Francophone Sub-Saharan African Immigrants Organizing Tontines in Toronto: A Basis for Solidarity and Integration

Canada, like other advanced Western countries, wrestles with the challenge of immigrant integration. Canadian scholars, policymakers and service providers are tasked with finding ways to assist immigrants to find livelihood as well as a sense of belonging in their new homeland. Because of their potential to isolate immigrant groups and/or prevent them from making important connections with the broader society, ethnocultural associations may be seen as a threat to this goal. This reasoning is not unconnected with the sparsity of research on informal immigrant ethno-cultural associations in Canada. Framed by anti-Black racist and feminist epistemologies and based on data collected in semi-structured interviews, this paper explores the experiences of francophone Sub-Saharan African women who participate in mutual aid and savings groups known as rotating credit associations in English or tontines in French. While focusing on the women's informal financial support networks, the paper documents aspects of their lives as minoritized francophones living and working in Toronto. The paper also examines tontines as a transnational practice with significant benefits to both participants and their host society. Given that tontines supplement revenue, they facilitate immigrants' integration into society. Our findings show that, as informal ethnocultural associations, tontines offer participants an opportunity to overcome aspects of the economic precariousness that they encounter in the labour market, while allowing them to express solidarity with one another and to cope with the isolation that they experience as newcomers to Canada. The article sheds light on how Sub-Saharan African immigrant women in the minoritized francophone community in Toronto have reproduced practices that they used in Africa to save money for their own and their family's material needs by organizing tontines.