Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the impact of the Covid-19 lockdown on microfinance borrowers in Tamil Nadu, India. It demonstrates that the crisis has exposed the limits of for-profit financial inclusion interventions offering credit as well as the fragilities of a livelihood model that is sustained by debt.

Paper long abstract:

Microfinance borrowers are imagined to have been transformed into entrepreneurs, establishing profitable enterprises which have lifted them out of poverty. In most cases the reality is very different: micro-loans reach low-paid wage workers, some locked in debt-based labour contracts, who use them to manage asynchronous incomes and expenditures. This paper discusses the impact of the Covid-19 lockdown on microfinance borrowers in three villages in Tamil Nadu, India, based on nine months of phone-based qualitative interviews. Here borrowers include agricultural daily wage workers, brick moulders, sugarcane harvesters, and textile workers. The last two decades have seen aggressive micro-lending and an explosion of debt in this region. Some women held up to six microloans, circumventing government limits by borrowing through others, juggling between these and credit from other sources, using each to repay the other. The Covid-19 crisis has exposed the limits of for-profit development interventions offering credit as well as the fragilities of a livelihood model that is sustained by debt. With the lockdown, most non-farm activities stopped and migrant workers returned to the villages without incomes. Microfinance institutions first completely disappeared, offering no protection to borrowers. When they returned they tried to enforce repayments despite the state moratorium, during which interest in any case accrued. When the moratorium ended, MFIs used the threat of blacklisting through the credit rating system to ensure that pending repayments were made – often through sales of assets or more expensive borrowing – and excluded those who continued to face income losses from new loans.

Paper short abstract:

Household debt ballooned across Southeast Asia during COVID-19 as many fell through the cracks of safety nets. Based on region-wide surveys, this paper argues that existing recovery strategies - especially financial deregulation - run the risk of economic & political volatility in the years ahead.

Paper long abstract:

In the wake of the pandemic governments across the globe have accrued significant public debt to provide stimulus and bailouts to companies and households. Yet in contexts like Southeast Asia where the informal sector remains more than half of the economy these support packages have often failed to reach the poorest households. This paper examines how the cracks and gaps in social safety nets in Southeast Asia have led to compounding household survival debt throughout the pandemic. Drawing on surveys from Myanmar, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia it argues that the failure of government social protection to expand sufficiently in the wake of the pandemic, compounded by pre-existing informal welfare provision and taxation, has created household debt that will suppress economic recovery and compound socio-political instability in the years ahead. In particular, it finds that respondents indebted during COVID-19 are far more supportive of economic protection and progressive social policy and taxation reform measures than more affluent voters. The paper concludes that attempts to provide a COVID-19 ‘economic boost’ without systematically reducing the source of household debt, for example via financial deregulation and trade agreements such as the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), are likely to be both economically ineffective but also politically unpopular as they further exacerbate precarity and inequality. A new deal which forgives survival debt, improves safety nets and commits to fair government revenue generation is critical if a more robust region is to emerge from the pandemic.

Paper short abstract:

My paper examines the unequal distribution of opportunities and risks among Uber drivers in Nairobi. It argues that, despite narratives of disintermediation, formal and informal financial intermediaries have emerged to lower entry barriers and rise exit barriers for the drivers.

Paper long abstract:

My paper examines the unequal distribution of opportunities and risks among the participants in the booming Kenyan gig economy. It draws on an ethnography of Uber drivers in Nairobi conducted before the Covid-19 pandemic and argues that, notwithstanding narratives of disintermediation advanced by digital firms, formal and informal financial intermediaries have emerged on the Kenyan market to provide access to cars and loans to struggling drivers. While helping lower the entry barriers, they rise the exit barriers for the drivers through debt. My analysis builds upon Peter Fleming’s concept of 'radical responsibilization' to explain how the power of these intermediaries stems out of three aspects inherent to the platform-drivers relationship: intensification of work, indebtedness and surveillance.

This case study lays bare the contradictions between market-driven solutions to address unemployment and socio-economic exclusion, and the entrenchment of pre-existing power relations. In so doing, my contribution critically engages with the Future of Work in Africa literature. It challenges the emphasis placed by both development and corporate actors on connectivity and entrepreneurship as key drivers of upward social mobility and suggests that the Future of Work agenda is premised upon a process of objectification from above in which the workers are constituted as entrepreneurs and disciplined through finance.

Paper short abstract:

Digital employment has been touted as a solution to Africa's jobs crisis. Calls for a new social contract to support the expansion of digital work are turning an urgent demand for more decent work into a new regime of accumulation based on the financialization of precarious labour.

Paper long abstract:

The rise of digital employment platforms, often referred to as the 'gig economy', has been accompanied by a call for a new social contract in order to facilitate expanded creation of quality employment. This offers a potential solution to the acute jobs crisis in Africa, characterized by high levels of informality, unemployment and rapid population growth. This paper looks beyond the hype to explore how the gig economy is reshaping livelihood opportunities and reformatting processes of social and economic inclusion among digital taxi drivers in Nigeria. Do proposed changes in the social contract address the problems of precarity and disaffection among Nigerian digital taxi drivers, or do they consolidate a new regime of accumulation around the digital incorporation and financialization of precarious labour? This talk will examine the quality of livelihoods created by the gig economy, and the limitations of digital employment in promoting sustainable livelihoods and the public good. The Nigerian case will inform a consideration of whether the prevailing vision of a new social contract represents a mechanism of economic inclusion or adverse incorporation for Nigeria's informal labour force. It will also explore how the gig economy is reshaping the basis on which the informal and unemployed masses in developing countries are being included in circuits of contemporary capitalism. This will form a basis for reflecting on how digital labour and the new social contract are transforming the role of labour in circuits of global accumulation, turning developing country labour from a workforce into an asset class.