1 Hopes and Realities of the Digital

In 2000, there were almost ten times as many internet users in Belgium than in all of East Africa (Roser et al., 2015). The latest estimates from 2020 suggest that there are 590 million internet users in Africa (Internet World Stats, 2020), representing a penetration rate of around 47 per cent—the lowest in the world. Furthermore, while in 2005 there were only 87 million mobile phone subscriptions in the whole of Africa (ITU 2019), today, the continent has some of the highest mobile phone penetration rates in the world, with rates well above 100 per cent in some countries, as many people own multiple sim cards to offset peak call charges, through which a majority access the internet. The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has estimated over 800 million mobile phone subscriptions in Africa in 2019 (ITU 2019).

Such tremendous diffusion of information and communication technologies (ICTs), including mobile phones, computers, and the internet, has led observers to examine the myriad ways in which technology-driven political, economic, social, and cultural transformations are happening on the continent (e.g. Adera et al., 2014; Africa Partnership Forum, 2008; Britz et al., 2006; Buskens and Webb, 2009; Butare et al., 2013; Chowdhury, 2006; Diga and May, 2012). Many see digital technologies and their adoption on the continent as a stimulus for Africa to connect more closely with the world digital economy. Indeed, digital technologies are acknowledged as a powerful driver of socio-economic transformation on the continent, as described by Dr Hamadoun Touré, former Secretary General of the ITU:

ICTs are truly transformational. With the power of technology, we can educate every African citizen, right across the continent. With the power of technology, we can open new opportunities and create new well-paid jobs for our people. With the power of technology, we can deliver healthcare services to every African citizen, even in the remotest villages. And with the power of technology we can empower African women and leverage the fantastic energy and passion of young Africans. This is not just a pipe-dream: this is real.

Touré, 2013

The potential of digital technologies to transform the political and economic landscape in Africa is deeply entrenched in the thinking of such organizations as the World Bank, which sees digital technologies as allowing people to access goods and services, and therefore as crucial in strengthening the continent’s economies (Yonazi et al., 2012). A recent issue of Africa’s Pulse, the World Bank’s biannual publication on the outlook of the African economy, states that ‘the digital transformation of Africa would foster economic growth and reduce poverty. It has the potential to create more jobs, encourage entrepreneurship among the youth, increase farmers’ productivity, bring more women into the labour force, and create markets’ (Calderon et al., 2019: 3). Such is the confidence around the emergence of the digital economy that some commentators argue that Africa’s place in the world economy will be redefined, as it transitions into the so-called ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ (Nsengimana, 2018). The African Union (AU) Commissioner for Infrastructure and Energy, Dr Amani Abou-Zeid, has recently commented that ‘All the stars are aligned for Africa to take advantage of Revolution 4.0 and digitalisation’ (World Bank, 2019a).

This does not suggest that a digital economy has become either pervasive or prevalent across the continent. As we will later show, there exists a highly uneven pattern of engagement with the digital economy. For example, the cost of accessing the internet on the continent remains high in comparison to the rest of the world. According to the Alliance for Affordable Internet (2019), there is a wide disparity in the cost of 1 gigabyte of mobile broadband data on the continent, with the cost in Egypt just under 1 per cent of the average monthly income, while in the Democratic Republic of Congo the cost is about a third of average monthly income. In two of the continent’s largest economies, Nigeria and South Africa, it costs 1.58 per cent and 2.3 per cent of average monthly income, respectively. In the continent as a whole, it averages around 8 per cent, while the world average is 5.76 per cent. There also exists a divide in terms of internet access between rural and urban areas in Africa, with rural populations 58 per cent less likely to have access (GSMA, 2019a). These divides can also be seen in the various forms of digital economy activity that are emerging on the continent. In 2019, an estimated 618 technology hubs—(i.e. organizations offering infrastructure support for technology start-up companies and digital entrepreneurs—were active on the continent, with almost half of those hubs present in just four countries, namely Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, and Egypt (GSMA, 2019b). The rise of digital labour platforms has also been heralded as revolutionary for the continent’s unemployment problem, as these platforms connect workers to economic opportunities around the world (Kuek et al., 2015). However, according to our own calculations, in 2019, almost all (92 per cent) of the African workers registered on the biggest digital work platform came from just seven countries, namely Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Kenya, South Africa, and Nigeria.

