Introduction
Emigrants’ international remittances are a large, established, and crucial element of the development finance landscape (World Bank, 2023; McAuliffe and Oucho, Reference McAuliffe and Oucho2024; UNDESA, 2025). The billions of transactions constituting these cross-border flows of private capital render them a significant – albeit informal – financier of economic security and social welfare for many hundreds of millions of people in the global South. Supplementing family incomes facilitates investments in human capital – notably health and education – and, according to the optimistic account, promotes small businesses, investments, and innovations in ways that spur economic development in the migrants’ country of origin/birth (Beijer, Reference Beijer1970; De Haas, Reference De Haas2007). Underpinning these discourses seems to be an assumption that migrant (and diasporic) remittances are a stable, resilient, and sustainable source of development finance and financial security, including during times of crisis (Ratha, Reference Ratha, Maimbo and Ratha2005, Reference Ratha2006).
However, as much as migrant remittances are celebrated, they are also a source of contestation. They are cited as principal causes of senders’ financial strain, hardship, and ill-health, stoking familial tensions and facilitating financialisation (e.g., Suro, Reference Suro, Terry and Wilson2002; Datta et al., Reference Datta, McIlwaine, Wills, Evans, Herbert and May2007; Humphries et al., Reference Humphries, Brugha and McGee2009; Carling, Reference Carling2014; Yeates and Owusu-Sekyere, Reference Yeates and Owusu-Sekyere2019). Senders’ personal sacrifices and the economic hardships they endure in sustaining remittances over the long term compound the discrimination, exploitation, and racism they experience in their working and living conditions in the country of settlement (Datta et al., Reference Datta, McIlwaine, Wills, Evans, Herbert and May2007, pp. 60–61). Additionally, migration and the remittances that ensue from this can render recipients financially dependent on senders and possibly underdevelopment in the source countries (Binford, Reference Binford2003; Olufemi and Ayandibu, Reference Olufemi and Ayandibu2014), creating or widening existing inequalities there (see Koczan and Loyola, Reference Koczan and Loyola2018, p.4–5, for an overview of this literature, which also points to the opposite effects; see also Lipton, Reference Lipton1980; Rubenstein, Reference Rubenstein1992; Russell, Reference Russell1992; Binford, Reference Binford2003; Olayungbo and Quadri, Reference Olayungbo and Quadri2019).
The large and growing body of evidence on the high costs migrants endure to sustain remittances sits in stark tension with the celebratory discourses on remittances, viz, the development opportunities they open up. Addressing this tension in discourses on remittances sustainability, this study focuses on senders’ financial capabilities. The concept of financial capability has developed over the past 25 years, leaving a sizeable policy and research footprint. However, despite the increasing volume of international remittances and the expansive, multi-stranded research literature on migration and remittances, specific studies examining the dynamic relationship between remittance senders, financial capabilities, and development are relatively under-researched. Drawing on Sen’s Capabilities Approach (CA), we “thicken” existing conceptual frameworks on financial capability to foreground the extent to which senders have real opportunities to achieve what they value. This approach directs attention to the interaction of senders exerting their agency and the wider conditions enabling or constraining the familial support that the remittances are intended to achieve. Using data from a broader study of financial inclusion of Zimbabweans in the United Kingdom, the study shows how financial capabilities are an integral part of the mutually constitutive relationship between remittances and development. It also shows that financial capability can be strengthened through transnational ties at the same time while senders’ financial capabilities can be corroded by long-term remitting. These findings qualify and challenge the celebratory discourses on remittances as sustainable development finance and point to a public policy agenda tangibly grounded in the promotion of financial capability, human development, and well-being as a bedrock of socio-economic development.
The article starts by reviewing literature on key aspects of the remittances-finance-development nexus and elaborating a “thickened” financial capabilities analytical framework and the benefits it affords. The next section outlines the methods of data collection and analysis, together with the data used in this study. It also provides a brief overview of the country contexts (Zimbabwe and the United Kingdom) from the perspective of this study. After this, it presents the data and discusses the findings from it. This is organised around four key functionings in the financial capability set. The final section concludes the article, summarising key lines of argument and findings, drawing conclusions from them, and indicating their implications for future academic research and for public policy.
Remittances, financial capabilities, and human development
It is well established that remittances can be essential to assuring the financial well-being and standard of living of households and families, as well as providing significant resource inputs into economies worldwide, especially for relatively small countries with large diasporas (Medina and Cardona, Reference Medina and Cardona2010; World Bank, 2016; De Silver, Reference De Silver2018). Questions about how to harness the full macro-level development benefits of remittances and maximise remittances’ impact on sending and receiving societies, together with how remittances reveal the nature of immigrants’ economic and social ties to their countries of origin and to their families (Nyamnjoh, Reference Nyamnjoh2005; Wong, Reference Wong2006; Lindley, Reference Lindley2009; Hammond, Reference Hammond2011; Baak, Reference Baak2015; Yeates and Owusu-Sekyere, Reference Yeates and Owusu-Sekyere2019) have dominated research and policy agendas, but there has been comparatively little interest in the relationship between human development and remittances. Yet, just in the way that remittances can be transformative of opportunities available to households and families to improve their standard of living, so they can also be expected to be transformative for individual senders and recipients. Remittances are, after all, a form of saving, even if sending them is prompted by different motives (e.g., self-interest, insurance, altruism, and inter-generational investment) (Sinning, Reference Sinning2011; De Arcangelis and Joxhe, Reference De Arcangelis and Joxhe2015). The knowledge, skills, and behaviours involved in daily budgeting and longer-term financial planning and using financial services and technologies (such as money transfer technologies) are key indicators of financial capability (and, for some, of financial inclusion (BIS CPMI, 2016; Ardic et al., Reference Ardic, Baijal, Baudino, Boakye-Adjei, Fishman and Maikai2022). From this perspective, the question becomes: how does remitting money “back home” impact senders’ financial capability? Addressing this question empirically opens a window to strengthen the theoretical connection between financial capabilities and human development.
The remainder of this section examines in more detail the research literature around financial capability, with particular reference to migrants and remittances. It then moves on to discuss how research literature has addressed the relationship between human development and migrant remittances, focusing in particular on the contributions of Sen’s CA to this discussion.
