Remittances are increasingly central to development discourses in Africa. The development sector seeks to leverage transnational migration and rapid innovations in financial technologies (fintech), to make remittance systems cheaper for end-users and less risky for states and companies. Critical scholarship, however, questions the techno-fix tendency, calling for grounded research on the intersections between remittances, technologies, and everyday life in African cities and beyond. Building on this work, we deploy the concepts of “micro-worlds” and “migrant infrastructure” to make sense of the complex networks of actors, practices, regulations, and materialities that shape remittance worlds. To ground the work, we narrate two vignettes of remittance service providers who operate in Cape Town, South Africa, serving the Congolese diaspora community. We showcase the important role of logistics companies in the “informal” provision of remittance services and the rise of fintech companies operating in the remittance space. These vignettes give substance to the messy and relational dynamics of remittance micro-worlds. This relationality allows us to see how remittances are circulations, not unidirectional flows; how they are not split between formal and informal, but in fact intersect in blurry ways; how digital technologies are central to the story of migrant infrastructures; and how migrants themselves are compositional of these networks. In doing so, we tell a more relational story about how remittance systems are constituted and configured.

中文翻译：

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汇款微观世界和移民基础设施：流通、中断和资金流动

汇款在非洲的发展话语中越来越重要。发展部门寻求利用跨国移民和金融技术（金融科技）的快速创新，使汇款系统对最终用户来说更便宜，对国家和公司来说风险更低。然而，批判性学术质疑技术修复趋势，呼吁对非洲城市及其他地区的汇款、技术和日常生活之间的交叉点进行扎实的研究。在这项工作的基础上，我们部署了“微观世界”和“移民基础设施”的概念，以理解构成汇款世界的参与者、实践、法规和物质的复杂网络。为了开展这项工作，我们讲述了在南非开普敦为刚果侨民社区服务的汇款服务提供商的两个小插曲。我们展示了物流公司在“非正式”提供汇款服务中的重要作用，以及在汇款领域运营的金融科技公司的崛起。这些小插曲为汇款微观世界的混乱和关系动态提供了实质。这种关系使我们能够看到汇款是如何流通的，而不是单向流动；它们如何不分为正式和非正式，但实际上以模糊的方式相交；数字技术如何成为移民基础设施故事的核心；以及移民本身如何构成这些网络。在这样做的过程中，我们讲述了一个关于汇款系统是如何构成和配置的更相关的故事。