Risk, Data, Alignment: Making Credit Scoring Work in Kenya

Credit scoring is an increasingly central and contested domain of data and AI governance, frequently framed as a neutral and objective method of assessing risk across diverse economic and political contexts. Based on a nine-month ethnography of credit scoring practices in Nairobi, Kenya, we examined the sociotechnical and institutional work of data science in digital lending. While established regional telcos and banks are leveraging proprietary data to develop digital loan products, algorithmic credit scoring is being transformed by new actors, techniques, and shifting regulations. Our findings show how practitioners construct alternative data using technical and legal workarounds, formulate risk through multiple interpretations, and negotiate model performance via technical and political means. We argue that algorithmic credit scoring is accomplished through the ongoing work of alignment that stabilizes risk under conditions of persistent uncertainty, which takes epistemic, modeling, and contextual forms. Extending work on alignment in HCI, we show how alignment operates as a two-way translation, where models are made “safe for worlds” while those worlds are reshaped to be “safe for models.”