The financial capability construct
The origins of the “financial capability” construct can be traced to behavioural finance and consumer research. The former broadened understanding of people’s financial decision-making processes by including the influence of personal attributes, emotions, instinct, and past experiences over those processes (Kahneman and Tversky, Reference Kahneman and Tversky1979; Lee and Andrade, Reference Lee and Andrade2011; Lucarelli and Brighetti, Reference Lucarelli and Brighetti2011; Storchi and Johnson, Reference Storchi and Johnson2016). Consumer research, for its part, engaged with the concept because the ability of consumers to make sense of increasingly complex and diverse financial services provision was increasingly regarded as a key ingredient of healthy market competition (Kempson et al., Reference Kempson, Collard and Moore2005). The financial capability construct also chimed with a growing political emphasis on personal responsibility for one’s own income security (ibid; see Kempson et al., Reference Kempson, Collard and Moore2005 and Atkinson et al., Reference Atkinson, McKay, Collard and Kempson2007 in relation to the United Kingdom; also, Nam and Loibl, Reference Nam and Loibl2021 on financial capability as a public policy issue for retirement planning in the United States). From a slow start of a handful of publications, the volume of research increased apace during the 2010s such that, by 2022, over 100 papers had been published on financial capability (Xiao et al., Reference Xiao, Huang, Goyal and Kumar2022). Over that time, financial capability has become a dominant frame in financial literacy, education, and well-being programmes in ~50 countries worldwide. It has spawned annual national surveys, a World Bank Financial Capability Survey, and an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Financial Education network (Messy and Monticone, Reference Messy and Monticone2016).
However, there is no widely accepted single meaning of financial capability. Defined variously as financial knowledge, financial inclusion, financial literacy, financial access, financial behaviour, and financial confidence (Xiao et al., Reference Xiao, Huang, Goyal and Kumar2022), financial capability is sometimes treated as a synonym for these concepts, other times as a component of them. There are also divergences in the constituent domains of financial capability and how it is measured (Birkenmaier, Rothwell, and Agar, 2022, cited in Nourallah et al., Reference Nourallah, Ohman and Hamati2024). Over the past decade, approaches to financial capability tend to incorporate financial knowledge (financial “literacy”), skills, confidence, and behaviours (Xiao and O’Neill, Reference Xiao and O’Neill2016; Xiao and O’Neill, Reference Xiao and O’Neill2018; Białowolski et al., Reference Białowolski, Weziak-Bialowolska and McNeely2021, Reference Białowolski, Xiao and Weziak-Bialowolska2023), as well as the quality of the institutional environment that variously enables or disables financial capability. A broad workable definition of financial capability that is common currency – and which we use in this article – is as follows:
The combination of attitude, knowledge, skills, and self-efficacy needed to make and exercise money management decisions that best fit the circumstances of one’s life, within an enabling environment that includes, but is not limited to, access to appropriate financial services (Microfinance Opportunities, 2015; Storchi and Johnson, Reference Storchi and Johnson2016, p. 4).
The academic literature on financial capability has also increased “dramatically” in recent years (Xiao et al., Reference Xiao, Huang, Goyal and Kumar2022, p. 3), establishing itself as a distinct research topic internationally. This literature is dominated by the United States and the United Kingdom, with considerably less attention paid to Asia and especially to Africa (ibid). Of the 215 studies that Xiao et al.’s (Reference Xiao, Huang, Goyal and Kumar2022) systematic review of the literature covered, just 5 pertained to an African country. Three of these were Ghana (Despard and Chowa, Reference Despard and Chowa2014; Wu et al., Reference Wu, Despard and Chowa2017; Ansong et al., Reference Ansong, Chowa, Masa, Despard, Sherraden, Wu and Osei-Akoto2019), one Kenya (Kagotho et al., Reference Kagotho, Ssewamala, Patak-Pietrafesa and Byansi2018) and one South Africa (Reyers, Reference Reyers2019). A further eight Africa-focused studies have been published since Xiao et al. (Reference Xiao, Huang, Goyal and Kumar2022): six from a special issue of Global Social Welfare (2023) (Ansong et al., Reference Ansong, Okumu and Koomson2023; Dako-Gyeke et al., Reference Dako-Gyeke, Abekah-Carter, Hervie and Boateng2023; Mort et al., Reference Mort, Sulemana and Kodom2023; Naami et al., Reference Naami, Mills and Abbey2023; Owuor et al., Reference Owuor, McCarthy and Kagotho2023; Tadesse and Huang, Reference Tadesse and Huang2023. Again, Ghana and Kenya are the “most favoured nations” in these studies, with additional attention on Mozambique (Tadesse and Huang, Reference Tadesse and Huang2023). Beyond that special issue, two studies stand out: one on financial literacy among informal traders in Zambia (Chibesa and Mwange, Reference Chibesa and Mwange2024) and one on the impacts of regulation of fintech on financial inclusion across 18 Sub-Saharan countries (including Zimbabwe) (Chinoda and Kapingura, Reference Chinoda and Kapingura2024). To the best of our knowledge, no academic studies of financial capability among Zimbabweans, whether living in Zimbabwe or abroad, have been undertaken.
Almost without exception, the financial capability literature focuses on single-country contexts and single social groups, with next to no cross-national comparative or transnational elements in the research designFootnote 1, Footnote 2. For this study, our primary interest is the Africa-focused studies, especially studies of African migrants, whether living in Africa or not. In this, we note that not one of the studies cited above distinguishes migration status (including any significant period abroad in people’s lives, even if resident in Africa at the point of study) within the population of interest. We found no studies of non-resident Africans from the financial capability perspective. Yet, we could reasonably expect it to be a factor worthy of investigation because, although research consistently points to how individuals with better access to financial services and stronger financial management skills are less likely to face financial difficulties, financial capability is strongly conditioned by immigration status among other social “background” characteristics – for example, gender, age, education, income, ethnicity, and disability status (Huang et al., Reference Huang, Nam and Lee2015; Xiao et al., Reference Xiao, Huang, Goyal and Kumar2022). Thus, studies have reported on differences between immigrants and “native-born” counterparts (De Arcangelis and Joxhe, Reference De Arcangelis and Joxhe2015; Khan et al., Reference Khan, Ferrer, Lee and Rothwell2021). Income-levels are also key, irrespective of immigration status: lower financial knowledge and financial behaviours are associated with economic hardship among older people (Khan et al., Reference Khan, Rothwell, Cherney and Sussman2017; Mokhtar et al., Reference Mokhtar, Sabri and Ho2020; Nam and Loibl, Reference Nam and Loibl2021), older immigrants (Nam et al., Reference Nam, Lee, Huang and Kim2014; Huang et al., Reference Huang, Nam and Lee2015; Nam et al., Reference Nam, Huang and Lee2016, Reference Nam, Sherraden, Huang, Lee and Keovisai2019), mothers, including low-income ones (Huang et al., Reference Huang, Nam, Sherraden and Clancy2016), and people of minority ethnicity (Mokhtar et al., Reference Mokhtar, Sabri and Ho2020; Yakoboski et al., Reference Yakoboski, Lusardi and Hasler2020).
