Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the emergence of a ''digital developmental state'' in Egypt. Ongoing efforts to digitize governmental institutions, forge a techno entrepreneurial ecosystem, and develop a digitally capable citizenry, make Egypt is a powerful case of a new state form.

Paper long abstract:

This paper seeks to understand the emergence of what we are calling a ''digital developmental state'' in Egypt. Like the industrializing developmental states of the 1980s/90s, this recent iteration rests on the premise that states in the global South are differently positioned in their ability to engage with the global economy. Their disadvantaged position necessitates that the state play a distinct role in the growth process. Nonetheless, whereas the original developmental states sought to increase their comparative advantage through exporting complex manufactured goods, nascent digital developmental states must find other ways to engage with a profoundly transforming global economy that is being shaped by the Fourth Industrial Revolution. In this paper we ask: How is the digital developmental state different from, and similar to, previous forms of the developmental state?

Egypt is a powerful case from which to document and explain the rise of the digital developmental state. Enchanted by the promises of technologies for economic development and modernization, the Egyptian state recently embarked on a comprehensive digital transformation quest to build a Digital Egypt, a society that integrates technologies, and an economy that operates digitally. Through its Digital Egypt Strategy, the state seeks to digitize governmental institutions and services; forge a techno entrepreneurial ecosystem that encourages digital innovation; and build a New Egyptian Person, a digitally-capable, skillful, competitive, responsible and flexible citizen who is ready for the future. This paper examines the actors, institutions, and resources that are being marshaled to establish Egypt's digital development state.

Paper short abstract:

Abstract The advent Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) has brought the rapid transformation of communication from analogue to digital.

Paper long abstract:

Abstract

The advent Information Communication technologies (ICTs) has brought rapid transformation of communication from analog to digital. ICTs provide the platform for the convergence of telecommunication, the internet, artificial intelligence (AI) and its social application, thus usage of smartphones has become a tool for rural development and the implementation of M-government, subsequent, e-governance. Thus, narrowing the gap in access to information, and paving way for economic openness, as it will provide cheap access to modern technology is imperative towards service delivery. Individuals within the development communication process are regarded as agents of change, not just recipients of a development initiative, but active participants and contributors of knowledge and information. Therefore, Information Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D), refers to “theories of Change”, that are not about the designation of technologies and diffusion but a multifaceted, dynamic, and contentious socio-economic and technological process, with communities at the forefront of the recipient of the change. This study employs a qualitative techniques and purposeful sampling to gather data. The study found that the North-West province does not communicate adequately with its communities thereby failing to achieve their objective towards rural communities of the province. The study recommends that the use of smartphones and M-technology in all provincial departments would enhance their service deliveries and that the introduction of digital platforms such as North-West Service Delivery App and the introduction of Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) are essential for effective and efficient socio-economic and technological development of the rural communities within the province.

Paper short abstract:

My paper highlights the significance of financial relations in the Kenyan gig economy. It examines the unequal distribution of opportunities and risks among Uber drivers in Nairobi and the role of formal and informal financial intermediaries. In so doing, it emphasises the role of debt.

Paper long abstract:

My paper highlights the significance of financialisation in the Future of Work in Africa debate by focusing on the booming Kenyan gig economy. It draws on an ethnography conducted before the Covid-19 pandemic to examine the unequal distribution of opportunities and risks among Uber drivers in Nairobi. It shows how, 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. My analysis uses Maurizio Lazzarato’s notion of debt as a technique of power and Zenia Kish and Justin Leroy’s conceptualisation of ‘bonded life’ to argue that, while helping lower the entry barriers, financial actors raise the exit barriers for the drivers through debt.

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 political economy literature on the Future of Work in Africa by challenging the emphasis placed by both development and corporate actors on connectivity and entrepreneurship as key drivers of upward social mobility. Instead, it suggests that the Future of Work agenda is premised upon a process of subjectification from above in which the workers are constituted as entrepreneurs and disciplined through finance.

