Extract

The digital continent is a no-holds-barred look at Africa’s crucial role in the digital world of work. Organized into seven chapters and based on fieldwork in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, and Uganda, the book examines the impact and working conditions of workers involved in the digital economy. Whether contributing to the emergence of autonomous vehicles or artificial intelligence, machine learning systems or next-generation search engines, the authors, Anwar and Graham, show that Africa is a central production node.

Their overarching argument is that the digitalization and fragmentation of production processes brought about by the internet age have enabled an African information economy to integrate into global production networks. However, alarm bells are sounded about potential structural barriers to value creation, a scenario exacerbated by the uneven economic landscape of digital labour.

The book theoretically follows the talk of ‘interdisciplinary trading zones’ (p. 8) by bridging the gap between the fields of economic geography and development studies. While it reveals the uneven geographies of digital work through the former, it scrutinizes the impact of the digital economy on workers in Africa through the latter.

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