Vanessa Opalo
Assistant Professor
Vanessa Watters Opalo is an anthropologist in the Science, Technology and International Affairs Program (STIA) at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and in the Department of Anthropology within the College of Arts & Sciences.
She studies the ways that finance, broadly defined, is incorporated into projects of economic welfare and development.
Her current book project examines credit-grating institutions and the rise of the cooperative lending movement in Togo, specifically, and the West African region more broadly. This research is organized around the concept of credibility—how people, institutions, and governments work to define the limits of what is and isn’t credible. This work considers the politics and ideologies of credit and debt across the landscape of banks, cooperatives, microfinance agencies, and religious organizations as they provide and also limit access to financial services.
Vanessa has a second ongoing research project on insurance markets in Africa. One aspect of this project examines the tools and practices that microinsurance providers use to screen prospective clients and build risk profiles. This research will contribute to a larger project that considers insurance— historically—as a financial technology crafted by and for different actors across colonial and postcolonial periods as assurance against imagined risks.