Paper short abstract:

Research in a Ghanaian IT company shows the paradoxical effects of success. The most-skilled employees receive high offers from international companies and leave. Is this a success? The aspirations of individuals and envisioned futures of societal development clash in this case study.

Paper long abstract:

We present results from empirical research in a Ghanaian IT company that has a training and an operative branch. A partnership between development agencies and a German company offers training for young IT experts to qualify them for collaboration with international companies. After an outsourcing wave of IT services to Asia in the 2000s, we find efforts to establish Africa as a contractor.

The main driver behind this IT initiative is the promise of a prosperous future. The results from interviews with employees, staff, and trainers show paradoxical results. Trainees and employees leave the company frequently – however, at different stages and for very different reasons. Graduates of the training program earn considerably higher salaries and have better employment opportunities than the average Ghanaian. Yet, the demanding training program and the stressful work for international clients result in a high rate of quitting.

One paradoxical outcome is that a successful transition from training to operational work leads to a high voluntary turnout. The best-performing employees receive offers from international companies that pay several times the wages of their current employer – sometimes in the US or Europe. Is this a success and for whom? There are conflicting imaginations of the future: Individual aspirations differ from the objectives of the profit-driven company and the interests of development organizations. Moreover, the most-thought employees are in a very different situation than the majority who struggle to fulfill the requirements of their jobs. This case demonstrates the paradoxes of successful IT work in Africa.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how graduates in machine learning and data science at Ghanian Universities are positioned as paying dividends to two dominant narratives of technological promise and demographic growth, and how in response, they retool and redirect AI to craft a multiplicity of urban futures.

Paper long abstract:

Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science (referred to collectively as AI hereafter) are taking off in African cities forging new kinds of labour, infrastructure, economies, and social relationships. In Accra, Ghana productivity, opportunity, and crises shape AI. With the entry of Google’s privately owned fibreoptic pipeline, paradoxically named Equiano after the abolitionist freed slave, the expansion of data infrastructures attracts extractivist racial capital aimed at privatising urban services and standardising urban space, while also providing opportunities to radicalise technologies and create improvisational and new material ways of getting by. A new generation of young people are being trained in coding, machine learning, and data science for entry into digital labour markets. Younger generations born and raised in Accra are challenged by the affordances of city life and entangled in policy discourses of data imperialism and urban ruination. At the same time, they exploit opportunities through hustle economies and maker communities to reclaim urban space and earn a living in ways that countervail the globalising reach of technology industries and the wider discourses of survivalism. Based on ethnographic research in Accra, this paper explores how two dominant narratives framing Africa’s future, technological promise and demographic growth, converge in the present day. Young people are positioned as paying dividends to both these narratives, and yet we know very little about how they design and use AI to carve out their own futures in rapidly changing urban environments.

Paper short abstract:

Our contribution examines how Western, classed and gendered imaginaries of digital and blockchain platform entrepreneurship both circumscribe and enable the ways in which visual artists in Ghana make a living and imagine their future.

Paper long abstract:

Our contribution examines how Western, classed and gendered imaginaries of platform entrepreneurship both circumscribe and enable the ways in which visual artists in Ghana make a living and imagine their future. Drawing on participant observation of and 30 in-depth interviews with visual artists living and working in Accra, we focus, in particular, on examining how Ghanaian visual artists negotiate the scope, boundaries and the identities implied in the imaginaries of frictionless, democratic, global, and readily accessible digital labour marketplaces, as well as the metaphors of decentralized and meritocratic blockchain-based NFT art marketplaces. We address both the intrinsic coloniality and the potential liberatory valence of such imaginaries as they coincide with the rapidly raising, yet achingly belated, aesthetic interest of the traditional global art markets in contemporary African art, and especially in figurative black body painting, which has as of late been subjected to skyrocketing, if insidious, economic speculation and accelerated financialization.