In fact, the very uneven development of Africa’s digital economy has led us to engage critically in this book with the wider debate around digital technologies and economic development—commonly referred to as the ‘information and communication technology for development’ (ICT4D) discourse (Unwin, 2009, 2017). While critical research has already pointed out the potential and limitations of ICTs in the African context (see, for example, Adera et al., 2014; Aker and Mbiti, 2010; Asongu, 2013; Attwood et al., 2013; Bornman, 2016; Carmody, 2013a; Diga and May, 2012; Donner, 2006; Etzo and Collander, 2010; Mamba and Isabirye, 2015; Molla and Heeks, 2007; Muto and Yamano, 2009; Okpaku, 2006; Oyelaran-Oyeyinka and Lal, 2006; Taylor, 2016), much of the focus so far has been on the impact of ICTs on the traditional sectors of the economy, such as manufacturing, tourism, and agriculture (Anwar et al., 2014; Foster et al., 2018; Murphy and Carmody, 2015). The newly emerging activities of the digital economy in Africa—and its associated digital labour—have received less attention. The book addresses this issue.

By digital economy, we mean ‘that part of the economic output derived solely or primarily from the application of digital technologies with a business model based on digital goods or services’ (Bukht and Heeks, 2017: 12). Most of these activities involve human labour. ‘Digital labour’, by contrast, has attracted a more varied set of conceptualizations. Heeks (2017) presents a useful schema of the ways in which the term is understood and used. There are multiple definitions to the term, for example, ‘waged and unwaged work undertaken on digital media’ (Scholz 2012); ‘the organisation of human experiences with the help of the human brain, digital media and speech in such a way that new products are created’ (Fuchs and Sevignani 2013); ‘digitally-mediated service work’ (van Doorn 2017); ‘work done in an online labour market where (1) labour is exchanged for money, (2) the product of that labour is delivered “over a wire” and (3) the allocation of labour and money is determined by a collection of buyers and sellers operating within a price system’ (Horton 2010); and ‘work done in online labour markets that bring together buyers and sellers of intangible knowledge and service work’ (Lehdonvirta et al., 2014).¹

While these definitions are helpful and certainly illustrate the fact that work is changing and becoming more digital in nature, ‘digital labour cannot be regarded as a discrete form of labour, separated hermetically from the rest of the economy’ (Huws, 2014: 157). There are two points to consider here. First, there has been an explosion of all sorts of work required to keep the machinery of the digital economy going—for example, production of tangible goods such as computers, cables, batteries, etc., much of which still requires human labour (see Fuchs, 2014). Second, the contemporary digital economy is increasingly reliant on ‘hidden value‐generating digital practices’ (Gregory, 2017), which some have described as ‘ghost work’ (Gray and Suri, 2019). This behind-the-scenes work can be found in telemediated services (Benner, 2006; Gareis et al., 2006) and various other forms of new digital tasks including machine learning, software development, transcription, proofreading, and search engine optimization (Anwar and Graham, 2020b; Tubaro et al., 2020). Many of these activities can in theory be outsourced to locations around the world to be performed by humans.

For Huws (2014), an appropriate way to understand digital labour is to recognize the growing division of labour in the contemporary digital economy—in part driven by the easy fragmentation of digital production into smaller tasks—and for digital labour to be geographically relocated to different parts of the world. The work during the early twentieth-century assembly line production (e.g. car assembly) would typically be done under one factory roof. However, some work has become digital in nature, meaning that digital tasks can be performed by workers around the world with minimum requirements—essentially, basic computing skills, computers, and an internet connection. Common examples of such work include transcription, and the image annotation/tagging work described in the Prologue. In other words, the emerging digital production landscape has become ever more complex, often opaque, and has the potential to expand into new locations. Some of these new locations are now in Africa. We therefore use the term ‘digital labour’ in this book to describe types of work activities involving the paid manipulation of digital data by humans through ICTs such as mobile phones, computers, laptops, etc.; in so doing we emphasize the centrality of human labour in the makings of digital capitalism. We also emphasize the role of geography in the ways in which digital work is organized and managed across a range of newer locations which have not previously been considered central to the global digital economy.² Our focus in the book is on two key forms of digital economy activities in Africa: business process outsourcing (BPO), and the remote gig economy.

