Emma Mavodza
Early-Career Fellow 2023–2024

Emma Mavodza (born 1986 in Masvingo, Zimbabwe) is an avid development researcher. Her academic research focuses on broad, transdisciplinary topics, including the politics of financial inclusion and exclusion, gender and development, indigenous knowledge systems, and digital financial service innovations.

Emma received her PhD from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. In her doctoral thesis, she examined the social life of mobile money in Eswatini and Zimbabwe. Based on her rich ethnographic data, she rejects some framings of mobile money as a tool for financial inclusion and demonstrates how it is grafted into the existing social relations, structures, practices, and social meanings of the adoptive communities.

During her doctoral studies, Emma received the Wits Post Graduate Merit Award and an  Erasmus+ Global Mobility Scholarship for an exchange program at the University of Agder in Norway. She has presented her work at regional and international policy dialogues and conferences in Germany, Ghana, India, Norway, and the United States. Before joining the Collegium, Emma was a ZUKOnnect fellow at the Zukunftskolleg of the University of Konstanz in Germany.