Activist Bankers

Congratulations to CERN member Professor Caroline Shenaz Hossein for the publication in May 2024 of The Banker Ladies: Vanguards of Solidarity Economics and Community-Based Banks.

The book focuses on the informal co-operative banks and rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs) that have been used by women of the African diaspora for generations. It draws on twenty years of research and nearly 450 interviews conducted in the Caribbean (mainly Jamaica and Haiti, and also Guyana, Grenada, and Trinidad) and Canada (Toronto and Montreal).

Professor Hossein contends that if we are to redo business and make it ethical and accessible to everyone then we can learn much from the economic practices of cooperation that have been developed by generations of Banker Ladies.

Professor Hossein says “The women who have built these cooperative financial institutions have grabbed hold of the concept of business as a people’s concept, and in striving to secure their livelihood-based needs and counter social and economic inequalities on their own terms they show us that there is a humane way to do business.” 

From the earliest days of slavery in the Americas, women of the African diaspora have sought to organise economically, even if there were life-threatening consequences, drawing on the richness and diversity of the collective and mutual business traditions they carried with them across the Atlantic. Thus the vocabulary of this economy includes Asousou used in Niger and the Bahamas; Caixinha used in Brazil; Equub used in Ethiopia and Eritrea; Gbeh and Eso Jojo used in Benin; and Susu used in Ghana, Trinidad and Tobago, Grenada, and St. Vincent. 

The risks for Banker Ladies remains. In one chapter, Professor Hossein outlines how Black Muslim women in Toronto are labelled as terrorists and money launderers, and so they operate their Hagbad and Ayuuto systems out of sight allowing them to carry on the work of financing businesses and servicing the other economic needs of their communities

Professor Hossein says “Banker Ladies carry their ancestral money systems with them, and use them to build safe havens and places of refuge for those who suffer exclusion. The work done by Banker Ladies is part of the genealogy of finance—specifically collective finance—and it should be remembered and cited as scholars document ‘modern’ financial economies, including the ‘fintech’ sector.

Professor Hossein’s passion for the Banker Ladies and what they represent reflects her own family’s experiences, from the devastating impact that the mainstream banking sector in Canada had on her family when she was a teenager, to the work of her Grenadian-born maternal great-grandmother, Maude Gittens, a food vendor and well-respected Susu banker in Sangre Grande, Trinidad for hundreds of women. 

Professor Hossein is Canada Research Chair and Associate Professor of Global Development and Political Economy at the University of Toronto Scarborough, and she is cross-appointed to the graduate program of Political Science at the University of Toronto. She is a college member of the Royal Society of Canada, and founding member of Diverse Solidarity Economies (DISE) Collective. 

The Banker Ladies builds on a 2020 film of the same name, and her prestigious Big Thinking on the Hill lecture delivered in 2021. There's also a short YouTube video about the book, narrated by Professor Hossein. 

Jenny Cameron