Remaking Africa’s Informal Economies: Youth, Entrepreneurship and the Promise of Inclusion at the Bottom of the Pyramid

Abstract

In recent years, the quest for ‘inclusive markets’ that incorporate Africa’s youth has become a key focus of national and international development efforts, with so-called bottom of the pyramid (BoP) initiatives increasingly seen as a way to draw the continent’s poor into new networks of global capitalism. SSA has become a fertile frontier for such systems, as capital sets its sights on the continents’ vast ‘under-served’ informal economies, harnessing the entrepreneurial mettle of youth to create new markets for a range of products, from solar lanterns and shampoo to cook stoves and sanitary pads. Drawing on ethnographic research with youth entrepreneurs, we trace the processes of individual and collective ‘transformation’ that the mission of (self-) empowerment through entrepreneurship seeks to bring about. We argue that, while such systems are meant to bring those below the poverty line above it, the ‘line’ is reified and reinforced through a range of discursive and strategic practices that actively construct and embed distinctions between the past and the future, valuable and valueless, and the idle and productive in Africa’s informal economies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. See, for example, Tiffin (1976).

2. The research consisted of in-depth interviews with Catalyst’s directors (2), office management (2), consumers (4) and field entrepreneurs (15). All interviews were conducted by the author or our Kenyan research assistant in the first language of informants, and were recorded, transcribed and coded for analysis. We also spent several days shadowing the selling process, accompanying entrepreneurs on their sales routes through Nairobi, and observed four days of the entrepreneurship training. Analysis of data was informed by the authors’ research projects on BoP distribution systems in Uganda, South Africa and Bangladesh.

3. Following the outbreak of violence in the wake of Kenya’s (2007) election, the government sought to subdue tensions by addressing the ‘problem of youth unemployment’ through Kazi Kwa Vijana (Work for Youth), a large-scale public works programme that aimed to employ ‘idle’ youth in the slums in road building, water harvesting and waste collection (OECD, n.d., p. 1).

4. http://www.kibera.org.uk/Facts.html

5. To protect the anonymity of informants, the name of this scheme and all participants have been changed.

6. The average annual income of entrepreneurs interviewed was approximately 15,000 Ksh (173 USD).