Migration status is a minority topic in financial capabilities research. Eleven such studies to date specifically focus on migrants’ financial capabilities (Ashraf et al., Reference Ashraf, Aycinena, Martinez and Yang2014; Doi et al., Reference Doi, McKenzie and Zia2014; Gibson et al., Reference Gibson, McKenzie and Zia2014; Nam et al., Reference Nam, Lee, Huang and Kim2014; Seshan and Yang, Reference Seshan and Yang2014; De Arcangelis and Joxhe, Reference De Arcangelis and Joxhe2015; Huang et al., Reference Huang, Nam and Lee2015; Chen and Lemieux, Reference Chen and Lemieux2016; Nam et al., Reference Nam, Huang and Lee2016, Reference Nam, Sherraden, Huang, Lee and Keovisai2019; Khan et al., Reference Khan, Ferrer, Lee and Rothwell2021). These studies group into two main clusters. One examines the effects of financial education on migrants’ financial knowledge and financial behaviours (Doi et al., Reference Doi, McKenzie and Zia2014; Gibson et al., Reference Gibson, McKenzie and Zia2014; Seshan and Yang, Reference Seshan and Yang2014). These studies found improved knowledge and behaviours as a result of attending a financial workshop, but no significant change in the amount or frequency of remittances sent. The second cluster examines the comparative strength of financial capabilities between migrants and “native”-born populations, between permanent and temporary migrants, and between older-age migrants and younger-age migrants (Ashraf et al., Reference Ashraf, Aycinena, Martinez and Yang2014; Nam et al., Reference Nam, Lee, Huang and Kim2014, Reference Nam, Huang and Lee2016, Reference Nam, Sherraden, Huang, Lee and Keovisai2019; De Arcangelis and Joxhe, Reference De Arcangelis and Joxhe2015; Huang et al., Reference Huang, Nam and Lee2015; Chen and Lemieux, Reference Chen and Lemieux2016; Khan et al., Reference Khan, Ferrer, Lee and Rothwell2021; Xiao et al., Reference Xiao, Huang, Goyal and Kumar2022). One debate here is the extent to which remittance-senders’ and -recipients’ savings propensity is affected by socio-economic characteristics (other than income and wealth) (e.g., education, occupation, and age) as distinct from individual behavioural traits. Ashraf et al. (Reference Ashraf, Aycinena, Martinez and Yang2014), Nam et al. (Reference Nam, Lee, Huang and Kim2014, Reference Nam, Huang and Lee2016), Nam et al., Reference Nam, Sherraden, Huang, Lee and Keovisai2019), De Arcangelis and Joxhe (Reference De Arcangelis and Joxhe2015), and Chen and Lemieux (Reference Chen and Lemieux2016) found behavioural traits less important than socio-economic characteristics. Another is the influence of the duration of residence abroad. De Arcangelis and Joxhe (Reference De Arcangelis and Joxhe2015) found that temporary migrants’ savings are 26% higher than those of permanent migrants.
Just four of the migrant-focused financial capability studies focused on international remittances (as distinct from savings more generally). Three sought to ascertain the impacts of financial education workshops on remittance behaviours of participants, motivated by questions of whether financial capability increases the amounts and frequency of remittances (Gibson et al., Reference Gibson, McKenzie and Zia2014), and whether such programmes induce higher savings among remittance-receiving households (Doi et al., Reference Doi, McKenzie and Zia2014; Seshan and Yang, Reference Seshan and Yang2014). The fourth, De Arcangelis and Joxhe (Reference De Arcangelis and Joxhe2015), examined the interrelated dynamics between savings and remittances, motivated by whether migrants save more when they are temporary residents than when they are permanent. All these studies approached the subject matter quantitatively, drawing on national datasets or bespoke evaluation surveys. None of them approached it systematically through multiple domains of financial capability. There has been some attention outside of that literature on how migrants sometimes borrow money or use their savings to send remittances when emergencies arise (e.g., Lindley, Reference Lindley2009; Hammond, Reference Hammond2011; Yeates and Owusu-Sekyere, Reference Yeates and Owusu-Sekyere2019), but those findings have not been taken up by the financial capabilities literature.
In sum, the financial capabilities of migrants have received very limited attention in the financial capabilities literature, especially with regard to the effects of sending remittances. The small number of studies that do exist are focused on savings (including remittances as “savings-like choices” [De Arcangelis and Joxhe, Reference De Arcangelis and Joxhe2015]); they do not cover other financial capabilities domains. Furthermore, to the extent that financial capabilities studies have focused on migrants, they have not included African nationalities.
Human development, migration, and remittances
Multidimensional approaches to human well-being have had a major impact on how we think about development, and how people’s quality of life is “produced” and maximised. The CA is one such approach (Sen, Reference Sen1985, Reference Sen1999). Strongly focused on human agency and human potentiality (“capability”), it holds that an individual’s quality of life is conditioned not just by their income but by their personal abilities that “convert” resources they have command over into activities they value; their experiences, including associated emotions that can drive their behaviours; the opportunities they have access to, and external constraints that can limit their overall potential to flourish.
For all its strengths, the expansive literature on CA has given relatively little attention to migration and to migrants, while migration scholarship has engaged with CA only relatively recently, to the effect that “research on migration aspirations is far more prevalent than studies on migration capabilities, and…clear conceptualizations and operationalizations of migration capabilities remain lacking” (Rodríguez-Peña, Reference Rodríguez-Peña2025, p. 1). Of the limited literature on CA/migration, two clusters can be discerned. The first focuses on the capability to move and work abroad, especially to higher-income countries (Gaspar and Truong, Reference Gaspar and Truong2010; Ortega, Reference Ortega2010; Ruhs, Reference Ruhs2010; Bonfanti, Reference Bonfanti2014; De Haas, Reference De Haas2021; Eichsteller, Reference Eichsteller2021; Rodríguez-Peña, Reference Rodríguez-Peña2025). This work is primarily conceptual, where the main concern is to work out how HCA can be applied to migration. The second cluster focuses on migrants’ capabilities while living and working abroad. They are primarily empirical. Just three such studies exist (Stanley, Reference Stanley2010; Shomron and Tirosh, Reference Shomron and Tirosh2021; Consoli, Reference Consoli2024), and none pertain to financial capability (or its conceptual synonyms).
Despite this limited literature, there are several important points we can take from it. First is the importance of subjectivities and perceptions in capabilities research. As Rodríguez-Peña (Reference Rodríguez-Peña2025) argues:
migration capabilities are shaped by both individual and social factors. Different individuals might prioritize various resources depending on how they perceive their ability to migrate and what they feel they lack. Capabilities depend on individuals’ migration aspirations, their perceptions of improved well-being and their assessment of their own ability to move (Rodríguez-Peña, Reference Rodríguez-Peña2025, p. 22; our italics added).
