Short Abstract

This panel welcomes contributions examining the intersection of platform-mediated labor and digital finance in contemporary African cities. From data workers paid in stablecoins to asset-financed motorcycle riders, we explore how new payment and finance architectures shape work in the AI era.

Long Abstract

In his recent The Alibi of Capital, Timothy Mitchell prompts a radical reexamination of the wage system by demonstrating how credit relations and debt have historically sustained industrial capitalism. Bringing this provocative thesis to the contemporary digital platform era, this panel investigates how new configurations of finance, debt, and payment mechanisms are reshaping labor in African cities. Here, the boundary between employment and financial services is rapidly dissolving. Labour platforms increasingly operate as financial intermediaries, deploying novel payment infrastructures—ranging from stablecoin transactions for data freelancers to asset-financing for on-demand workers. These developments complicate conventional paradigms of labor, value, and exploitation.

In line with the ECAS 2027 theme, “African Prisms”—which refracts monolithic ideas of development and technology into a diverse spectrum of localized realities—this panel seeks to unpack the multiplicity of ways labor and finance are mutually constituted. We invite empirically grounded and theoretically driven papers that explore these themes and beyond:

- The political economy of digital and platform-based wages (e.g., stablecoins, mobile money integrations, etc).

- Asset-financing (e.g. PAYGO systems), debt traps, and the financialization of everyday survival in gig economies.

- The interface between payment mechanisms and algorithmic management, data-driven exploitation, and digital surveillance.

- The financialization of formal and informal labor engendered by fintech

Grassroots financial practices, worker-led fintech adaptations, and forms of financial insubordination or solidarity.

By bringing together diverse disciplinary perspectives from anthropology, sociology, geography, and development studies, this panel aims to chart the emerging political economies of work and finance in African cities.

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