Digital Labour at Economic Margins: African Workers and the Global Information Economy

Abstract

In discussions about the locations that make up the key productive nodes of the digital economy, Africa workers rarely gets a mention. The main aim of this briefing is to make visible the invisible and bring light to the role African workers are playing in developing key emergent and everyday digital technologies such as autonomous vehicles, machine learning systems, next-generation search engines and recommendations systems. Once we acknowledge that many contemporary digital technologies rely on a lot of human labour to drive their interfaces, we can begin to piece together what the new global division of labour for digital work looks like and build a greater socio-political response (both at the global and local scale) to make some of these value chains more transparent, ethical and rewarding.

Keywords: Digital Labour, Gig Economy, Gig Economy, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Search Engine Optimisation, Future of Work, Africa