Here, we note the paucity of studies using qualitative methods able to surface migrants’ perceptions (only Consoli (Reference Consoli2024) does this). Second is the relevance of a transnational approach to migrant capabilities. As Rodríguez-Peña (Reference Rodríguez-Peña2025) argues: “How people can mobilize their resources depends not only on the opportunities and barriers present in the country of origin (e.g., poor access to transportation) but also on those in destination countries (e.g., language requirements, specific entry permits)” (p. 22). Gaspar and Truong (Reference Gaspar and Truong2010) also hint at the same point, of needing to understand how simultaneous “here and there” perceptions of migrants’ decisions and behaviours.
The third “takeaway” is the importance of innate variability in capabilities. As de Haas (Reference De Haas2021) argued, this variability arises from different perceptions of “a good life” among people and, hence, their life aspirations – which vary hugely across social and cultural contexts. It also arises due to different abilities of migrants to use the resources they have control over and the interaction of these with context-specific conversion factors (Rodríguez-Peña, Reference Rodríguez-Peña2025). Barriers or constraints in one context can be enabling in another. This variability is even greater if we take into account how “actions and policies can have differing effects on the capabilities of different persons and even on different capabilities of the same person” (de Haas and Rodríguez, Reference De Haas and Rodríguez2010; our emphasis added). Fourth is that CA’s focus on the agentic powers of individuals cannot be meaningfully detached from structural conditions, such as infrastructure, societal structures, and social relations (Robeyns, Reference Robeyns2005; De Haas, Reference De Haas2021). The fifth point we take pertains to research methodology. Noting Rodríguez-Peña’s (Reference Rodríguez-Peña2025) comment about the lack of clarity about how to operationalise migrants’ capability sets, we also draw attention to how, in a field oriented to potentiality (“capability set”), measuring “potential” – whether partly unrealised or denied – remains methodologically challenging.
A consequence of non-dialogue between CA and migration literatures is the absence of substantial attention to financial or social remittances through an CA lens. As we noted earlier, studies of migrants’ financial capability are rare, and those focusing on remittances are rarer still. Remarkably, perhaps, none of the studies examine financial capability as a social remittance, despite a significant literature on social remittances (see, e.g., Lacroix et al., Reference Lacroix, Levitt and Vari-Lavoisier2016 and Adams et al., Reference Adams, de Haas, Jones and Osili2012 for comprehensive reviews of this literature). The single exception is Bettin et al.’s (Reference Bettin, Massidda and Piras2024) study of migrants’ entrepreneurship and financial and social remittances. That study suggests long-term residents may be more adroit at becoming financially capable and sending finance-related social remittances, but further research is needed.
Research aims and method
This article draws from a larger study of UK-residing Zimbabwe nationals’ financial capabilities. The question driving it was how does sending remittances home using mobile-money technologies affect Zimbabwean migrants’ financial capabilities?
Zimbabwe and the United Kingdom are a robust choice for country case selection. Zimbabwe is classified as a lower-middle income country (World Bank, 2022) and in the medium human development category (it had a Human Development Index of 0.550 that ranked it 159th in the world) (UNDP, 2022). Against the background of a partial and fragmented social protection system that denies half of people living in poverty access to financial support (UNICEF, 2022) and the diminishing value of benefits and pensions due to hyperinflation, emigration has become an important survival strategy for millions of Zimbabweans (Bloch, Reference Bloch2005, Reference Bloch2008; Pasura, Reference Pasura2012 Footnote 3), and the remittances they send have become an important income resource for Zimbabweans (Magunha et al., Reference Magunha, Bailey and Cliffe2009; Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, 2024). Migrants’ remittances were Zimbabwe’s second-largest source of foreign currency in 2023 after export earnings, contributing about 55% of total foreign currency receipts (Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, 2024). As a former colonial power, the United Kingdom has been among the top primary destination countries for Zimbabweans, and the United Kingdom-Zimbabwe remittances corridor is among the most significant (ibid).Footnote 4 Official statistics enumerate about 170,350 Zimbabweans living in the United Kingdom (data calculated from UNDESA, 2020); this exceeds 200,000 if undocumented migrants are also taken into account (IOM, 2006; Pasura, Reference Pasura2012). They are predominantly employed in the human health, care, and social work sectors, followed by the wholesale and retail trade sectors (Figure 1). These sectors together employ about half of the Zimbabwean migrants in England and Wales.
Figure 1. Industrial sectors where Zimbabwean migrants in England and Wales were employed in 2021.Footnote 5
Source: Compiled by the authors from the Office for National Statistics (2023) data.
For this study, we take the definition of financial capability cited earlier in this paper, per “[t]he combination of attitude, knowledge, skills, and self-efficacy needed to make and exercise money management decisions that best fit the circumstances of one’s life, within an enabling environment” (Microfinance Opportunities, 2015; Storchi & Johnson, Reference Storchi and Johnson2016, p.4). We operationalised this using Kempson et al.’s (Reference Kempson, Collard and Moore2005) concept of financial capability, with its four domains (Figure 2). Kempson et al. (Reference Kempson, Collard and Moore2005) was chosen as the most comprehensive model of financial capability developed for the country in which the study respondents lived (i.e., the United Kingdom).Footnote 6 The domain of “Staying informed” was particularly important because remittance-senders need to keep abreast of financial issues, such as foreign exchange rate fluctuations, which affect the monetary values of the remittances they send. However, Kempson et al.’s (Reference Kempson, Collard and Moore2005) framework was not adapted to the specific circumstances of migrants; nor did it take into account the digital capabilities required to navigate increasingly-complex FinTech. For this reason, we elaborated a “bespoke” conceptual schema, suited for our purposes (Figure 3). Our schema extends Kempson et al.’s four domains of functionings to also include digital financial literacy (Morgan et al., Reference Morgan, Huang and Trinh2019; Goyal and Kumar, Reference Goyal and Kumar2020; Gallego-Losada et al., Reference Gallego-Losada, García-Abajo, Montero-Navarro and Gallego-Losada2022) and finance-related social remittances, which are of direct relevance to our population of interest. These additions reflect the prevalence of FinTech in money-transfer services and Bettin et al.’s (Reference Bettin, Massidda and Piras2024) findings that social remittances are of prime importance in how senders and recipients make effective use of financial remittances. Thus, the definition of financial capability we are using is not just a capability in name, but also conceptually – and one suited to the real-world practices of international migrants. It allows us to follow through on the ways in which resources and conversion factors can constrain or enable migrants’ financial capability.
Figure 2. The four domains of financial capability by Kempson et al. (Reference Kempson, Collard and Moore2005).
