The Gig Economy’s Next Frontier: Africa

The gig economy in Africa has grown significantly as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, serving as a stopgap for consumers when businesses shut down during lockdowns, and offering employment for those shut out from formal and even informal opportunities.

The 2021 fairwork foundation reports on gig work in south africa confirms that the digital labour platforms hold the potential to reduce the extremely high unemployment and inequality levels.

Do you know that 63 per cent of the total labour force in africa engages in some form of self-employment? 

The pandemic has enabled Africa and other emerging markets to explore online gig work to increase productivity and quality of work for its large workforce

Sub-saharan Africa is the world’s you gear region, with over 60 percent of its population being below 25 years, and it comprises 13 percent of world’s workforce, after Asia 

There is more and more evidence that gig economy has the potential to complement efforts to increase formal employment and provide another avenue to meaningful engagement with the formal economy 

Flexible work, offered for low-skilled workers, can unlock significant economic benefits such as raising labour-force participation, providing opportunities for the unemployed, or even boosting productivity for millions around the world. 

When it comes to careers, a full-time job has been considered the norm in most countries. However, platform and tech companies such as Uber, Alibaba, and Google have started to undermine this long-established concept and have built their success on new business models that change the way many view work.

The industry these firms have built is often called the ‘gig economy’. Strictly speaking this is a catch-all term describing people that are not salaried employees, but work independently and get paid for each transaction or “gig” that they complete.

 In Zimbabwe, for example, it is estimated that 90 per cent of people work in the informal sector as subsistence farmers, vendors and small-scale traders. Meanwhile, 71 per cent of registered businesses consist of individual entrepreneurs, many with multiple ‘hustles’ – some entrepreneurial, some not. Overall, McKinsey estimates that 63 per cent of the total labour force in Africa engages in some form of self-employment.