Business process outsourcing is understood as the practice of a firm contracting out some of its non-core services or functions to a different specialized firm or firms. It involves both the domestic and foreign relocation of these services, commonly referred to as onshore or offshore outsourcing, respectively (see Bryson, 2007; Troaca and Bodislav, 2012). While this process of sourcing of services has been going on for decades, advances in digital technologies since the 1990s have radically altered the spatial organization of production—and hence the geographic and sectoral reach of global services sourcing as new actors join global networks (Beerepoot et al., 2017; Peck, 2017). The BPO industry that emerged in India and the Philippines in the 1990s has had a great impact on local economic development in these two countries (Bardhan et al., 2013; Dossani and Kenny, 2009; Kleibert, 2015). More recently, some of this offshoring work has moved into various countries in Africa. In particular, the growth of mobile phone subscriptions has led to the emergence of a domestic market serving BPO operations, particularly customer services centres across a number of countries on the continent (Anwar and Graham, 2019; Graham and Mann, 2013). However, apart from a few reports produced by management consultancies (e.g. Deloitte, 2015, 2016; Everest Group, 2012; Frost and Sullivan, 2018) and a handful of scholarly works on BPO operations in Africa (for example, Anwar and Graham, 2019 Benner, 2006; Kleibert and Mann, 2020; Mann and Graham, 2016), not much has been written about the African labour involved in this industry.³ This book contributes to the emerging literature by focusing in part on entry-level activities such as call and contact centre work which includes diverse range of activities e.g. inbound and outbound customer service, technical support, back office admin functions, digitization, etc. in Africa.

The second focus of the book is the remote gig economy. The gig economy can be understood as a system of economic exchange whereby organizations and individuals come together to get a variety of work done via digital transaction platforms acting as intermediaries (see Lehdonvirta et al., 2019; Woodcock and Graham, 2019). Digital platforms enable transactions between buyers and sellers of a particular service or tasks digitally through their proprietary platforms or websites. An estimated 4.8 million workers have already performed various types of gig economy tasks in just seven countries on the African continent (Insight2impact, 2019). We use the term ‘gig economy’ to refer to the work tasks that are digitally mediated or transacted through a multitude of digital platforms and that can be delivered either remotely or performed locally. The term ‘gig’ refers to the short-term nature of the work, with tasks lasting from a few minutes to several months. Conceptually, we acknowledge a range of competing understandings of the gig economy, such as microwork, online outsourcing, crowdwork, etc. (see Heeks, 2017), but we stress explicitly the geographical and digital focus of the term and distinguish between two types of gig work: ‘remote work’ that is geographically untethered (e.g. transcription and graphic design work secured via platforms such as Upwork) and ‘geographically tethered’ work which is geographically sticky and performed locally by workers (for example, ride-hailing apps like Uber) (Graham and Anwar, 2018a, 2018b, 2019). Our focus in the book is on remote work. That is, where workers apply for and carry out a variety of remote jobs for clients who themselves can be located anywhere in the world. Some of these tasks include article writing, virtual assistance, transcription, and machine-learning and search engine optimization, which can be perfomed by workers either via platforms or through firms (e.g. BPO firms). With increasing diffusion of digital technologies, and rising internet penetration in low- and middle-income regions of Africa, there is a potential for more of this labour to be performed across the continent.

The core question we attempt to answer in this book is as follows. How are these new digital economy activities influencing African workers’ lives and livelihoods? To address this question, we undertake a geographical and political economic analysis of the consequences of digital labour for African workers. Empirically, we draw on in-depth qualitative evidence gathered from African call and contact centre operations and the remote gig economy to analyse paid digital work and its flows, networks, geographies, and development implications in five African countries, namely: Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, and Uganda.

The selection of our five case study countries was strategic, and they represent a diversity of experiences and contemporary development challenges, such as growth in joblessness, unemployment, income inequality, and high levels of informal employment. We also wanted to cover places where both types of digital work activities, i.e. business process outsourcing and remote work, are happening in Africa. We conducted fieldwork in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, and Uganda between July 2016 and November 2017 (see Appendix for more details).⁴

Concerning the state of digital work in these countries, Ghana and Kenya are noted for their potential for digital outsourcing activities in various management consultancy indexes, and South Africa remains a top destination for international BPO work in Africa. Other countries, like Nigeria and Uganda, face serious challenges, and in several cases, we found some BPO operations closing down. Our five case countries account for 40 per cent of the labour supply from the African continent on the biggest digital work platform in the world, Upwork. Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa have some of the highest concentrations of platform workers in Africa (only Egypt had a higher number of registered workers on Upwork from Africa, at the time of data collection), but by contrast, Uganda and Ghana are still catching up.