Source: Atkinson et al. (Reference Atkinson, McKay, Collard and Kempson2007), p.31).
Figure 3. Financial capability as applied to migrants’ financial practices, including remittances, and individual, social, and environmental conversion factors.
The study’s respondents had lived in both a low-income country, Zimbabwe, and (at the point of the study) a high-income country, the United Kingdom. They maintained significant links with Zimbabwe and their family there. As we demonstrate, exchanges of financial advice between the respondents and their family members in Zimbabwe occur regularly and are a potential avenue for the international transfer of financial capabilities.
The study employed a qualitatively driven mixed methods design. Over 2018–2019, data were collected through an online survey (n = 347) and semi-structured telephone interviews (n = 23) with a subsection of survey respondents. Descriptive statistics were generated for the quantitative data, while theoretical thematic analysis was applied to interpret the qualitative data (Braun and Clarke, Reference Braun and Clarke2006). The research was approved by The Open University Human Research Ethics Committee (Reference HREC/2531/Nyanhete/1).
This article mainly draws on the qualitative analysis of the interviews for its data. The respondents were selected from the survey, further information about which is in Nyanhete (Reference Nyanhete2023). For present purposes, it is pertinent to note here that 79% of the survey respondents were aged between 31 and 50 years old, most had moved to the United Kingdom between 2000 and 2009, and 59% earned £2,501 or more (net) every month. This implies that our sample comprised relatively wealthy individuals, although this is subject to the known limitations of self-reported data. We selected 23 interviewees from respondents who stated they sent remittances to Zimbabwe. Seven of the interviewees were female, and 16 were male. Their age profile spread across the age range (3 were aged “21–30 years,” 9 were aged “31–40 years,” 8 were aged “41–50 years,” and 3 were aged “51–60 years”). Five of the interviewees were single (never married), 15 were married, and 3 were either divorced or separated.
We use pseudonyms to protect the identities of the research participants. Whenever quotations from our semi-structured interviews are discussed in this article, the attributes of the interviewees are summarised at the end of each interview quote as their pseudonyms, gender, age group, profession, and the year they migrated to the United Kingdom.
Findings
This section discusses our findings as they pertain to the financial capability set of the respondents. Figure 3 specifies pertinent conversion factors that emerged from our analysis of the interviews and secondary analysis of grey literature. The results in this section are discussed under five functionings, viz the respondents’ ability to: budget, save, plan for their retirement, transfer financial capabilities to their kinship “back home,” and use relevant FinTech services. The resources and conversion factors are integrated into our presentation and discussion of the five functionings. Of note is that although the original study did extend to the domains of “choosing products” and “staying informed,” they are not covered here. We acknowledge this is a limitation of this study. At the same time, our purpose is to illustrate our conceptual innovations of the financial capability construct as a means to deepen the theoretical links between financial capability and human development.
Budgeting
As outlined in Figure 2, according to Kempson et al. (Reference Kempson, Collard and Moore2005), people who are financially capable should monitor their finances and plan for foreseeable future expenses. The discussion with one of our interviewees, Tatenda, illustrates the feelings that some of our study’s participants had about the effects of sending remittances on budgeting. Tatenda was studying for a Master’s degree in the UK. He would send remittances to Zimbabwe every month to his wife, friends, and other extended family members.
Interviewer: Has the need to send remittances had an effect on your ability to budget expenditures?
Tatenda: Basically no. I think I always try to plan my expenses in time but there are some instances where you can get an emergency call, for example, someone has been sick or there is a payment which really needs to be done, or something which really needs to be fixed. There are some of those incidental expenses which just come out of nowhere. With those circumstances, this is where you have a problem in terms of budgeting, but other than that I think it has been generally fine.
(Tatenda, Male, 31-40, Postgraduate Student, 2017).
Tatenda explained that although he largely felt that the effects of sending remittances on his ability to budget were minimal, he experienced challenges with instances where unexpected emergencies like illnesses arose at home. Such emergencies required that he sends money home urgently and this negatively affected his budgeting. Some literatures have highlighted the challenges migrants experience when they have to deal with unexpected requests for money by their relatives ‘back home’ (Baak, Reference Baak2015; Ikuomola, 2015; Lindley, Reference Lindley2009; Nyamnjoh, Reference Nyamnjoh2005). Nyamnjoh’s (2005) research described how the study’s respondents were pressed through telephone calls, emails, or letters from their relatives at home who would be asking for remittances that were late. This illustrates the pressure that senders of remittances sometimes experience and brings to light potential negative effects on senders’ budgeting.
Saving
Many studies report pressure on migrants in higher-income countries to fulfil their moral obligations towards their families “back home” by sending money on a regular basis (Nyamnjoh, Reference Nyamnjoh2005; Wong, Reference Wong2006; Lindley, Reference Lindley2009; Hammond, Reference Hammond2011; Yeates and Owusu-Sekyere, Reference Yeates and Owusu-Sekyere2019). We were interested in the effects on saving rather than on economic hardship more generally. The negative effects of remitting on the respondents’ ability to save were evident in the responses from our interviewees. These obligations are certainly a social conversion factor affecting the respondents’ ability to achieve the saving function, but they are not all-determining. Indeed, the interviews evidenced varied responses. Tendayi, for example, clearly stated that the financial support he gave his relatives “back home” severely compromised his ability to save. He said:
I think [sending remittances] has definitely affected my ability to save, because to be honest I haven’t been able to save given the fact that I had to send money home because I didn’t see the need for me to have money in a bank account here saying it’s my savings, it’s my future when there was a need, an important need back home where someone was very much in need of treatment. So, it actually impacted on my savings and on my way of life. But it’s something that had to be done. So definitely, yes it has.
(Tendayi, Male, 41–50, Housing Officer, 2000).
Tendayi’s response clearly indicates how his limited savings (and thus resources) were affected by continued, long-term remitting. Kutenda, a nurse, sent remittances to her extended family in Zimbabwe and/or South Africa monthly. When asked whether the need to send money home has affected her ability to save money in the United Kingdom, she responded:
Yes, at one point I have to save for myself. My children are growing up and they will soon be going to university; and I will need to support them at one time or another. So, how long will I keep on giving people money without saving. So, I had to make a commitment for saving even for personal, my children or whatever; setting up direct payments, then with the surplus that’s when I would think of sending home or asking who is not going to school this year because of money.
(Kutenda, Female, 41–50, Nurse, 2005).
