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Paper short abstract

This paper explores Zimbabwe’s fintech sector as a ‘shadow innovation system’ emerging from economic chaos. Using qualitative fieldwork, it uncovers how digital finance enables adaptive agency, informal development, and the remaking of financial citizenship-innovation under structural uncertainty.

Paper long abstract

Radical monetary fluctuations, including hyperinflation, devaluation, and fluctuating exchange rates, characterise the Zimbabwean economy. The financial sector in Zimbabwe is unstable, leading to the development of a thriving fintech industry operating in a grey area. This paper illustrates that fintechpreneurs, M-Pesa agents, and citizens in both Harare and Bulawayo are conducting financial experiments that exhibit resilience and resourcefulness, which deserve appreciation.

Method: a qualitative research design using semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and digital transaction mapping to explore three research themes: (1) fintech services such as Ecocash, Zipit, & Mukuru, and emerging cryptocurrencies addressing conditions; (2) informal mobile money services as a coping mechanism to address shortages of cash and foreign exchange; (3) multi-currency exchange and informal exchange rates employed through fintech platforms to stabilize household and small business finances.

Theoretically, building on evolutionary innovation systems and Southern theory approaches, it constitutes a “shadow innovation system” – it is more than a hack, an infrastructural support of economic activities in conditions of uncertainty. Its recognition acknowledges local intelligence and creativity in innovation driven by necessity at the margins of the economy. This research makes significant interventions in thinking about innovation studies by highlighting how Zimbabweans remake development trajectories in uncertain environments and how fintech serves as a living lab in which financial citizenship is produced out of state failure. This study provides new theoretical and empirical approaches to understanding the politics of innovation in conditions of uncertainty, highlighting how survivability, resiliency, and subversion mediate innovation in the Global South.