The prices of development. An ethnographic account of a randomized pricing experiment in East Africa

This article, based on ethnographic research, explores the material conditions of price realization, in the context of a poverty-reduction intervention implemented in rural areas of an East African country. It describes a pricing experiment conducted by development economists on people living in extreme poverty, with real money. Using pricing as an analytic prism, I discuss the politics of a market-based poverty-alleviation project. The goal of the experiment was to identify a price that ultra-poor, off-grid consumers would be willing to pay to acquire a solar light. It consisted of testing different prices simultaneously and led to a situation in which participants within the same village were offered to buy the same object at a randomized price. The paper details the operations through which prices were turned into experimental objects and analyses the consequences of the particular way in which prices were materialized. As a result of the experimental pricing process, prices were carefully detached from the solar lights for sale, and carefully attached to randomly selected people. I show that beyond testing the villagers’ ability to pay a given price, the experiment aims at testing their ability and stimulating their desire to behave as payers in general.