Kutenda was pushed to her commitment to saving by the realisation that the needs of her relatives “back home” would always require ongoing financial support. She chose to prioritise saving for the needs of her family in the United Kingdom over sending remittances to support relatives at home. It would be easy to surmise that these differences between Tendayi and Kutenda reflect their personal behavioural traits, but the outcomes are clearly a reflection of a strategy at some level. One such strategy deployed is strategic ignorance (defined as “a way to retreat from the information, resources, and relationships of one’s social ties in order to lessen the obligation to give” (Kusimba, Reference Kusimba2021, p. 109). The final part of Kutenda’s response hints that she could have deployed strategic ignorance to manage the persistent requests for remittances: “… then with the surplus that’s when I would think of sending home or asking who is not going to school this year because of money.”
The experiences of these two respondents shine a spotlight on an oft-neglected dimension of migrant finances. In effect, remittances are a form of saving, but they tend not to be conceptualised as such by studies of how migrants manage their day-to-day finances, taking care of family “here” and “there.” Of note, though, is that both respondents were long-term residents in the United Kingdom. Their lower (or no) savings chime with other studies’ findings that longer duration of stay is associated with lower savings levels of migrants compared with natives (Bauer and Sinning, Reference Bauer and Sinning2011), but a further study is required to systematically explore this.
Making provisions for retirement
Retirement planning is important because the rise of employer-sponsored and private defined-contributions pension plans shifts the responsibility for financial planning for retirement to workers (Lusardi, Reference Lusardi2019). It has, however, been largely overlooked in the academic research literature on migrants. One of our interviewees, Tariro, who worked in care management, sent remittances every month to her extended family in Zimbabwe. Asked how she made provisions for her retirement alongside sending remittances, she responded:
I contribute to a pension fund, so because I’m contributing to that I’m thinking maybe, maybe I’ll be covered when the time comes. But I also think I might decide to sell the house and go back home, you know when the time comes. So, I’ve all those options. I still believe from the assets that I’ve managed to acquire here, I should be able to live a comfortable life out of this country because this country is quite expensive to live in.
(Tariro, Female, 41–50, Care Management, 2002)
Contributions to a pension fund were a key component of financial preparations for retirement among many of the interviewees. However, the efficacy of those contributions is conditioned by macro-level, environmental factors, notably the economic situation in Zimbabwe. Tariro, hence, also indicated that there were other resources she was relying on to support her financially after retirement, in addition to her pension fund contributions. Financial (retirement) risk-spreading is culturally attuned, economically rational behaviour for Zimbabweans. In Zimbabwe, it has become common practice for people to make various forms of long-term savings as part of their retirement plans rather than completely rely on pension funds for support after retirement. This is due to financial losses in pension values and massively eroded value of the Zimbabwean currency as a result of the hyperinflation that took hold in Zimbabwe for a decade up to around 2008 (Toscano, Reference Toscano2011; Muronzi, Reference Muronzi2019). The financial losses were felt most by pensioners, many of whom received paltry payouts from their pension funds despite having contributed to the funds for decades, if not their entire working lives (Mazviona, Reference Mazviona2013; Mutsawu and Sarawoi, Reference Mutsawu, Sarawoi, Kararach and Otieno2016). The economic crisis corroded public trust in pension funds, insurance companies, and the financial sector at large (Muronzi, Reference Muronzi2019), and it has since then become common practice for Zimbabweans to make preparations for retirement that are independent of what employers and the state provide (i.e. they ‘bypass’ key resources such as public services in favour of private, individual arrangements). Thus, our interviewees showed how concerned they were about whether they had been making these personal financial preparations for retirement. Part of the response from our interviewee, Tendayi, highlights this: “I do not think I have been able to make any adequate savings for my retirement. I have a pension that I’m currently paying into and that is my only consolation” (Tendayi, Male, 41–50, Housing Officer, 2000).
How remitting affected financial plans for retirement was a particularly sensitive topic for interviewees aged 50 years or older. The response from Nyasha, an entrepreneur, illustrates this point. Nyasha sent remittances every month to Zimbabwe and/or South Africa to her extended family, friends, and community members. She said:
I am panicking on that because I am getting to an age whereby I need to be thinking about my own retirement, you know. When I reflect on it, I actually think that some people who are back home are even better off than I am; and yet I’ve been the giver; but when it comes to my retirement, I think that I will get a shock of my life because I will have nothing; and that really worries me.
(Nyasha, Female, 51–60, Entrepreneur, 1987)
Making financial preparations for retirement was a sensitive topic for her. Nyasha moved to the United Kingdom in 1987 and had been in the country for much longer than other interviewees, many of whom had arrived in the United Kingdom between 2000 and 2004. She had been sending remittances for much longer than the other interviewees. Another interviewee, Gugulethu, also in her 50s, similarly expressed regret for not having made sufficient financial preparations for her own retirement because of sending remittances. She arrived in the United Kingdom in 2002, and she said:
I came here in 2002 and thinking that I’m now 53 years old and starting to think that I haven’t had anything that I’ve put aside for retirement at all except the government pension that has been taken out from my salary otherwise I haven’t done that at all.
(Gugulethu, Female, 51–60, Postgraduate Student, 2002)
The interviewees’ responses surface how a whole lifetime of remitting could compromise migrants’ financial preparations for retirement, leaving them at risk of experiencing financial problems post-retirement. This is an effect of remitting the senders that has been largely overlooked in academic research literature.
Financial capabilities as a social remittance
Financial advice constitutes a key focus of advice offered by the migrant to their family “back home.” About 55% (143 out of 260) of the survey respondents who sent non-monetary remittances abroad reported that they provided finance-related advice to their family and kin “back home.” In the same vein, ~46% (54 out of 117) of the survey respondents who received non-monetary remittances from home indicated that they received finance-related advice from their relatives and kin in Zimbabwe. Further exploring these exchanges, we asked about the nature of that advice in the interview. One interviewee, Anesu, illustrated the kind of advice that was transferred between the respondents and their kinship “back home.”
Interviewer: … Do they [relatives in Zimbabwe] ever advise you on financial issues too?
Anesu: No, they don’t. They think I know it all because I’m good at it. So no, they don’t really. Of course, they will like tell me if there is an opportunity that I could be interested in like there is property being sold or something like that; they do definitely. That kind of information.
Interviewer: Alright. And the moral support etc that you mentioned, how valuable do you find this?
Anesu: I think it is very valuable in the sense that distance separates [us] and the context of life becomes different and obviously there are things that we being this side of the world have learnt some stuff and one would also like to transfer that knowledge and understanding; whether it’s things to do with living, things to do with coping and whatever challenges you would want to assimilate that and sort of share the bit to the level that it can be understood and [be] useful to people back home. So, I find it very, we have thanks to WhatsApp, these platforms where as a family we confer and we actually have discussions; some of them very useful, some of them silly. But yes, it is an important part of family unity; it’s a day-to-day kind of thing where you share, communicate. Yes, it is very important.