Our case study countries also have some of the fast-growing information technology sectors on the continent, with Kenya, for example, heralded as a ‘Silicon Savannah’ in the popular press (Financial Times, 2016). Kenya’s tech-hub ecosystem is big, with forty-eight hubs (GSMA, 2019b), over 200 start-ups, and a valuation of US$1 billion (Mallonee, 2018). Our five case study countries account for 40 per cent of all the technology hubs currently in Africa. South Africa has a highly developed information technology infrastructure and ranks fairly highly on the ICT Development Index in comparison to other African countries—only outranked by Mauritius and the Seychelles.

All five countries are also quite varied in terms of development indicators. Nigeria and South Africa are the two biggest economies on the continent, and are classed as middle-income countries; however, both have high income inequality. In South Africa, the Gini index (a measure of income inequality) has remained persistently above 60 per cent, and in a recent study, Chatterjee et al. (2020) found that the wealthiest 10 per cent of the South African population owns 86 per cent of the aggregate wealth. Furthermore, they find that half the adult population survives on near-zero savings. While South Africa fares better on the human development index, Nigeria fares very low, largely due to the unstable political situation marred by violence and terrorism in the northern parts of the country. Ghana is also a middle-income country, is fairly stable politically and economically, and ranks highly in various socio-economic indicators in comparison to its West African neighbours. Uganda is a low-income country and is classified as very low on the human development index (162nd of the 189 countries for which data are available), with poverty rates standing at 41 per cent in 2016 (World Bank, n.d.). Table 1.1 summarizes the key development indicators of our case study countries.

Theoretically, this book bridges research in the fields of economic geography and development studies—what Vira and James (2011) have referred to as ‘interdisciplinary trading zones’ (also see Barnes and Shepard, 2010)—to engage with the intersections between these disciplines. Economic geographers are typically concerned with geographical enquiry into the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services (Clark et al., 2018). They have long used concepts like space, place, and positionality to make sense of contemporary economic globalization and the uneven distribution of production activities around the world (Barnes, 1989; Coe and Yeung, 2015; Dicken, 2011; Harvey, 1982, 1989a; Massey, 1995; Scott, 1988; Sheppard, 2002; Storper and Christopherson, 1987). However, the emergence of information technology and its increasingly important role in the production process has led some observers to describe an altering of the geographical landscape of production—perhaps most famously in Thomas Friedman’s assertion that the world has become ‘flat’. In other words, this heralds the so-called ‘death of geography’ (Ohmae, 1990) as globalization and digitalization render obsolete various key factors for structuring of production processes, such as physical proximity to the market. In this view, a relational understanding of space is much more helpful, i.e. space is seen as emerging from social relations (Massey, 2005), rather than being a mere physical quantity. It draws attention to the actor networks formed through the subtle blending of digital technologies and human actors, which are then implicated in the ‘active construction of space and place, rather than making it somehow redundant’ (Graham, 1998: 174). The underlying point is that even in the highly technologically mediated production systems and markets of the digital economy, geography still matters. In this book, we highlight uneven geographies in digital economy networks. We then draw on conceptual frameworks within the sociological research and development studies literature (e.g. job quality) to examine digital economy’s developmental impacts on workers on the African continent.

There are two main advantages to the bringing together of many disciplines into discussion of Africa’s digital economies. First, by bringing the lens of economic geography into the study of Africa’s digital economy, we can examine the continent’s place in the contemporary world of digital work. We will show that there exists an emerging market for a variety of digital work activities, which presents economic opportunities for African workers that are unequally distributed. It also enables us to broaden the scope of analysis of digital capitalism into low- and middle-income regions. Second, having a multidisciplinary focus improves its utility for public policy. This is hugely important, given the high rates of poverty and unemployment across the continent, which forces governments to uncritically adopt narratives around digital technologies as a panacea for economic development without appropriate empirical evidence. We hope this book will enrich the debates around the role of digital technologies in effecting a broader structural transformation of the African labour force—an aspect that is often neglected in the ICT4D literature.

