Mattsson, Criscione, and Ruddick document the transaction records of the Sarafu Community Inclusion Currency in Kenya over the eighteen months from January 2020 to June 2021. The paper describes and publishes a dataset of pseudonymized account information for approximately 55,000 users and every Sarafu transaction over that period, totaling roughly 300 million units of the currency. The dataset supplies the corpus with its most substantial empirical evidence that a Community Inclusion Currency can operate at population scale, in marginalized and food-insecure areas, over a period spanning economic shock and pandemic.
What the work documents
Sarafu is the collective name for the community currencies managed by the Grassroots Economics Foundation, founded by Will Ruddick. The pattern began with the physical Bangla-Pesa in Mombasa in 2013. By the end of 2019 the system included twelve local currencies, eight in urban or peri-urban areas and four in rural areas, spanning a geography from Mombasa to Nairobi. On 25 January 2020 the twelve precursors were folded into a single digital CIC called Sarafu, delivered over feature-phone USSD interface. The 2022 paper captures the eighteen months of transaction records that followed the consolidation.
The dataset covers purchases, transfers, and participation in savings and lending groups (chamas), the rotating structures that carry the actual economic activity for most users. Chamas are the operational descendants of the older Rotating Savings and Credit Association (ROSCA) pattern, adapted to the digital ledger. One unit of Sarafu was set roughly equivalent to one Kenyan shilling.
A follow-on data collection, Sarafu Network Community Asset Vouchers 2022–2023 (Ruddick, UK Data Service, 2023), extends the record to Kenya, Cameroon, and South Africa, and documents the pivot toward Community Asset Vouchers on the Celo blockchain from 2023 forward. Ruddick’s white paper Community Inclusion Currencies (CICs): Funding Sustainable Development Goals (2021) is the design document behind the pattern.
Why it matters to the BioConomy corpus
Three specific contributions to the corpus.
The empirical proof of concept for the ground tier. The sensor-response money architecture rests on a three-tier design, and the ground tier is a CIC. Sarafu is the working case study at population scale, over multiple years, across multiple communities, with a peer-reviewed dataset behind it. The corpus can point to Sarafu when readers ask whether the ground tier is a lab curiosity or a documented functioning pattern.
The chama mechanism as commitment pooling. Chamas are traditional rotating savings and labor groups, adapted by Grassroots Economics into the digital CIC substrate. This mapping supplies the direct empirical link between commitment pooling as a BioConomy concept and mutual credit as a working monetary pattern. The chama-to-BFF pathway is one of the clearest examples in the corpus of how existing community coordination structures scale into bioregional monetary infrastructure without requiring novel institutional design.
The transaction ledger as observing signal. The Mattsson-Criscione-Ruddick dataset itself is what the community-generated data stream of sensor-response money looks like in practice. Purchases, transfers, chama participation, and savings-group activity are already a rich signal of community economic state, produced by the community’s own behavior in the currency. This is one operational answer to the wisdom question posed in the sensor-response money entry: the community’s own transaction record is part of the data the currency is backed against.
Positioned reading
The paper is a data description paper, not an argument for the CIC pattern. Its authors are careful about causal claims, and the dataset itself has not established that CICs produce the outcomes their advocates claim (poverty reduction, food security, economic resilience). Subsequent academic work on the Sarafu dataset has begun to establish some of these effects; the corpus should treat the empirical case as strong on operation and still developing on impact.
Ruddick’s white paper carries the strong version of the CIC-as-development-instrument argument. The Scientific Data paper carries the strong version of the CIC-as-observable-monetary-system evidence. Both belong in the corpus, positioned for their respective strengths.
Grassroots Economics as an organization is the operational vehicle behind the Sarafu Network. Its continued design iteration, from paper vouchers through digital tokens to the current Community Asset Vouchers on Celo, is worth tracking as the frontier of CIC design practice. The BioConomy corpus should regard Grassroots Economics as an active practitioner peer and treat its published documentation as primary source material for the ground tier of the architecture.
Related entries
Will Ruddick · community-inclusion-currency · sensor-response-money · bioregional-financing-facility · commitment-pooling · mycelial-patronage · protective-illiquidity · bioregional-economics