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Paper short abstract

This paper argues that indigenous festivals, ritual performances, and communal theatre practices among Yoruba communities function as informal financial infrastructures, embedding redistribution, trust, accountability, and collective survival that challenge top-down financial inclusion models.

Paper long abstract

Abstract

Contemporary development discourse often frames financial justice in the Global South through access-driven paradigms such as banking penetration, microfinance, and digital inclusion. This paper challenges such top-down approaches by foregrounding indigenous performance practices as community-based financial pedagogies embedded within Yoruba festival systems in Southwestern Nigeria. Drawing on post-development theory, decolonial finance, and political economy perspectives, it argues that indigenous festivals function as informal financial infrastructures through which communities encode principles of redistribution, trust, accountability, and collective agency. Yoruba festivals and ritual performances are not merely cultural expressions; they operate as spaces where economic ethics are dramatized, negotiated, and transmitted across generations. Through performative enactments, symbolic exchanges, and communal participation, these practices sustain indigenous financial systems such as ajo/esusu (rotational savings), gift economies, labour-sharing, and ritualized accountability mechanisms that challenge extractive financial logics. Rather than privileging individual accumulation, such systems emphasize relational wealth, social security, and communal resilience, offering viable alternatives to neoliberal financial inclusion models. Methodologically, the paper adopts a qualitative, interpretive approach combining performance analysis with ethnographic insights. By reframing indigenous performance as economic knowledge production, the paper contributes to debates on power, agency, and alternative development futures, concluding that recognizing indigenous performative systems as financial infrastructures is vital to advancing financial justice and community-led development in the Global South.

Keywords: Indigenous Knowledge Systems; Financial Justice; Community Agency; Informal Economies; Post-Development Futures