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Remaking Africa’s Informal Economies: Youth, Entrepreneurship and the Promise of Inclusion at the Bottom of the Pyramid
Open accessAbstract
In recent years, the quest for ‘inclusive markets’ that incorporate Africa’s youth has become a key focus of national and international development efforts, with so-called bottom of the pyramid (BoP) initiatives increasingly seen as a way to draw the continent’s poor into new networks of global capitalism. SSA has become a fertile frontier for such systems, as capital sets its sights on the continents’ vast ‘under-served’ informal economies, harnessing the entrepreneurial mettle of youth to create new markets for a range of products, from solar lanterns and shampoo to cook stoves and sanitary pads. Drawing on ethnographic research with youth entrepreneurs, we trace the processes of individual and collective ‘transformation’ that the mission of (self-) empowerment through entrepreneurship seeks to bring about. We argue that, while such systems are meant to bring those below the poverty line above it, the ‘line’ is reified and reinforced through a range of discursive and strategic practices that actively construct and embed distinctions between the past and the future, valuable and valueless, and the idle and productive in Africa’s informal economies.
Overview
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TL;DR
This ethnographic case study of a Kenyan social enterprise, Catalyst 5, examines how bottom-of-the-pyramid youth entrepreneurship schemes promise inclusion and mobility by converting unemployed youth into door-to-door micro-entrepreneurs. It finds that these schemes offer modest, precarious earnings and social recognition while reinforcing moral and market boundaries between productive entrepreneurs and the excluded poor.
Key findings
- Catalyst recruits primarily single parents and “street kids” aged 18–24, provides a two-week training course, gives access to $75 (£50) worth of products on credit, operates a daily consignment model with about 30 “life-changing products,” and pays agents 10–20% commission plus a tiered bonus during their first three months.
- Training, role plays, uniforms, time discipline, monthly sales targets of 10,000–20,000 Ksh [115–230 USD], and biweekly one-on-one appraisals aim to convert youth into entrepreneurial subjects, but also select and exclude them; the director describes “the bottom ten percent” as those “you should be letting go every month.”
- Outcomes are ambivalent: some entrepreneurs gain modest income and social recognition, but the average annual income of interviewed entrepreneurs was approximately 15,000 Ksh (173 USD), and some, like Mary, could not raise enough to pay a month’s rent.
- The paper argues that BoP entrepreneurship depends on consumption and retail as an engine of jobless growth, offering contingent opportunity in place of secure employment and making inclusion hinge on an ex ante conversion to market discipline.
Methods
- Ethnographic case study of Catalyst 5, a social enterprise in Kawangware, Nairobi, with research conducted in 2012–2013.
- In-depth interviews with Catalyst’s directors (2), office management (2), consumers (4), and field entrepreneurs (15); interviews were recorded, transcribed, and coded; researchers also shadowed sales routes and observed four days of entrepreneurship training.
- Analysis was informed by the authors’ research projects on BoP distribution systems in Uganda, South Africa, and Bangladesh.
Limitations
- The paper states no formal limitations section.
- Evident from the text: it is a single case study of one pseudonymized social enterprise in Kawangware, Nairobi, with a small interview sample (15 field entrepreneurs, 2 directors, 2 office management, 4 consumers) and no systematic longitudinal outcome data.
- Evident from the text: broader claims about BoP entrepreneurship in Africa are extrapolated from one Kenyan case and the authors’ related research projects, while entrepreneurs’ accounts show ambivalence rather than measured impact.
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In the paper
“It is not only management that watches however, as the progress chart exposes entrepreneurial performance to public view.”
§ Remaking Africa's Informal Economies: Youth, Entrepreneurship and the Promise of Inclusion at the Bottom of the Pyramid > Performance
plainstates a cause- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: unclear — It is unclear whether the paper’s conclusions depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
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In the paper
“Despite earlier invitations for trainees to reflect on what kind of person they are, to pursue a quest for self-actualisation, in the end, trainees are enjoined to focus on 'doing', rather than 'thinking' in order to demonstrate their suitability for Catalyst and their readiness to enter the market.”
§ Remaking Africa's Informal Economies: Youth, Entrepreneurship and the Promise of Inclusion at the Bottom of the Pyramid > Rituals of Readiness: Training and Role Plays
plainstates a cause- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
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In the paper
“Catalyst training emphasises the importance of 'learning to be goal-oriented' as a virtue in itself, regardless of whether the goal is achieved, or even achievable.”
