In most Sub-Saharan African cities, citizens rely on informal buses to fulfil their transport needs. These networks circulate cash to employees, unions and informal businesses that congregate around transport hubs. They also serve as infrastructures for mobilising political support and extracting value from clients. Informal buses operate as redistributive webs deeply embedded into the social territoriality of cities. Recently, authorities have attempted to replace cash with digital payment technologies to disembed the industry from 'predatory' networks, reduce capital 'leakage' and introduce surveillance over workers, cash-flows and vehicles. Such attempts are welcomed by public authorities keen to assert control. Providers attempt to shift capital from de-legitimised informal actors towards formal ICT providers, investors and financial intermediaries. Using the cases of Johannesburg and Nairobi, I examine the dislocations and responses provoked by these attempts from the perspective of Polanyi's Double Movement. I argue providers must confront the embedded nature of the sector. Rather than technologies bypassing informal practices; they bring political conflict and unspoken informal norms to the surface and arouse contestation. In Johannesburg, a social protection response is emerging as providers negotiate with drivers and operators about employment conditions and compensation. In Nairobi, the social web has been too resilient to change and in place of negotiation, has come technological stalemate. I argue that informal urban transport is a unique sector due to its territorial, social and political embeddedness. However, it signals that technologies will not bring about automatic change. Rather changes are subject to political contestation and social protection responses.

Cette contribution s'intéresse à l'ambivalence et aux usages du Mobile Banking dans le petit commerce informel. Les principaux opérateurs de téléphonie mobile proposent chacun leur service financier mobile. Ces services financiers nouveaux passant par le téléphone mobile sont vus par la Banque mondiale et par la Banque centrale du Congo comme un potentiel outil d'inclusion financière. Ils sont en train de se déployer progressivement dans un pays où le taux de bancarisation est très faible (5%), et où les banques ne sont pas dimensionnées pour s'adresser à des millions de clients à faible revenu. L'un des usages apparus parmi les plus intéressants dans le cadre d'une recherche de terrain est celui du Mobile Banking dans la pratique du petit commerce. On se pose notamment la question de savoir si le Mobile Banking permet aux petits commerçants informels de tirer bénéfice de l'économie formelle ?

Face à l'importance croissante de l'offre des services financiers mobiles et de leur contribution potentielle à la construction d'un nouveau « marché financier », on se demande également si les services financiers mobiles utilisés dans le cadre du petit commerce et qui mettent généralement en jeu de petites sommes d'argent peuvent éventuellement produire des grands effets ? Nous explorons l'hypothèse d'une croissance du secteur apparaissant comme rapide mais qui pourrait s'avérer fragile, susceptible d'être émaillée de crises ou dans certains cas de succès limités. On analyse à la fois les potentialités et les limites de ce nouvel outil financier dans le cadre du petit commerce informel.

Over the past decade, microinsurance—formal insurance products designed specifically for low-income people—has taken off in South Africa. Of the nearly 62 million lives covered by microinsurance products in Africa, South Africa alone accounts for more than half. A closer look at these numbers reveals that the dominance of this market is fueled almost exclusively by the sale of funeral insurance, perhaps an unsurprising trend considering the immense cultural value many South Africans place on funerals. Moreover, insurance companies have achieved this impressive scale by working through intermediaries who are embedded within community-based institutions like burial societies and funeral parlors. The incursion of "insurance culture" into this sphere has thus resulted in an ecosystem in which formal and informal institutions are in fluid states of tension and cooperation. As this paper will demonstrate, intermediaries and mediators sustain this ecosystem by reconciling the different rationalities, institutions, bureaucracies etc. of the formal insurance system with those of the informal risk management sphere. They also help to produce and/or entrench existing power inequalities at different scales, complicating the notion that favorable risk outcomes are distributed equitably. Three types of brokers, who are respectively situated at different points along the formal-informal fault line, are considered in turn. An analysis attuned to the various social identities and positions embodied by these brokers helps to reveal the dislocations, ambiguities, and opportunities generated by the expansion of microinsurance markets into the low-income terrain.

Despite over a decade of growth averaging 5% across Sub-Saharan Africa, the bulk of the population still experiences unacceptable levels of poverty, catastrophic unemployment and relegation to vast informal economies. In this paper, I will show that the expansion of African informal economies is no longer a product of global economic exclusion, but results from new forms of inclusion in the global market economy.

Perspectives on the role of African workers in contemporary capitalism reveal two divergent strands. On the one hand, tales of poverty and informality warn of a labour force that is functionally irrelevant to the global capitalist system. On the other hand, global corporations and development agencies are emphasizing the dynamic potential of Africa's rapidly growing young populations and large informal economies which are being celebrated as central players in the rise of inclusive capitalism.

In this paper, I will examine the role of African informal workers in 21st century capitalism. Focusing on the rise of outsourcing, labour brokers and social enterprises, I will explore the new institutional ecosystems emerging to link global firms to African informal workers. Case studies from South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria will show how new types of intermediaries serve to facilitate the sourcing and control of informal labour outside the protection of formal employment, producing new more precarious forms of economic inclusion.