On writing about money and diaspora

Some notes about content design in the remittance space

This is based on a talk for the Stockholm UX Writing and Content Design meetup on the topic of The Language of Care. It was held on 11 November 2021 and was organised by Jane Ruffino, Janté Diaz, and Cattrina Mott. Co-panelists were Candi Williams, Mara Clarke, Rob Forrester, and Michael Conlon.

Stockholm UX Writing and Content Design’s “The Language of Care”. Original illustration by Elizaveta Guba.

Big thanks to all involved, both organisers and co-panelists. And an even bigger thanks to those who most helped shape these ideas: my colleagues. These notes are drawn from my experience and research but rely heavily on conversations with the folks I work with — designers, localisers, customer support agents, developers, community managers, and others — who are always ready to think about what care means in the context of remittances. Special thanks to Abdikani Yabarow, Andreas Nylander, Bridget Homem, Faraz Ali, Jonte Edvardson, Katie Skagerlind, Mansoor Ahmad, and Mine Demir.

Remittances as care

As end-users, we generally come across fintech products the same way as we do our own banking: it’s about my savings, my payments, or my investments, at most, my part of a shared bill for a dinner with friends. So even when fintechs are revolutionising banking or democratising finance or whatever they’re doing, we largely see this operating at the scale of the individual.

Remittances, which is the specific aspect of fintech that I’m currently working in, are very different. For those who are unfamiliar with remittances, here’s the Wikipedia blurb: “A remittance is a non-commercial transfer of money by a foreign worker, a member of a diaspora community, or a citizen with familial ties abroad, for household income in their home country or homeland.” [1]

So we’re essentially talking about economic migrants from lower- and middle-income countries of the Global South, who live and work in higher-income countries of the Global North and are sending money to their countries of origin.

But what’s important here is that remittances are about networks. So rather than functioning at the individual scale, remittances are a type of economic transaction that operates at the collective scale.

Of course, this is because diaspora is about networks. Even in more desperate circumstances, humans don’t usually migrate in a vacuum. If we migrate out of economic necessity, we usually go to where we have cousins and neighbours, where we know it’s safe because someone from our town moved there, or where a friend’s friend found a job.

So what happens with remittances is that it’s rarely a 1:1 relationship, of me sending money to one single person I support in my country of origin. Instead, remittances usually cluster both senders and recipients. Sometimes, multiple people support a single person abroad. Sometimes, a single person supports multiple people. Other times, people remit as a group, so one person will collect the money from various sources, often in the different countries in which that diaspora has settled. Then that person will send the money to another person in a receiving country whose responsibility it may be to further redistribute the money across a web of people.

For many people in receiving countries, remittances are a lifeline without which they would not be able to pay for housing, education, medical care. As an example, in Somalia, a country we focus on at work, it’s estimated that nearly half the population relies on remittances from the diaspora. And according to the World Bank, in 2020, the global value of remittances hit 540 billion USD [3]. That amount far outnumbers global overseas aid and foreign direct investment combined. And in moments of crises (natural disasters, global pandemics, etc.) migrants send remittances much quicker than governments or NGOs can send foreign aid.

So it doesn’t seem particularly controversial to me that we consider remittances as a form of care.

But remittances are care not because they support individual people, but because they create networks of support. Anthropologist Laura Hammond argues that remittances constitute a “web of obligations” that bind diasporic individuals to their communities of origin but also to the diaspora itself. According to her, the acts of sending and receiving remittances “are a medium for negotiating and reinterpreting social relations”. They’re an economic transaction with lasting social significance. [3]

Remittances can be seen as a form of care because they maintain, create and renegotiate vast, transnational systems of care. In this sense, care is fundamentally about networks. Or in other words, care is about interdependence.

It’s along these lines that the author collective behind The Care Manifesto sees care as a “politics of interdependence”. At some point in the book, they take this further by talking about the need for care to be “promiscuous”. That is to say, care shouldn’t be reserved for “our own” as in our own family, our own kin, but that our sense of both family and kin can expand to include strangers or even the non-human. [4]

How this applies

So how does any of this apply to content design and UX writing? How do we write with care for this situation?

We do so by remembering that this form of care — remittances — is also ambivalent and often given under duress and difficult circumstances.

