Study: Future of Work in Africa’s Informal Economy

The majority of workers in low and middle income countries are not represented by the traditional labor movement. Instead, they are either unorganized, or affiliated with non-traditional worker organizations. These organizations are the unions, associations and cooperatives representing workers in the informal economy, and they are some of the fastest growing membership organizations in Africa. Most of Africa’s workforce earns their living in the informal economy, yet most establishment trade unions represent workers only in the formal economy. If the organizing movement in Africa is going to grow it will be through informal workers, and the Labor Movement must engage non-traditional worker associations to drive that growth.

It is an urgent moment for the labor movement because Africa is experiencing rapid changes in the way work is created and conducted. New platforms and technologies for securing and conducting work are swiftly becoming more widespread. The demand for care services is increasingly globally, and coincides with a rise in women migrating for work in the informal care economy, notably between East Africa and the Gulf Corridor. Energy transitions and impacts of climate change increasingly contribute to worker precarity. These trends create vulnerabilities for workers that governments and stakeholders are only beginning to understand.

Yet there are also signs of hope, as workers develop new ways to organize to respond to these trends. The recent case of Facebook content moderators in Kenya who organized for better conditions and filed a lawsuit against Meta drew global attention as a prominent example of workers responding to the new work vulnerabilities. It is vitally important to understand such cases and trends across Africa, which can lead to recommendations for worker organizations, the Labor Movement, governments and the philanthropic world, on how to strengthen support for workers amidst the changing nature of work.

The Africa Future of Work Study (AFWS) is investigating such new forms of worker power building and organizing, with a focus on Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, and South Africa. The primary goals of the study are to:

Identify new forms of worker organizing, and their approach for power building; Assess the intersection between new forms of worker organizing and workforce trends such as digitization and platform work, care work, migration and just energy transition, that are increasing worker vulnerability; Document case studies which profile how unions and worker organizations are responding to this changing context; Understand how new ways of worker power building can improve old ways of representation.