Worker Empowerment in the Era of Sharing Economy Platforms in Global South

Abstract

In this exploratory paper we discuss the relation between empowerment and global sharing economy in a Global Southern context. We distinguish two primary meanings of 'empowerment' namely,the liberation from oppression and the ability to act. We inspect working for sharing economies from both angles. A critical factor for assessing whether sharing economies are empowering for global South workers is the change it brings. If the platform work offers opportunities for formerly unemployed, the change is considered as empowering. However, it is possible, that these platform jobs instead replace the traditional, more protected employments, in which case the change is considered dis-empowering. We exemplify our arguments with a contextual inquiry into community-based tourism in a small village Tanzania. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → HCI theory, concepts and models; • Social and professional topics → Geographic characteristics.

A community-initiated website development project: promoting a San community campsite initiative

“…Otherwise, initiatives discussing the role of participatory design in creating services to support business operations of indigenous groups are mostly lacking from the literature. Participatory design provides tools that can be used to design systems intending to improve livelihoods in the Global South [20]. However, co-designing with indigenous people for an international target market is different.…”