Anthropologists, Geoffrey and Stephanie Hobbis, have spent the last seven years researching digital transformation trends, challenges and opportunities in rural Solomon Islands.

The researcher couple observed and participated in everyday life during their time in the Pacific island nation, and interviewed everyone from market vendors, farmers and fishers to store owners and unemployed youths.

They saw first-hand the “innovative agency” of Solomon Islanders to overcome some major barriers to access and use various forms of digital financial services (DFS), largely using smartphones.

Mr and Mrs Hobbis also observed shrewd usage of social media platforms like Facebook by rural ‘horticulturalist’ Solomon Islanders, who otherwise struggle to access traditional markets, to sell produce.

The research findings were published in the book ‘The Digitizing Family: An Ethnography of Melanesian Smartphones.’

The Solomon Islands government, with support from development partners like the UN Capital Development Fund (UNCDF), has been pushing for the wider adoption of digital technologies as drivers of economic growth and financial inclusion.

The country’s National Financial Inclusion Strategy 2021-2025 emphasizes the key role of DFS as a means to improve resilience and the livelihoods of everyday Solomon Islanders.

However, geographical barriers, poor infrastructure and low rates of digital literacy still pose a significant challenge.

Closing the digital divide – the gap between those who have access to digital technologies and the internet and those who do not – remains a major challenge, says Mrs Hobbis.

According to Mr Hobbis, despite increased digital data circulation, national policy changes informed by systematic ethnographic research were needed to ensure no-one was left behind in the country’s journey towards digital transformation.

The UNCDF Pacific team recently caught up with Mr and Mrs Hobbis for an interview about their experiences in Solomon Islands, highlighting lessons learned and brief recommendations relevant to our work.

Below are excerpts from the interview:

Please tell us about your research in Solomon Islands, including any key insights from the field?

Stephanie: Geoffrey and I have been ethnographically researching digital transformations in Solomon Islands since 2014. We did fieldwork for our respective doctorates in anthropology together, as a recently married couple. Starting in 2014, we spent our first two months living near Kukum in the capital, Honiara on Guadalcanal Island. Here we started to learn Pijin, the local lingua franca and Lau, a language spoken by 15,000 people. Then we moved to a small village in the Lau Lagoon on the northern tip of Malaita, the country’s most populous province. We observed and participated in everyday life as much as possible for eight months, everything from gardening to fishing to feasting to playing to weddings and even funerals.

Geoffrey: After six months of this, Stephanie and I began interviewing people about their smartphones for another two months. We would talk about everything inside and outside the phone, covering a whole range of social relationships in the call history function as well as the contacts list, apps and even basic functions of the phone. We also encountered a great deal of multi-media.

The use of digital financial services (DFS) is concentrated in urban areas while access in rural areas remains a challenge. However, you both observed use of DFS in rural communities too. Can you describe how rural Solomon Islanders are overcoming challenges to access DFS and the impact this is having on their lives?

Stephanie: As an example, when we wanted to access financial services, we needed to travel the 6-to-8-hour trip from the Lau Lagoon to Auki, the provincial capital of Malaita, and the closest banking location. Often enough we would arrive at the bank only to find out it was closed for staff training or, more frequently, that they were simply out of currency. Digital financial services, insofar as they involve the use of government currency, are even less accessible.

Geoffrey: However, as with most other things, Solomon Islanders exercise great agency in navigating these shortcomings. For example, phone credits are redistributed through the village as a tradeable object. In a domestic remittance economy wherein urban relatives or friends purchase and send phone credits back to home villages where it is then redistributed throughout the village in exchanges with, for example, tea packets or tins of tuna.

Solomon Islanders with smartphones have access to social media platforms, for example Facebook, which is a favourite tool for e-commerce and online trading. You have previously highlighted how Solomon Islanders are using the platform in innovative and unique ways. Can you share some insights and examples of this?

Geoffrey: Typically, what we mean when we use terms like ‘digital economy’ is the digital augmentation of industrial markets, but also to a lesser extent command and mixed market economies. But there are other economies going through their own digital transformations. There are hunter-gathers in places like the Amazon, pastoralists in, for example, Central Asia, or nonindustrial agriculturalists in tribal regions throughout south and southeast Asia. Solomon Islands, along with the rest of Oceania, are horticulturalist societies. Yes, capitalist business practices dominate in urban cores, but for the large swathes of rural jungle and bush, horticulturalism is the primary economic activity. In these contexts, e-commerce and online trading take on interesting characteristics.

Stephanie: We argue that in Solomon Islands, Facebook markets, such as the Solomon Islands Buy and Sell page, is used in a similar fashion to bush markets, where horticultural exchange takes place and trading does not primarily happen – for example, to accumulate wealth or for individual financial interests, but in a much more reciprocal way that focuses on the affirmation of social relationships. By taking these horticultural economic practices seriously, rather than simply sidelining them as ‘informal economies’ a space of critical insights and potentially highly impactful support becomes visible.

What is the potential for leveraging social media's wide coverage to increase the uptake and usage of DFS in Solomon Islands?

Geoffrey: Significant. If access to social media is easy enough, if there is affordable hardware and data, it has the potential not only to increase a sort of media literacy of DFS, but it can also be the very media in which it takes place. We have seen this with the platformization of horticulturalism in Solomon Islands. What is important for a clear understanding of digital transformations in Solomon Island society is a data-driven approach to conceptualizing economic activity, emphasizing the everyday lived realities of Solomon Islanders.

Now that there is more digital data circulating in the country, we need to spend more attention understanding the sometimes-radical changes it is caught up in. We are convinced that the best solution to this challenge is through policies informed by systematic qualitative research at a national level on digital transformations in general but also more specifically on the various ways in which Solomon Islanders have integrated especially smartphones into their economic activities. What is really important to understand here is not frequency of use, but the ‘why’ behind the use.

Stephanie: It is also important to realize that social media’s coverage remains very much constrained by access to phone credit and Islanders’ control over it. At times, telecommunication companies limit how much credit can be transferred to another phone or they charge for it. This restricts the circulation and availability of credit in rural areas, and hence also Islanders’ ability to engage with social media. In general, crossing the digital divide in Solomon Islands has been a decades long task that is still ongoing. From the grass roots connectivity of PFnet to mega construction projects, the story of connectivity in Solomon Islands is one of overcoming often challenging landscapes.