Paper short abstract:

The promotion of entrepreneurialism constitutes a paradigm of the current neoliberal re-organization of labour in Africa and beyond. This paper examines how the implementation of small-scale enterprises employment programs is reconfiguring experiences of marginalization in Addis Ababa’s inner city.

Paper long abstract:

In a context where state institutions and development organizations are disengaging from supporting the working poor, entrepreneurialism is preached as the skill that individuals should have to found their means of survival and, possibly, of social improvement. The outcomes of these interventions, however, have been far from opening up opportunities of social mobility or even entrepreneurial success. In post-industrial Europe and North America, the proliferation of flexible labour is producing widespread forms of social instability and precariousness. In a similar way, in the developing world, the emphasis on informality and self-employment, and the promotion of small-scale enterprises are furthering conditions of exclusion and marginalization.

In Addis Ababa's inner city, since the mid - 2000s, under the impact of development programs promoting small-scale enterprises, the street economy has undergone through a pervasive process of formalization that has come to advance the realization of an authoritarian form of developmental state, while imposing a regime of unskilled and badly paid labour on the street. Drawing on 16 months of fieldwork between 2009 and 2010 on the street economy in Addis Ababa's inner city, this paper focuses on how notions of entrepreneurialism and wage labour pervaded the interactions between government officials and the 'street youth' involved in these development programs. In doing this, I will show how the implementation of small-scale enterprises triggered a reconfiguration of forms and experiences of marginalization through labour and how ideas of being 'workers' provided 'street youth' with a way of navigating and narrating political subjugation and social exclusion.