Practically, this book has two central arguments. One is that digital capitalism is bringing some jobs to Africa but is also generating uneven economic geographies. Historically, the outsourcing of economic production (primarily industrial manufacturing) was done from a handful of geographical locations around the world. Because of the tangible nature of industrial activities involving movements of raw materials and finished goods over long distances, a number of factors—socio-political, cultural, and technological—have generated uneven economic geographies of production. Digital technologies are expected to have an equally profound impact on the way economic production is spatially organized. The digitization of production processes generates new digital forms of value, such as IT-enabled services. Much of this value remains geographically untethered and can therefore move around the world much more easily than, say, industrial goods. As a result, new places have been brought into these digital networks—most notably, places like India and the Philippines (Beerepoot et al., 2017; Kleibert and Mann, 2020), but also a number of countries across Africa. By examining the economic geographies of business process outsourcing and the remote gig economy in these countries, we are able to unveil processes of integration and marginalization (e.g. political, economic, social, and technological infrastructures) to highlight uneven developments on the continent as it is brought more closely into the circuits of digital capitalism.

The second central argument we present is that while digital capitalism is bringing much needed jobs to Africa, the use of digital technologies is also enabling so-called ‘digital Taylorism’ in contemporary workplaces and digital work platforms, where management and control techniques are being applied with increasing efficiency. This is simply the latest manifestation of the scientific principles introduced by Frederick W. Taylor in the early twentieth century to organize work on the factory floor. This revolution in organizational efficiency was laid out in Taylor’s book ‘The Principles of Scientific Management’ (1911), and is still referred to today as Taylorism or Taylor’s Principles. By breaking complex jobs into simpler ones, managerial control of workers could be increased, as could quantification of worker performance, and thus linking of wages to performance. These techniques were widely adopted both in the assembly line production of the early twentieth century (Frobel et al., 1981; Lipietz, 1987) and the BPO industry of the late twentiethth century. Indeed, since the 1990s, call and contact centres have become synonymous with Taylorist control systems, with research done on BPOs around the world showing high levels of monitoring, commodification of work, and a lack of work autonomy (Taylor and Bain, 2005; Woodcock, 2016). Some have equated work organization at call and contact centres with an ‘assembly line in the head’ (Taylor and Bain, 1999), or even to an ‘electronic sweatshop’ (Garson, 1988).

Much recent research is documenting how the use of digital technologies is altering work, labour processes, workplaces, and employment relations (Aroles et al., 2019; Bonekamp and Sure, 2015; Gandini, 2019; Kellog et al., 2020; Prassl, 2018). The Economist (2015a) has noted that Amazon’s use of Taylorist techniques to measure its workers in order to achieve maximum efficiency embodies a new trend of ‘Digital Taylorism’. This form of digital control is also very much evident in the global gig economy, where managerial control of workers through the use of technologies and algorithms is quite common (Gerber and Krzydwinski, 2019; Kellog et al., 2020; Anwar and Graham, 2020a, 2020c). In essence, Digital Taylorism is seeping into various forms of low-paid informal work (Krishna, 2019; Wonolo, 2019), which has great development implications in many low and middle-income countries, where informal work is the dominant form of employment opportunity (International Labour Organisation (ILO), 2018). While digital technologies have been leveraged in a variety of workplaces since the 1990s in order to achieve efficiency, the latest drive also affects working conditions (Anwar and Graham, 2019; Taylor et al., 2013). This fundamental tension between efficiency and working conditions raises questions about the limits of digital technologies in bringing about a positive socio-economic transformation of labour on the continent.

One of the underlying arguments we want to make in our analysis of BPO work and the gig economy in Africa is that these work types are only made possible because of the commodification of work. We would also argue that the digital Taylorism that sustains these digital economy activities is more powerful and more dehumanizing than earlier versions, mainly because technological innovations have given management the ability to control labour processes remotely, allowing Taylorist principles to be exerted from far beyond the place of production (Frischmann and Selinger, 2017). In more practical terms, we will pinpoint and discuss a number of bottlenecks or challenges to a sustainable and equitable transformation of the lives of African digital workers.

Among many policy institutions, development organizations, and management consultancies, there is an implicit assumption that many of the changes we see in contemporary work organization are technologically driven, and hence inevitable (for example, see European Commission, 2019; Mckinsey & Company, 2016; Manyika, 2015; World Bank, 2016). However, we will argue that these changes in the world of work are also (even largely) political and economic. In organizational studies, there has been a shift away from technologically deterministic explanations of technology use in organizations (e.g. Lawrence and Lorsch 1967; Perrow, 1967; Thompson 1967; Woodward, 1958) towards socio-material, institutional, and practice-driven views of technology-induced organizational change (eg. Barley, 1990; Leonardi, 2013). Some scholars have, for instance highlighted the inseparability of the technical and social aspects of work and organizations (see Orlikowski and Scott, 2008). Leonardi and Barley (2010), in their review of the application of technology in organizations and further suggest that scholars should pay closer attention to the geographical variability of social dynamics, to the dynamics of power, and the role of institutions in shaping technological trajectories. Such geographically sensitive and socially constructed explanations of digital technologies, we posit, can help advance understanding of the nature of digital work, especially regarding the uneven geographies of contemporary digital economy. More importantly, it will hopefully build social consciousness and help shape political and regulatory responses to the normalization of Taylorist techniques in the digital economy.

