Paper short abstract:

The bottom of the pyramid (BoP) approach has gained currency as a tool of ‘inclusive’ development in sub-Saharan Africa. This paper examines how global firms remake Africa’s informal economies through market technologies that render the BoP visible, calculable, and profitable to capital.

Paper long abstract:

Over the last decade, the bottom of the pyramid (BoP) approach has gained currency as a tool of 'inclusive' development in sub-Saharan Africa, one that harnesses the perceived 'efficiency' of the private sector to do what billions of aid dollars have failed to do. As part of the wider family of market based approaches, BoP initiatives reframe development as a seamless outcome of core business activities, one that can ameliorate poverty by bringing much-needed products and services to the poor and by generating employment opportunities for informal and subsistence workers as 'micro-entrepreneurs.'

This paper draws on research with BoP schemes to examine how Africa's "under-utilized" poor are drawn into these new networks of transnational capital, capital not of diamond mines and oil fields but of bicycles, handcarts, and women selling soap, shampoo, and solar lamps door-to-door. It argues that while global corporations seek to extract surplus value by securing a footing in Africa's BoP markets, firms do not simply graft their operations onto the social and physical infrastructure of rural Africa. Rather they make BoP economies through a set of market technologies, practices, and discourses that render the spaces and actors at the bottom of the pyramid visible, knowable, and predictable to global business. This process of calculability can bring new consumer goods and opportunities for entrepreneurship to those who have had little of either, but it also reformats rural Africa for global business, generating new distinctions between the usable and unusable poor.