Banking the unbanked: Financial inclusion and economic sustainable development for women? : Decolonial perspectives on the gendered migration-remittances-development nexus

Abstract: Over the last decade, a new trend of Global Remittances has emerged within the international development community, especially a growing interest in women’s migration and remittances, and their potential for poverty reduction and economic growth. Due to the staggering amount of transnational money transfers, migrant remittances have become a central component in multilateral discussions on alternative development financing, and has been included in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The present study thus explores the multiple ways in which this gendered migration-remittance-development nexus has come to play out the recent years, seeking to understand how the “banking the unbanked” logic along with microfinance profit-making agendas serves neoliberal governmental and infrastructural discursive formations of transnational migration and its development impact. By using a decolonial approach, the study uses critical discourse analysis to scrutinize selected multilateral actors’ policy documents to explore in what ways migrant women’s “financial inclusion, independence and economic empowerment” have been included in the goals and targets within the 2030 Agenda. The main finding is that the rights-based approach towards migrants in the sustainability discourse rather tends to dismantle migrant agency into monetary practices which have come to be an important means for the financialization of migrant and non-migrant communities as well as for the transmittance of western knowledge doctrines, and in turn, are to prolong regimes of “modern slavery.”