Following this introductory chapter, in Chapter 2 we discuss Africa’s digital connectivities to understand the nature of digital production networks on the continent. The objective of this chapter is to examine continuity and change in the extractive nature of contemporary capitalism in Africa. The overall argument is that the internet is bringing globalization to Africa, and the resulting digitalization and fragmentation of production processes have enabled an African information economy to emerge and integrate into global production networks. However, there is a danger of African economies getting locked structurally into a system of value extraction, which will ultimately impact workers’ livelihoods.

To explore this, we first carry out a brief overview of the colonial and post-colonial linkages of the African continent with the world capitalist economy. A number of studies have shown that Africa’s underdevelopment is a result of poor articulation in the global political economy (Bond, 2006; Carmody, 2010; Rodney, 2012) rather than due to its physical distance from core economies or lack of market access. Indeed, many hope that through the rapid adoption and diffusion of digital technologies, Africa’s adverse articulation can be reversed, and the continent put on track for economic development. This is best symbolized in the ICT4D (European Commission, 2017; Unwin, 2009) and ‘data for development’ (D4D) discourses (Mann, 2018). One uncritical assumption among some of the studies is that digital technologies are transforming Africa’s place in the global economy, and are also having a progressive impact on its workers (e.g. World Bank, 2012, 2013b, 2016). While it is true that technological revolutions have transformed the production landscapes of the twenty-first century by bringing various places into the ambit of capitalist production, we argue that it is the nature and type of integration that is key to understanding the development implications of increasing digitalization.

In Chapter 3 we present a vivid account of the economic geographies of the emerging digital economy in Africa through an examination of the production, distribution, and consumption of digital goods and services in Africa. The underlying objective of this chapter is to provide a visual and descriptive outline of call and contact centre work and remote gig work in Africa, revealing a highly uneven landscape of informational capitalism. We argue that geography matters for the networks and flows of the global information economy, and the way that labour is allocated within it. In doing so, we ask what type of remote/digital work gets done in Africa, and what that means for value creation and capture across the region.

Drawing on our empirical work on BPO firms in our five case study countries, we first examine and analyse the geographies of the outsourcing industry, the nature and types of activities taking place, and the level of integration with global outsourcing production networks. We point to the uneven development of the African outsourced services industry. For example, South Africa’s outsourcing industry is more outward looking and has a deeper connection with international buyers than Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, and Uganda. In some cases, such as in Kenya and Ghana, international BPO operations have shut down, due to companies moving abroad in search of cheaper locations. While there has been a certain lifting of technological barriers (such as internet connectivity), other political and socio-economic bottlenecks, which are preventing the region from moving into high-value added functions (e.g. upgrading), still remain. That is, the uptake of digital technologies does not necessarily transform the power relations and political–economic structures of global production networks in such a way as to allow African firms to participate equally in the global information economy.

The final part of the chapter deals with the rise of the African gig economy. By sourcing data from, Upwork, which boasts over two million registered workers worldwide, we provide an empirical and visual account of the geography of remote work in Africa through mapping of remote work activities. Upwork is the go-to platform for African workers to source gig work, although most workers set up profiles on multiple platforms, including Freelancer.com, Fiverr, and PeoplePerHour. We find there to be a highly uneven distribution of remote work across the continent, with only a handful of countries accounting for the majority of the African workers registered on Upwork. This uneven geography is also represented globally, with the United States, India, Pakistan, and the Philippines accounting for more than half of the global labour supply on Upwork. Our argument here is that while in the world of digital work there exists the possibility of a planetary-scale labour market, it is very far from being a level playing field (Graham and Anwar, 2019). Digital labour markets are characterized by multi-scalar and asymmetrical technological, political, social, cultural, and institutional factors, which can lead to an uneven geography of labour both in Africa and beyond.

