(Illustration by Hugo Herrera)
Roughly six months into the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of international media outlets reported on a silver linings story in Uganda. A Kampala woman who had lost her logistics job during the shutdown founded a new, all-women ride-hailing app called Diva Taxi, hiring dozens of Ugandan women, many who were also laid off or furloughed, providing these workers an economic lifeline and women riders a safer option for travel.
It was part of a broader explosion of digital platform work in Uganda over the past three years, as new app-based food delivery services took off, the country’s ubiquitous “boda-boda” motorcycle taxis were repurposed to deliver contraceptives to people stuck at home, and hair stylists and other small business owners took to advertising on digital platforms and media while their shops were closed.
In some ways, these developments were transformative. By 2021, a survey by the Centre for Global Development found, 60 percent of Ugandan youth had become involved in the platform gig economy. The cofounder of the Centre declared that balancing multiple gig jobs was the future of employment for young Ugandans. But in other ways, it was old news for a country in which 92 percent of total employment is in the informal economy—a category that long predates gig work, and which is defined as any employment where workers lack access to government social and labor protections through their jobs.
In much of the world, informal work is simply what most work looks like. In 2021, the International Labour Organization (ILO) estimated that some 2 billion workers, representing more than 60 percent of the global adult workforce, are part of the informal economy. In developing countries, that percentage can be much higher. And in many countries, women compose the majority of the informal workforce, through occupations like domestic and home-based workers, street vendors, market traders and waste-pickers. As Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO) has pointed out, although mainstream economists tend to cast the informal economy as either a small collection of “plucky entrepreneurs” or people engaged in illegal activity, in fact, in many developing countries, the informal economy is the real economy.
What, then, does it mean when digital labor platforms come to those countries?
In Uganda, even before the pandemic, there were high levels of unemployment in the formal, government-regulated job market, and the informal economy has been the main driver of national economic growth for decades. But COVID-19 caused even greater unemployment, as millions lost their jobs. As in much of the world, the pandemic forced people onto digital platforms in order to survive, both through finding new ways to ply their trade while in-person commerce was closed, but also because most emergency government assistance came through digital payment systems, giving workers no option but to embrace the internet. Some of this story is positive, but much of it is not.
A year into the pandemic, Saqib Munir, an executive at the food delivery app Glovo, declared that “the gig economy is the future of work” in Africa. Writing in Ugandan newspaper The Independent, Munir argued that gig work was “becoming increasingly important as a potential pathway to socio-economic development and employment creation, given Africa’s unique status as the continent with the youngest population but the highest youth unemployment rate.” Citing ILO estimates that there could be 830 million unemployed youth on the continent by 2050, Munir suggested gig work was the solution, calling to reexamine “the conventional wisdom that informal markets must transition into formal markets.”
But while gig platforms began to boom in Global South nations like Uganda during the pandemic, workers did not benefit in the same way. Workers in informal employment already lack key legal protections, social benefits and bargaining power, which make them more vulnerable to exploitation and precarious work arrangements. Technology can exacerbate these problems, giving platform owners new ways to exploit workers and evade labor laws, controlling workers’ labor conditions in ways that are often opaque and abusive, through policies workers have no say over. Some digital platforms use algorithms to determine wages and workers’ hours, or to monitor their performance, leading to unpredictable pay and working schedules, poor working conditions, and little job security. Many digital labor platform workers must take on multiple gigs in order to make a living, and still end up in debt.
Many gig workers also lack meaningful ways to address disputes or assert their rights, since they’re often shut out of traditional means of organizing for better conditions. In many countries, gig workers are effectively excluded from existing unions, either by policy, since many unions require members to have full-time contracts, or de facto, since many union members are hesitant to ally with people working on platforms that disrupted their industries, as with ride-hailing apps’ impact on the traditional taxi and public transportation sector. And when gig workers have sought to organize, platforms have often engaged in aggressive union-busting activity, including by suspending or banning workers who try to unionize.
