The Political and Moral Economy of Telecom Corporate Social Responsibility in Somalia

This article focuses on a commercial sector deeply entwined with diaspora humanitarianism: transnational Somali telecommunications. Telecom companies in Somalia are celebrated for innovations in digital finance and are powerful economic actors in a context affected by conflict and recurrent humanitarian crises. Emphasising the embeddedness of mobile money, the article analyses online content from a leading provider about its ‘corporate social responsibility’ activities. This dominant company's communications reflect and promote a moral economy of digital capitalism within a wider political economy of instability and humanitarian response. The article argues that the telecom sector occupies a distinctive infrastructural position from which it engages Somalia's population with a legitimating narrative of connectivity, empowerment, nationalism and piety. Analyses of different modes of crisis humanitarianism thus need to take into account the ideological characteristics of emergent forms of regional digital capitalism that can thrive in conditions of protracted state weakness and ongoing conflict.