(Anesu, Female, 41–50, Consultant, 2009)
The interviewees largely concurred that they were usually the ones who gave financial advice to their relatives “back home.” However, the relatives in Zimbabwe would also advise the interviewees when they intended to invest at home. The relatives at home were more knowledgeable about the prevailing economic environment in Zimbabwe and could advise the interviewees when they wanted to invest at home. Our study hence appears to suggest that the transfer of financial capabilities through financial advice shared between migrants and their relatives “back home” is reciprocal in a significant minority of cases. Both the relatives “back home” and the migrants stand to benefit from the mutual exchanges of financial advice.
Use of relevant FinTech services
The rapid advancement and growing prevalence of financial technologies for sending and receiving remittances requires that digital financial literacy be incorporated into an overall conceptualisation of migrants’ financial capability (Figures 2 and 3). “Digital financial literacy is a combination of financial literacy and the skills to use digital devices/technology to handle money transactions” (Goyal and Kumar, Reference Goyal and Kumar2020, p. 21). Although a considerable share of international remittances is still sent through informal and “traditional” money transfer channels, mobile money-enabled international remittances (MIR) (international transfers delivered electronically to a financial account held on a mobile phone) have increased significantly over the past two decades (Scharwatt and Williamson, Reference Scharwatt and Williamson2015; Farooq, Reference Farooq2017; Raithatha and Storchi, Reference Raithatha and Storchi2025). By 2024, over two billion registered accounts were recorded, two-thirds of which came from Sub-Saharan Africa, mainly in East and West Africa. Since 2020, the number of such accounts in Sub-Saharan Africa has doubled (Raithatha and Storchi, Reference Raithatha and Storchi2025). Worldwide in 2024, there were 28 million registered mobile money agents (up 20% compared with 2023), again mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa, cashing in USD356 billion (ibid). Still, mobile money accounts for a small minority – 4% – of global international remittances, and its country and population coverage are far from universal (Nyanhete, Reference Nyanhete2023; Raithatha and Storchi, Reference Raithatha and Storchi2025).
At one level, digital financial literacy obviously conditions the use of FinTech services such as MIR. However, being digital finance literate comes at a price that is not immediately obvious. Compared with informal or formal channels (“bricks and mortar” money transfer outlets), the resources needed to enter the MIR market and use the services are “outsourced” to users and agents who are widely distributed geographically. Transferring money digitally is inherently individual and not amenable to cost-sharing through collectivisation. On top of the price of equipment (for users, a smartphone), resources are needed to purchase energy to charge the phone and pay the agent fees for each transaction. Digital financial literacy may be an achieved outcome, but this outcome is realised by a complex combination of resources and individual, social, and environmental conversion factors that are, furthermore, locationally specific (Figure 3).
Thus, using MIR, for example, requires both people involved in the transaction (sender and recipient) to be digital finance literate, or at least conversant with mobile money services. If they are not, a digital finance literate social intermediary must be found to facilitate the transaction: a trustworthy, reliable person with the mobile money skills needed to operate the service that sends or cashes out the remittance (cf. Morvant-Roux et al., Reference Morvant-Roux, Barussaud, Reuse, Compaoré and Ilboudo2017).Footnote 7 We asked whether our interviewees were comfortable with using MIR when sending remittances to elderly recipients “back home.” The intention was to find out whether elderly relatives there could transact using the MIR service themselves or required assistance to do so. Shingirai is typical of several of our interviewees who confirmed the need for social intermediation when sending remittances through MIR:
No. I was not, because of the technology required around that. I know my grandmother cannot manage to go and get money, or even use the phone to see how she can manage to take the money from the phone, or to go and use it to buy. So, when it comes to the old like my granny, grandfather etc, I have been using to send them either cash or I either send through another relative who can manage to extract that money from the phone and give them as hard cash.
(Shingirai, Male, 41–50, Entrepreneur, 2000)
The response from Shingirai illustrates the point that digital financial literacy is not just an “achieved functioning” in the financial capability domain, but a key conversion factor (Figure 3). An individual’s functioning is highly dependent on social conversion factors: their embeddedness in local social networks and the availability of a trusted social intermediary to assist with completing the transaction when needed.
The infrastructure needed for money transfer services to operate in both the migrant-sending and migrant-receiving countries is an environmental conversion factor. In this case, the infrastructure required for the use of MIR notably includes coverage of mobile phone networks, a reliable (if not constant) energy supply to power phones and data centres. It also extends to coverage and accessibility of FinTech money services in the countries of residence of the sender and the receiver (Figure 3).
The macroeconomic operating environment within which the FinTech services are offered is also a major environmental conversion factor. At the time of the fieldwork for the study, macroeconomic challenges hindered the use of MIR in Zimbabwe, notably, liquidity problems and poor currency stability in the country. Liquidity challenges made it difficult for recipients of MIR to convert the electronic remittances they would have received into hard cash. The situation was worsened by the instability of Zimbabwe’s national currency, influenced by high inflation and foreign exchange risks. These challenges discouraged the use of MIR in the country.
Consequently, in the Zimbabwean case, contextual factors like macroeconomic challenges, government regulatory policies (e.g., a tax that was levied by the government on MIR and other electronic money transfers), and market practices (e.g., cash-out fees or money charged by MIR service providers when MIR recipients withdrew remittances from their electronic wallets) discouraged the use of MIR and made transnational families prefer alternative remittance methods like the “traditional” collection of remittances as hard cash (Nyanhete, Reference Nyanhete2023). Hence, the MIR service was not widely used among marginalised groups in Zimbabwe, particularly people living in rural areas and women, which limited the contribution of MIR towards the attainment of financial inclusion goals (ibid).
Discussion and conclusion
This study has innovated an expanded CA-derived analytical framework that incorporates resources, conversion factors, and “functionings” of direct relevance to migrant senders of international remittances. It has also undertaken the first-ever analysis of UK-resident Zimbabwean remittance senders’ financial capabilities, drawing on survey and interview data. Our study provides significant empirical findings relating to how international remittance fields are structured. First is the adverse impact of remitting on the senders’ financial capabilities in the dimensions of budgeting, saving, and preparing for retirement. None of our respondents reported being able to save as much as they would have liked, especially for their retirement, although we discerned that some had been able to ensure a degree of financial protection for themselves. Second is that FinTech services’ provision of a reliable remittance-transfer service has substantial limitations. Interview respondents reported significant difficulties in cashing out money by the recipients of the transaction in the lower-resource setting of Zimbabwe. These two findings alone necessitate qualifying celebratory discourses on the migration-development nexus. Indeed, we found a range of contingent factors that can make a difference as to whether or not there are sufficient financial resources to be sent, and whether the financial remittance is successfully received and rendered into a usable form by the intended person (or people). A complex mix of resources together with environmental, social, and personal “conversion factors” needs to be securely in place at both ends of the remittance transaction in order for that transaction to be successful. The third finding from this study pertains to the necessity of a transnational perspective on remittance senders’ financial capability. “Staying informed” and “choosing products” rely on the maintenance of “remote” presence in the country to which the money is being sent, be it to track currency fluctuations or choose investments. Knowledge gained by the remitter from staying regularly in touch with family “back home” is, we suggest, a key social remittance. It is also a reverse remittance, where the direction of travel is from the (poorer) country of origin to the (richer) country of destination. We found no evidence of financial capability functioning being taught by the sender and/or learned by the receiver of remittances.
