The Digital Continent: Placing Africa in planetary networks of work. Mohammad Amir Anwar and Mark Graham

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.

Anwar and Graham explore how Africa has been brought closer to digital capitalism by focusing on business process outsourcing (BPO) and the remote gig economy. BPO involves entry-level activities such as customer service and technical support, while the remote gig economy involves work performed through digital transaction platforms acting as intermediaries, for instance, Upwork, Fiverr, and Freelancer.com. The book aimed to explore the impact of digital work in Africa and reflect on it in a planetary-scale labour market. This may have served as the inspiration for the book’s cover title, ‘The Digital Continent…’; however, this is somewhat misleading, especially as Africa accounts for a paltry 5.2 percent of the global workforce on Upwork, the leading digital transactional platform in Africa on which the authors rely (p. 71).

Irrespective of this, Africa stands at a crossroads. With the fastest growing and youngest population of any continent and an unemployment rate of around 7 percent according to the International Labour Organization, the study of digital work and its implications comes at a critical juncture as it holds potential for both economic opportunity and inclusion. What Anwar and Graham do well is to wean readers off the chorus of digitalization ushering in a plethora of unlimited jobs and instead present a reality check on the precariousness of digital work, for example, short-term contracts, job insecurity, long and irregular working hours, and lack of social benefits coupled with racial and gender discriminatory undertones, to name but a few.

They also reveal that workers are subjected to a punitive regime of algorithmic surveillance of the workplace and work processes. This is exerted through the application of advanced digital technologies, giving rise to their use of the term ‘Digital Taylorism’, where digital labour is commoditized without due regard to workers’ welfare (p. 107). In essence, the dominance of artificial intelligence and digital assessments to secure your next gig in call and contact centres has meant that employers have the upper hand and bargaining power in the digital world of work.

The lack of state welfare and trade unions has also meant that remote workers are at a disadvantage when it comes to organizing and demanding rights compared to the physical gig economy where, for example, rideshare drivers could meet and organize protests. It is therefore not far-fetched to see labour exploitation as one of the central themes of the book, as the value created flows globally to a small circle of digital financial elites. Yet, remote workers have shown resilience by using alternative digital spaces such as social media networks and Facebook groups to seek support, express their voice and power, and organize informally.

Embarking on original research is methodologically challenging, and obtaining quantitative data on digital work in Africa is even more so. Anwar and Graham ingeniously employ a click-based strategy via websites such as similarweb.com, alongside web scraping using Python on platforms such as Upwork, in addition to over 207 qualitative interviews in the countries studied for their analysis.

A key shortcoming of the book, however, revolves around the author’s strategy. Anwar and Graham argue their selection of case study countries was strategic. Their calculations reveal almost 92 percent of African workers registered on the largest digital work platforms (Upwork, Fiverr, Freelancer.com, PeopleperHour, and Figure Eight) are from seven countries. These are Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Kenya, South Africa, and Nigeria, yet the book falls short by depriving readers of empirical insights from the three leading North African countries.

Again, throughout the book, what seems to be the elephant in the room is laxity of the continent’s legal frameworks, which provide space for companies and employers to exploit loopholes to their advantage and evade responsibility for workers’ welfare. Given that this is unlikely to change any time soon, the bigger question is how African workers can reap rich benefits from digital work amidst legal laxity. In this context, the authors fail to offer convincing policy alternatives to make digital labour fairer. This notwithstanding, academic audiences, policymakers, and civil society activists, especially those with a focus on digital work in Africa, would find this book a major contribution to the literature on the digital economy. Overall, the book enriches debate on the role of digital technologies in bringing about a broader structural transformation of the African labour force—an aspect that is often neglected in the Information and Communications Technology for Development literature.