Globalisation, Economic Inclusion and African Workers: Making the Right Connections

This book addresses the question of whether greater inclusion in the global economy offers a solution to rising unemployment and poverty in contemporary Africa. The authors trace the connection between global demographic change and new mechanisms of economic inclusion via global value chains, digital networks, labour migration, and corporate engagement with the bottom of the pyramid, challenging the claim that African workers have become functionally irrelevant to the global economy. They expose the shift of global demand for African workers from formal to increasingly informalised labour arrangements, mediated by social enterprises, labour brokers, graduate entrepreneurs and grassroots associations. Focusing on global employment connections initiated from above and from below, the authors examine whether global labour linkages increase or reduce problems of vulnerable and unstable working conditions within African countries, and considers the economic and political conditions needed for African workers to capture the gains of inclusion in the global economy. This book was previously published as a special issue of the Journal of Development Studies.

Kate Meagher is an Associate Professor at the Department of International Development, London School of Economics. She specializes in African informal economies and real governance, and has published widely on contemporary dilemmas of informality and economic inclusion, including Identity Economics: Social Networks and the Informal Economy in Nigeria.

Laura Mann is an Assistant Professor at the Department of International Development, London School of Economics. Her research and publications include work on political economy of development, African higher education and labour issues and critical approaches to new information and communication technologies in Africa.

Maxim Bolt is Lecturer in Anthropology and African Studies at the University of Birmingham, and a Research Associate at the University of the Witwatersrand. His first book – Zimbabwe’s Migrants and South Africa’s Border Farms: The Roots of Impermanence – explores wage labour in a place of transience and informal livelihoods.