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Paper short abstract

This paper examines digital infrastructures in Yaounde, Cameroon, and how these influence economic trajectories of women fashion traders

Paper long abstract

Young Cameroonian women fashion traders in Yaoundé use WhatsApp and Facebook networks to organise import and export. These networks—and therefore their trade—rely on digital infrastructure. One of the major challenges they face is what they describe as “réseau dérangé”—an unstable or malfunctioning internet connection. Government efforts to upgrade digital infrastructure are often undermined by state-imposed internet slowdowns or shutdowns in certain areas.

Despite these constraints, digital infrastructure has polarised the economic trajectories of Cameroonian women fashion traders. It has enabled the rise of “fast fashion” imports from China versus France or Turkey, as was previously the case. This paper asks how young women’s economic trajectories toward a country they consider to produce lower-quality goods are produced and sustained, even when the internet remains réseau dérangé.

To address this question, I analyse how digital infrastructure—especially 4G internet, but also new port developments—reshapes the economic trajectories of female fashion traders by enabling what I call “scales of exchange" drawing on Tsing’s concept of non-scalability, Ferguson’s notion of a rightful share, and Piot’s spheres of exchange. Whereas trade trajectories under conditions of limited internet connectivity relied heavily on human infrastructure—such as trust and social networks—recent digital infrastructure projects increasingly digitalise and polarise this human infrastructure. This process densifies scales of exchange even as internet connectivity remains unstable and infrastructure upgrades themselves remain uneven and contested. In doing so, these scales of exchange generate new hierarchies through which the economic trajectories of young women fashion traders become further polarised.