the African diaspora” or “of African descent” interchangeably, to refer to people who consider themselves part of the African diaspora and who have a lineage to Africa. For usages of the word Black to refer to a group of people, the “B” is always capitalized. See Nancy Coleman, “Why We’re Capitalizing B.” New York Times, 5 July 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/--05/insider/capitalized-black .html.
12. I use the terms “Black people,” “African-descended people,” and “people of the African diaspora” or “of African descent” interchangeably, to refer to people who consider themselves part of the African diaspora and who have a lineage to Africa. For usages of the word Black to refer to a group of people, the “B” is always capitalized. See Nancy Coleman, “Why We’re Capitalizing B.” New York Times, 5 July 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/--05/insider/capitalized-black .html.
13. The World Bank, “The Global Findex Database 2021: Financial Inclusion, Digital Payments, and Resilience in the Age of COVID-19.” https://www.worldbank.org/en/-publication/globalfindex. 2021.
14. Jeffrey Ashe, “Yunus Was Wrong: Savings, Not Credit, Is a Human Right.” Nextbillion, 14 August 2023. https://nextbillion.net/yunus-was-wrong-savings-human-right-financial-inclusion-shift-focus/. 2023.
15. Akua L. Benjamin, “The Black/Jamaican Criminal: The Making of Ideology.” PhD diss., University of Toronto, no. 305258209. 2003.
16. Research for this volume occurred under a series of ethics certificates issued by the universities at which I have been based. The University of Toronto approved human ethics protocol no. 41957, which was re-issued on 12 June 2023 from a follow-up on March 2022. Previous approvals for this project included York University certificates under the project title “The Black Social Economy”: no. 2014-319 (expired 5 November 2018) and no. e2019-172 (expired 25 November 2021).
17. Mary Njeri Kinyanjui, Vyama: Institutions of Hope – Ordinary People’s Market Coordination and Society Organizations. Nairobi, Kenya: Nsemia. 2012.
18. Gina A. Ulysse, Downtown Ladies: Informal Commercial Importers, a Haitian Anthropologist and Self-Making in Jamaica. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2007.
19. See the video defining the term at Black Social Economy: Produced by Kindea Lab. Posted 28 April 2022. YouTube video, 1:56. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8e2NRfEnoos.
20. Caroline Shenaz Hossein, The Black Social Economy in the Americas: Exploring Diverse Community-Based Alternative Markets. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2018.
16. Research for this volume occurred under a series of ethics certificates issued by the universities at which I have been based. The University of Toronto approved human ethics protocol no. 41957, which was re-issued on 12 June 2023 from a follow-up on March 2022. Previous approvals for this project included York University certificates under the project title “The Black Social Economy”: no. 2014-319 (expired 5 November 2018) and no. e2019-172 (expired 25 November 2021).
17. Mary Njeri Kinyanjui, Vyama: Institutions of Hope – Ordinary People’s Market Coordination and Society Organizations. Nairobi, Kenya: Nsemia. 2012.
18. Gina A. Ulysse, Downtown Ladies: Informal Commercial Importers, a Haitian Anthropologist and Self-Making in Jamaica. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2007.
19. See the video defining the term at Black Social Economy: Produced by Kindea Lab. Posted 28 April 2022. YouTube video, 1:56. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8e2NRfEnoos.
20. Caroline Shenaz Hossein, The Black Social Economy in the Americas: Exploring Diverse Community-Based Alternative Markets. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2018.
On November 26th, 2026, Dr. Hossein will give the 32nd Lecture in the series, Caribbean Women: Catalysts for Change at the Nita Barrow Unit in the University of the West Indies, Cavehill Campus, in Barbados.