Remaking Africa’s Informal Economies: Youth, Entrepreneurship and the Promise of Inclusion at the Bottom of the Pyramid

Speculative futures at the bottom of the pyramid

“…Such linear time‐frames exert an ever‐present influence at the level of cognition (see Oian ): the belief that the future will be better than the present an enduring ideological orientation, even where progress appears less than likely. Indeed, despite the many obstacles faced by agents in the Nairobi slums – soaring unemployment and living costs; decaying infrastructure and services (Dolan & Rajak ) – agents’ renderings of the future are permeated with assumptions of personal progress: ‘whens’ not ‘ifs’ of owning their own businesses, or ascending up the professional ladder; self‐empowerment continuing to hover tantalizingly around the corner.…”

“…Through an ethnography of Catalyst, a social enterprise that aims to rehabilitate and repurpose ‘aberrant’ youth by offering them jobs as entrepreneurs selling ‘social/humanitarian’ goods in the slums of Nairobi, we examine how the BoP inclusive business model reframes the conditions of possibility for urban youth, engendering certain types of action while foreclosing others. As noted elsewhere (Dolan & Rajak ), while this new paradigm of development hails the innate entrepreneurial energy of youth as the driver of economic growth, the emphasis is less on unleashing natural entrepreneurial talent than on the purposive making of the entrepreneur. Through a process of recomposition, and often decomposition of previous modes of being and doing, informal actors are sculpted into a cadre of self‐willed entrepreneurs and acculturated into the values and virtues of maximization to render them fit for global markets.…”

Leaving No One Behind?: Informal Economies, Economic Inclusion and Islamic Extremism in Nigeria

“…Dolan and Roll (: 134) detail how efforts to engage with informal economies generate ‘a knowledge bank, allowing companies to produce a schematic of market potential that classifies the poor in terms of purchasing power, consumption patterns, demographics, and shopping behaviour, and in so doing demarcates who falls within and beyond the concern of inclusive business’. In the process, inclusive market strategies involve a selective reconfiguring of local institutional orders, labour markets and even worker subjectivities (Dolan, ; Elyachar, ; London & Hart, ; Webb et al ). Mair et al (: 828) emphasize the need for ‘renegotiation of existing institutional arrangements to define who can access and participate in markets and under which conditions’.…”

“…Critical commentators show that the potentially exploitative character of inclusion may shift more risks than gains onto poor borrowers and workers. There is mounting evidence that the growing ranks of BoP marketers and micro‐credit beneficiaries face low wages, insecure employment, intensive work regimes and rising debt obligations that offer ‘little substantial relief from the everyday vulnerabilities that informal workers experience’ (Dolan, ). For many, inclusive markets are experienced as ‘adverse incorporation’—inclusion on worse terms—in which the benefits of inclusion are captured by more powerful market actors, while the adversely incorporated enjoys symbolic participation and a greater increase in risks than in material gains (Hickey & du Toit, ; Meagher & Lindell, ; Miraftab, ).…”

Frugal Innovation and Development Research

“…The above discourse and its proposition has met with severe criticism and skepticism by development scholars (Bhaduri, 2016;Dolan, 2013;Dolan and Rajak, 2016;Meagher and Lindell, 2013, Meagher in this special issue) by questioning among others the (normative) assumption that designing and producing goods or services for low-income people is equal to solving their developmental problems. Their critique is rooted in a discourse, which has a long history in development studies.…”