Within this situation, women suffer further still. Women’s position in the labor market is already less favorable than men’s in any country you look at. In a world where employers are at the apex of the economic pyramid, women are less likely to be employers, less likely to be regular wage workers, less likely to receive reliable income, and more likely to be informally self-employed. While workers who receive regular wages can count on what they’ll be earning every week and more often enjoy the stability of contracts and benefits like sick time, self-employed people absorb all the risk themselves. And that’s where women are overrepresented.
As women have entered the gig economy in Uganda, they’ve often faced additional issues that neither male gig workers nor platform workers in wealthier Global North countries tend to encounter. In Uganda, many women lack their own cell phones, tablets, laptops, or data plans, which would allow them reliable access to platform work. In many households that do have smartphones, women are at the bottom of the hierarchy in terms of who gets to use them, after husbands who typically control the devices and children who use them for school. In some families, women seeking to use cell phones for income-generating work risk causing discord with husband’s who don’t support women working or the prospect of women earning more than they do. If a woman’s phone SIM card is registered in their husband’s name, that can also be a cause of disagreements, enormous power struggles, trust issues and regular fights, where most payments in the platform economy are digital.
Women working in the digital economy also face discrimination from clients who don’t want to hire women, sexual harassment and stalking by customers, and a lack of safety measures from employers. In Uganda, that’s led some women ride-hailing app drivers to make use of informal means of protection such as carrying sharp objects to use to defend themselves or pepper spray, installing video surveillance equipment in their cars, or sharing their live location with WhatsApp groups, so that their fellow drivers can track them and ensure they make it to their destination safely.
But it’s not only women facing additional hurdles in using the technology being hailed as the future of work in Uganda. There are also fundamental barriers for other workers, as with apps and programs that presume English literacy as the lingua franca of the internet, and for older and migrant workers at risk of being left behind because they can’t access the technology. There is also a need to address online harassment and basic internet safety and security measures for the large new group of people working online.
Pollicy, a Uganda-based feminist collective focused on women and technology, has worked to address some of these issues through training and capacity building. Over the last year, Pollicy has also worked with the international research project Fairwork, which rates how well platform companies treat their workers, to assess how the booming gig economy is functioning in Uganda. Out of 12 platforms that were assessed in Uganda, only one company, Glovo, scored any points at all in meeting the minimum standards of providing fair work.
There’s much to be done to address these issues. Across the world, and particularly in the Global South, where labor laws often lag far behind the reality of workers’ lives. Current labor policies and regulations in Uganda, as elsewhere, are based on traditional employment in the formal economy, even though that sector represents a small minority of the national workforce. (And even those are lacking, since Uganda’s minimum wage laws were last updated in 1984, nearly 40 years ago.) Government leaders need education and training to understand digital frameworks, so they can legislate appropriately and learn how to create a supportive environment for platform workers to organize, in order to balance the power of technology companies. Similarly, police in these countries need a better understanding of the sector in order to address crimes against platform gig workers.
Platforms seeking to live up to their claims of offering a better future for work can play a role here too, redesigning themselves to center worker protections and workers’ access to benefits. Some platforms have already taken steps to do so, such as the parking app Garage, which maintains a community fund to offer some social protection for gig workers. And in some places, the Global South is leading when it comes to envisioning a feminist future for digitally-mediated work. In Argentina, a domestic workers’ union developed a platform for domestic labor that will be worker-owned and run.
But a larger, community-led approach to redesigning platform work is needed to ensure that these workers can access the social protections all workers should be entitled to.
To build a more just future for labor and tech, we must prioritize workers’ rights, needs and voice in the design of these platforms and how they are governed. That will take a collaborative effort from platform owners, workers, policymakers, and more. When women can be owners at all levels, a feminist future of work will not only be possible but probable - that means agency over phones and data plans used to find work, to the mobile money accounts through which they are paid, to the platforms themselves. Ultimately, that’s the only way women can gain leverage over the systems that relegated them to the bottom of the economic pyramid to begin with.
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Read more stories by Irene Mwendwa, Bonnita Nyamwire & Sally Roever.