With CEOs in the Global North proclaiming that ‘location is a thing of the past’ (Upwork, 2018) and governments and civil society in Africa promising to create millions of digital jobs on the continent, we need to understand that geographies still matter to the flows of digital work and to the lives of the African workers who undertake these activities. More importantly, the emergence of digital jobs has wider development implications.

Chapter 4 conceptualizes the developmental impact of new digital work activities by drawing from the literature on the quality of work (e.g. ILO, 1999, 2014; Green, 2006; Kalleberg, 2013). While this framework has its theoretical origins in high-income countries, there are certain commonalities to be found in low- and middle-income regions. We therefore conceptualiseize the impacts of two digital economy activities (namely call and contact centre work, and remote gig work) on African labour in terms of income, autonomy at work, worker power, freedom of association, economic inclusion, skills upgrading, and labour agency.

Chapter 5 examines the developmental impacts of digital jobs on labour in Africa. It frames several key questions: Who does this type of work? What factors determine who does it? And how do these jobs impact workers’ lives and livelihoods? We provide a detailed description of the labour processes involved in both platform-based remote work, and call and contact centre work. This we believe is key to understanding how workers perform different types of digital jobs, and how this affects their well-being. We draw on interviews with workers to explore the lived experiences of African digital labour. One of the key arguments we make is that while digital work can certainly bring a degree of freedom and flexibility to African workers’ lives, it can also contribute to precarity and vulnerability.

We discuss various forms of social divisions such as class, gender, and race, and how these shape the way workers get access to digital work. We also stress that there is no straightforward narrative about positive or negative outcomes, but rather a great variety of lived worker experience—shaped by workers’ socio-economic, political, and cultural backgrounds, education levels, and types of work activities. That said, there is an element of agency involved, and workers have the ability to create ‘fixes’ for their own production and reproduction and to influence their working conditions.

Chapter 6 examines the agency of African gig workers to shape their own labour geographies. By incorporating various strands of research on labour geography, this chapter asserts that labour agency, as understood in the existing literature, needs further conceptual and theoretical development that speaks for emerging digital work activities and the labour that goes into them. We theorize agency not just in the form of collective and organized action, but also in the way in which workers are able to exert individual and unorganized agency in digital workplaces. These can be understood as the everyday actions and practices of workers, described as ‘hidden transcripts’ by Scott (1990) in his portrayal of subaltern resistance in the face of power. We also place specific focus on agency practices that extend beyond the realm of production into the realm of reproduction, i.e. worker homes and the new digital communication spaces that provide workers with an outlet for their voices to be heard and for mobilizing collective action. In doing so, we highlight a number of ‘fixes’ created by workers beyond their workplaces in response to capital’s tendency to undermine their labour. However, we show how these agency practices are shaped and restricted by a number of factors, including the socio-economic background of workers and the types of work activities they undertake.

Chapter 7 brings together several key threads and arguments made in the book to discuss what the future of work means for the African continent and how to create a fairer world for labour. Here we note that the future of work in Africa is still emerging and emergent vis-à-vis the processes of digital transformation. If that future is to contain decent jobs and fair outcomes for African workers, we need to ensure that we appropriately understand the transnational networks in which those jobs are embedded. Here we propose the idea of a planetary labour market in digital work. Planetary labour markets transcend the spatial boundaries that constrain the convergence of employers and workers, but that is characterized by multi-scalar and asymmetrical technological, political, social, cultural, and institutional factors. This allows us to think about labour futures in such scenarios.

We end the chapter by asking the following. Does a planetary market for digital work mean that African workers can transcend some of the constraints of the local labour markets in which they are embedded, or will they continue to suffer from those constraints? There is no simple yes or no answer. However, the opportunities and constraints placed on labour power must be better understood if we are to create a better future for African workers. Finally, we draw attention to the key role that political actors (e.g. the state) and civil society (third sector organizations and advocacy groups) can play in ensuring that digital work contributes positively to workers’ lives. We also call for greater involvement of labour unions in expanding the way they organize workers, especially in thinking about cross-national ways of fostering solidarities and worker voice. In summary, we need to understand that economic production is embedded in socio-political and cultural contexts, and that state institutions are required to govern and regulate it. It is those institutions, together with trade unions and civil society organizations, that must rise to the challenge of not just thinking at a planetary scale, but also acting at a planetary scale if we want labour markets to represent anything other than a global race to the bottom.