• We’re writing for people who are often under pressure to send money. These are “obligations”, as Laura Hammond described them. In many communities, there is the expectation of remittances so the person living abroad is expected to support family in their country of origin. People who remit may be in precarious working conditions and have to borrow money to send. There’s also the pressure that remittances wreak on couples who, on a low or single incomes, may have to choose which side of the family to support.
• We’re writing for people who, more often than not, are subject to racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and other forms of violence. Who have had to deal with national bureaucracies that, by and large, place hurdles in their path when it comes to accessing housing, work, healthcare, the right of abode, and the guarantee of civil rights. This, of course, at a time of an increasingly fortified Europe with ethno-nationalist ideology and anti-immigrant rhetoric on the rise. And we know well how black and brown people, especially immigrants and refugees, are spoken of in our media landscapes.

In practice, writing with care can be done in a variety of ways. I’ve collected a few notes:

1. Don’t equate sending money with care. While I’ve been arguing that remittances are a form of care, I also think that saying this in customer-facing copy can add pressure for the user. As we’ve seen, many people already feel obligated to remit. It’s not our job to add further pressure or guilt-trip users into sending more cash, maybe more than they can afford or want to send because we consider this ‘care’. So we’re careful not to praise people in celebratory moments such as when money is sent because we don’t entirely know what state they’re in. Are they happily sending money or is this a banal monthly obligation? Or are they stressed because they just paid for a loved one’s emergency surgery? Or resentful because they were pressured into sending money to their least-favourite cousin? We don’t know so we shouldn’t presume. Customers don’t need to be lauded for sending money.
2. Reject saviourism. Remittance service providers, certainly Europe-based ones, should not be in the business of “helping Africa” or “stabilising nations” or whatever. It’s patronising at best and neocolonial at worst.
3. Prioritise localisation and decentre English. Bring localisation into the design stage, give localisers the space and time to give feedback on copy. And then take their feedback seriously, and allow English to be inflected by localised content. English is by no means an Anglo-American commodity. It hasn’t been for quite some time. Depending on the sources, non-native speakers of English are either double or triple the number of native speakers of English. And this is not to mention all the people who are actually native English speakers but whose accents and birthplaces don’t coincide with what is considered ‘good’ or ‘proper’ English.
4. Emphasise belonging. Or at least doesn’t exclude people based on our own ideas of where someone’s “home” is. So don’t use formulations like “send money back home”. Even the term “migrant” is exclusionary because it implies that someone is not from wherever “here” happens to be for me. Of course, “home” also becomes an even more complex concept when we talk about second or subsequent generations of migrated people.

Then what?

The blurb for this meetup talks about care for our users but also for ourselves. And that’s what I want to briefly turn to in my final few minutes. How can we care with and care for ourselves and our colleagues? This is especially when so many of us work in the for-profit space which, by its very nature, is not often especially caring.

Here is where I think diasporic communities can provide guidance. One aspect of diasporic economic life is the ayuuto or hagbad, Somali terms for what in English is known as a Rotating Savings and Credit Association (ROSCA). The term ayuuto actually comes from the Italian aiuto for “help”, from back when parts of present-day Somalia were an Italian colony. In fact, ayuuto exist in various forms and in multiple languages and spaces across the world: chit funds in India, panderos or juntas in Peru, or hehui 合會 in the Chinese-speaking world. They operate as informal or semi-formal savings and credit schemes in which family and friends contribute a set amount of money to a collective fund. Either at a predetermined point in time, or in an emergency, each person is allocated their share of that fund. This is basically mutualism, an idea we usually believe started in 19th century France but has far older and more scattered origins.

Ayuuto and other forms of mutual aid work not simply because they bypass banking or other formalised structures of power, but because in doing so they create expansive networks of mutual support, obligation, and care.

So in caring with and for ourselves and our colleagues, I think we do well in turning to the collective principles underlying ayuuto: that we create equivalent spaces for mutual support and obligation to one another. That we do things like advocate for our colleagues, openly discuss compensation, and join — or even form — unions. Essentially, that we work to strengthen our interdependence.

[1] Laura Hammond (2011) “Obliged to Give: remittances and the maintenance of transnational networks between Somalis at home and abroad,” Bildhaan: An International Journal of Somali Studies: Vol. 10, Article 11. https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/bildhaan/vol10/iss1/11

[2] “Remittance”, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remittance (retrieved 2021/11/10)

[3] “Defying Predictions, Remittance Flows Remain Strong During COVID-19 Crisis”, World Bank, 2021/05/21. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2021/05/12/defying-predictions-remittance-flows-remain-strong-during-covid-19-crisis

[4] The Care Collective (2020) The Care Manifesto: the politics of interdependence, Verso. https://www.versobooks.com/books/3706-care-manifesto