ECAS 2013

Images of an 'African Boom' have presented us with labour markets full of dynamic potential: a declining dependency ratio, low levels of unemployment, and a vibrant middle class. This buoyant view of African labour markets conceals a less encouraging reality of catastrophic youth unemployment and expanding informality, creating a 'youth bulge' that is more of a threat than an opportunity. How does the continent with the largest share of informal labour in the world become a beacon of prosperity? Whose prosperity are we talking about? As Chinese firms and the Bottom of the Pyramid strategies of MNCs penetrate African informal economies, are we witnessing the global integration of African informal labour, or an increasingly unstable process of 'adverse incorporation'? This paper will explore the reality beneath the outbreak of labour market optimism, and consider why African labour markets are being painted in such rosy colours.

Business Processing Outsourcing (BPO) was intended to be Kenya's next big export earner and a source of employment for its graduates. After observing the successes of India and the Philippines, Kenya made substantial investments into infrastructure, hoping to woo global business onshore. Consultants pronounced Kenya's niche to be contact centres due to the country's educated workforce and its neutral English accents. Over the past few years, things have changed dramatically. Finding it difficult to establish direct contact with clients overseas, many Kenyan BPO managers were forced to take on exploitative contracts with intermediaries. The global recession also negatively impacted the sector, drying up work opportunities and putting pressure on Western governments to bring back jobs. Kenyan BPO companies have undergone painful re-orientations. Many have closed. Others have turned to 'impact sourcing', positioning Kenya as a site for corporate social responsibility work. The BPOs that remain increasingly cater to local and regional clients. The government has responded by encouraging a new culture of outsourcing within East Africa. It is said that this local experience will inspire confidence in international clients and better protect Kenyan BPO firms from external shocks. Efforts have also been stepped up to attract Indian BPO and Western ICT companies to Kenya. After being hailed as a booster of exports, BPO has in effect, become an import, modernising and globalising Kenya's own organisations. This paper explores how an idea aimed at boosting exports to the outside world ultimately became a discourse about modernizing the home economy.

Over the last decade, the bottom of the pyramid (BoP) approach has gained currency as a tool of 'inclusive' development in sub-Saharan Africa, one that harnesses the perceived 'efficiency' of the private sector to do what billions of aid dollars have failed to do. As part of the wider family of market based approaches, BoP initiatives reframe development as a seamless outcome of core business activities, one that can ameliorate poverty by bringing much-needed products and services to the poor and by generating employment opportunities for informal and subsistence workers as 'micro-entrepreneurs.'

This paper draws on research with BoP schemes to examine how Africa's "under-utilized" poor are drawn into these new networks of transnational capital, capital not of diamond mines and oil fields but of bicycles, handcarts, and women selling soap, shampoo, and solar lamps door-to-door. It argues that while global corporations seek to extract surplus value by securing a footing in Africa's BoP markets, firms do not simply graft their operations onto the social and physical infrastructure of rural Africa. Rather they make BoP economies through a set of market technologies, practices, and discourses that render the spaces and actors at the bottom of the pyramid visible, knowable, and predictable to global business. This process of calculability can bring new consumer goods and opportunities for entrepreneurship to those who have had little of either, but it also reformats rural Africa for global business, generating new distinctions between the usable and unusable poor.

Recent changes in foreign investment patterns in southern Africa are having a major impact on enterprises and their workforces. Yet, pre-existing labour practices are not always deeply transformed by these shifts. My paper explores these trajectories of continuity and change in Swaziland, with specific reference to the ethnography of labour-management relations in Enkopolwani, a company town managed by white North American and white southern African Pentecostal Christian entrepreneurs.

Previously a mining operation, since 2006 the town is run as a not-for-profit social enterprise where orphan care goes hand in hand with economic activities like timber processing and tourism. The original vision was conceived by a charismatic Canadian businessman whose ideas about labour practices were closely aligned with his business experience in the Canadian context. However, the day-to-day management of the town was from the very beginning in the hands of a group of white Swazis and white South Africans. In line with the poor standards of the rest of the country, black Swazi workers in Enkopolwani receive low salaries and live and work in harsh conditions.

As in older Swazi workplaces controlled by white employers, Enkopolwani labour relations are shaped by paternalism, a tacit acknowledgement of racial difference and a high degree of informality in the negotiation of production regimes and remuneration packages. Despite significant differences in the quality of labour relations, in these companies the principles of reciprocity, negotiated difference and flexible planning continue to mediate the impact of structural changes on the human economy of Swaziland.

What is the role of settled, residential workplaces in a place of transience? During the Zimbabwean crisis, millions crossed through the South African apartheid-era border fence, searching for ways to make ends meet. Many joined black farm-worker populations on white-settler farms, in turn shaped by the 'flexible' capital and crop flows of intercontinental export agriculture. Today's 'flexible capitalism' is commonly seen in terms of ephemerality and perpetual change. Local arrangements are commonly thought so ad-hoc and fleeting that contracts collapse into informality, employment into entrepreneurialism. Acute crisis is seen merely to hasten capitalism along its path. But this paper argues that, on the Limpopo River, amidst transience and short-term strategies of making do, resident workforces are settings in which people strive for a provisional permanence. Workforce hierarchies incorporate transient people: regular labour migrants; recent fugitives seeking work; actual or would-be dependents; and traders, drawn by the lucrative markets represented by hundreds of waged workers. Indeed, on this border, migrants have long had manifold reasons for moving, and are made labour migrants through their social incorporation at places of employment. The border farms and their workforces mediate intersecting flows of people, goods, tangible cash and virtual capital. The paper argues that, for people facing uncertain futures in today's regional upheavals and global capitalism, workplaces are lifeplaces.

Does transnational link matter after return? The study presents the conditions under which migrants participate in the labour market of the home country. Though transnationalism describes return migration as a circular movement, there is still evidence of permanent return. Therefore there is the need to explore how returnees utilize their transnational links after return. Structured questionnaires were used to gather information on pre and post-return experiences. This was followed by in-depth-interviews and observations which primarily looked at labour participation of migrants in the home country. The study focuses on Ghana since various governments of Ghana have pursued different return migration programmes since the early 1990's with the aim of attracting especially skilled Ghanaian nationals abroad. The study finds that Return migrants keep ties with host countries for the sake of businesses and other benefits which may not be readily available in the home country.