Our study and findings generate new ways of looking at the much-studied phenomenon of migrants’ remittances. We bring fresh insights into these international financial transfers that play such a huge part in development finance. Looking at them from a capability and human development approach underlines the agentic and transnational features of financial transactions and how knowledge is actioned within tangible social (relational and material) contexts that span international borders. Although a lot of remittances are thought to still be sent through informal routes, formal channels – and especially digital ones – are of great significance. In a digital age, however, being financially capable is necessary but insufficient. As we have highlighted, “old” and “new” technologies must combine in complex ways for current FinTech services to successfully enable migrant remitters to get money from A to B. However, FinTech is subject to continual change, and becoming and/or remaining digital finance literate is a lifelong learning process requiring on-going investment.
Before concluding this article, we note the limitations of our data. As explained earlier, we undertook secondary analysis of primary data collected by one of us (Nyanhete, Reference Nyanhete2023). While our new analysis benefitted from an enhanced CA-based conceptual infusion of financial capability, it also generated some weaknesses in our data. One issue is that the original data were generated for a different purpose than this study, so there are inevitably some data gaps in this study. We are conscious that these gaps pertain especially to two of the financial capability functionings, notably staying informed and choosing products. A further limitation is that the primary data covers remittance senders only. The original study excluded remittance recipients due to problems gaining official access to Zimbabwe to undertake primary fieldwork. This exclusion impacted the data by rendering the remittance recipients’ perspective invisible, precluding an in-depth examination of financial capability as a social remittance, and obscuring the complex cashing-out processes at the recipients’ end of the FinTech-mediated transaction. For these reasons, we cast our findings as illustrative in this article.
Our findings nevertheless highlight potential avenues for future empirical and theoretical research that can broaden and deepen existing understanding of migration financial (and other) capabilities (Rodríguez-Peña, Reference Rodríguez-Peña2025). First, building on our insight that senders and recipients in a FinTech-mediated monetary remittance transaction require some degree of financial capability and digital capability for it to complete, a question arises as to how both parties involved gain the skills needed for that and how they experience it. Multi-sited research, perhaps involving concurrent verbal and visual interviewing, would be vital to surfacing relational dimensions of financial capability, comparing different perspectives of the sender and recipient(s), and understanding the complex dynamics of identity, family and national identity (re)formation that unfold across geographical distance.
Second, our emphasis in this paper on the “here and there” socio-cognitive links and processes involved in migrants’ financial capability gives rise to the question as to what extent and in what ways is there a distinct transnational realm in achieving the functionings we highlighted in Figure 3. Social remittances have not been studied in relation to the full range of financial capabilities before, but our study suggests the process of becoming financially capable may constitute a social remittance, and one that is created in transnational spaces. Future research could focus on how ‘here and there’ cognition, attachments and investment are expressed in the act of learning to become (and remaining) financially capable. This would enrich social remittances literatures by adding a transfer not previously considered. It would also constitute a meaningful building block in the path to an empirically-strengthened and theoretically-enriched field of capability and human development research that embraces the insights afforded by a methodologically transnationalist analytical lens.
A third strand of study builds on our finding that financial capability is differentiated, such that individuals can build or strengthen some “functionings” just as others diminish. Being financially capable is not static; it can change over time, and is, in theory, actionable. A key question arising from this is how far migrants’ financial capability is conditioned by personal factors (ability, motivation, and intended and actual duration of stay abroad) as compared to socio-economic (e.g., disposable income and strong social networks) and/or environmental factors (e.g., communications and energy infrastructures) and the role of resources in these conversions to functionings. This can inform advocacy of holistic approaches to building financial capability across a population, in ways that include but go beyond individual financial education and broadening access to services, and support for the most vulnerable groups. Focus on the collective infrastructures upon which these strategies for attaining financial capability in a digital age ultimately depend needs to be retained. Environmental “conversion” factors are all too often overlooked by a focus on the skills of the user or customer interface, but, as our paper has shown, are an essential factor in financial capability, most especially in a digital age.
Overall, this study has advanced understanding of a key research issue at empirical and analytical levels: how migrants’ financial capabilities are affected by monetary remittance-sending. It extends the empirical base from the small number of studies of migrants’ financial capability and adds a new country/ nationality (Zimbabwean) case study that starts to rectify the pronounced research bias towards rich countries in the Global North. Furthermore, in the context of an expansive literature distinguishing between instrumental or intrinsic and substantial aspects of capabilities (cf ‘central human capabilities’ (Nussbaum, Reference Nussbaum2000, Reference Nussbaum2011); ‘capabilities that people value and have reason to value’ (Sen, Reference Sen1985, Reference Sen1999)), this paper contributes to a fuller understanding of the instrumental value of financial capabilities in realising intrinsically-valuable human functionings for both senders and recipients (e.g. housing, health, social participation). The paper provides new empirical and conceptual-theoretical insights that are of great relevance to and significance for capability theory more broadly.
Analytically, our micro-level, qualitative focus on remittance senders’ financial capability and, by extension, human development potential provides an alternative vantage point in a context where the migration- and finance-development nexuses have tilted towards migration aspirations and strategies and macro-level political economies of volumes and impacts of remittances. By looking at the migration-development nexus from a capability perspective, we have surfaced interesting and potentially productive new avenues for migration and (financial) capability research. Most immediately, on-going dialogue and collaboration between these fields of study is needed, with the overall aim of elaborating the theoretical, conceptual, and operational dimensions of migrants’ financial capabilities and financial capability-related human development occurring under conditions of an ever-more integrated world comprised of extensive, dense transnational lives, links, and social relations.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by The Open University International Development and Inclusive Innovation Strategic Research Area.
The authors are grateful for the support given by the United Kingdom’s Office for National Statistics in helping source data about the sectors that UK-based Zimbabwean migrants work in. This paper benefitted from the feedback from the peer reviewers and from Dr. Tania Burchardt. The authors take full responsibility for any error of interpretation.
Disclosure statement
The authors declare none.
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