Obstacles and opportunities : the impact of the multicurrency monetary system on livelihoods and social lives in Zimbabwe

Abstract

Zimbabwe has a convoluted monetary system, resulting from the official withdrawal of the country’s fiat currency in 2009 and the government’s attempts to reintroduce it after 2013. The result has been the coexistence of different currencies and different forms of money in Zimbabwe, accompanied by disagreements about their relative value. This thesis draws on first-hand observation of the ways in which different categories of the population deal with the complexities of the monetary system with which they are confronted and which some of them help to perpetuate. The thesis shows how the multicurrency and multiform monetary system presents people with both obstacles and opportunities, depending on a multiplicity of factors. The multicurrency system adds a layer of complexity to people’s everyday lives, which they must navigate. To explore how differently positioned actors deal with money in Zimbabwe’s multicurrency system, I engaged in an ethnographic study of people’s everyday interactions with money in Zimbabwe. In line with this, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork through visiting different physical and online communities and communities of money repertoires. I employed three different ethnographic approaches – participant observation, netnography, and autoethnography – to gather data from differently positioned actors in Zimbabwe’s multicurrency system. These actors were moneychangers, runners, informal business operators, including street vendors and tuckshop operators, cross-border traders, the Zimbabwean diaspora, remittance facilitators (both formal and informal), and civil servants in several positions and ministries. The activities that animate this system are far from ideal, perpetuating and sometimes amplifying the struggles faced by the various actors within this unsustainable economic situation, but the activities allow actors to innovate and survive despite the government’s failures. It becomes clear that, in Zimbabwe’s convoluted monetary system, money is not a neutral medium of exchange issued by a benign authority. Rather, money constitutes a site of active and ongoing contestation among divergent interests, marked by asymmetries in power, access, and legitimacy. This contest cannot be neatly framed as a binary struggle between state and citizens. Instead, this thesis demonstrates the need to move beyond such oppositions, highlighting how various actors, including policy makers, bureaucrats, businesspeople, traders, and ordinary citizens, both shape and are shaped by the evolving monetary regime. Their interactions produce a constantly shifting landscape of alliances, accommodations, and tensions. One of the most striking features of Zimbabwe’s monetary configuration is the blurring of boundaries between formality and informality. Formally employed individuals increasingly build informal economic structures atop their formal jobs, leveraging dual positions to mediate risk and extract value within the fragmented system. In doing so, they challenge rigid economic categorisations and reveal the improvisational logics underpinning monetary survival. These hybrid practices speak not to the failure of formal structures but to their reconfiguration through daily acts of negotiation and adaptation. The introduction of financial technology (fintech) innovations has added yet another layer of complexity. Far from offering a seamless solution, these technologies often illuminate the infrastructural fragilities and trust deficits that characterise the broader system. While fintech can expand transactional options, it also reproduces exclusionary dynamics and introduces new forms of dependency and uncertainty, particularly in contexts where digital access, financial literacy, and institutional credibility remain uneven.