§ Remaking Africa's Informal Economies: Youth, Entrepreneurship and the Promise of Inclusion at the Bottom of the Pyramid > Performance
plain- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: unclear — It is unclear whether the paper’s conclusions depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
A result the paper reports from its own data — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“For some entrepreneurs the one-on-one casts a shadow of anxiety and disaffection over the days preceding it.”
§ Remaking Africa's Informal Economies: Youth, Entrepreneurship and the Promise of Inclusion at the Bottom of the Pyramid > Performance
plainstates a cause- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: unclear — It is unclear whether the paper’s conclusions depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
A result the paper reports from its own data — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“Catalyst trainers presented the role of the newly transformed entrepreneur as an ambassador/evangelist spreading the virtues and opportunities of small business to the 'community' through their engagement with customers and through the social benefit of the products themselves.”
§ Remaking Africa's Informal Economies: Youth, Entrepreneurship and the Promise of Inclusion at the Bottom of the Pyramid > Rituals of Readiness: Training and Role Plays
plain- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: passes — The paper’s conclusions depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
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In the citing paper
“Indeed, a downward flow of benefits is often checked by the use of formal contracts, bureaucratic complexities and other forms of corporate discipline to 'align incentives' and protect corporate profits (Bahre 2012;Dolan and Rajak 2016;Hietelahti and Nygren 2011).”
From Cannibalizing the Informal Economy: Frugal Innovation and Economic Inclusion in Africa (2018) · cites this paper as Dolan and Rajak 2016
In the citing paper
“A high turnover of sales agents in BoP distributive networks indicates that the benefits are often slow to trickle down (Arora and Romijn 2011:484;Dolan and Rajak 2016).”
From Cannibalizing the Informal Economy: Frugal Innovation and Economic Inclusion in Africa (2018) · cites this paper as Dolan and Rajak 2016
In the citing paper
“In contrast to claims of complementarity, recent ethnographic studies of micro-insurance, micro-credit, and other branded products and services have highlighted the aggressive appropriation of social networks and informal institutions to access informal labour and consumer markets on the cheap, at little benefit to informal actors.”
From Cannibalizing the Informal Economy: Frugal Innovation and Economic Inclusion in Africa (2018) · cites this paper as Dolan and Rajak 2016
Self-check
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In the paper
§ Remaking Africa's Informal Economies: Youth, Entrepreneurship and the Promise of Inclusion at the Bottom of the Pyramid > 5. Dreams Deferred
“You might find you made sales of 76,000 shillings [93 USD]”
§ Remaking Africa's Informal Economies: Youth, Entrepreneurship and the Promise of Inclusion at the Bottom of the Pyramid > Performance
“between 10,000 and 20,000 Ksh [115 to 230 USD]”
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Metadata
- Authors
- Dolan, C., & Rajak, D.
- Affiliations
- SOAS University of London (GB)
- University of Sussex (GB)
- Corresponding author
- Dolan, Catherine
- Venue
- The Journal of Development Studies
- Publisher
- Informa UK Limited
- Published
- 2016-03-22
- Volume
- 52
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 514-529
- ISSN
- 0022-0388 (ISSN-L)
- 1743-9140
- OpenAlex
- W1816961283
- Semantic Scholar
- 7c314c13eb7c106cf47bfb8ba816a1b1036fe2ea
- Cited by
- 144
- References
- 53
- Citations by year
- 2026: 6 · 2025: 9 · 2024: 13 · 2023: 10 · 2022: 24 · 2021: 22 · 2020: 23 · 2019: 20 · 2018: 9 · 2017: 5 · 2016: 2
- FWCI
- 30.72
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- Licence
- cc-by
- Locations
- The Journal of Development Studies (publishedVersion)
- SOAS Research Online (SOAS University of London) (acceptedVersion)
- SOAS Research Online (SOAS University of London) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Sussex Research Online (University of Sussex) (submittedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- Figshare (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Business and International Management › Innovation and Socioeconomic Development
- Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Microfinance and Financial Inclusion
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › African Studies and Ethnography
- Keywords
- bottom of the pyramid, informal economy, youth entrepreneurship, inclusive markets, poverty reduction, empowerment, sub-Saharan Africa, global capitalism, market segmentation, discursive practices
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
A language model drew the claims from the paper on 2026-11-14, under version 3 of the claim definition (model deepseek-v4.1-flash, prompt extract-v3).
A second model labelled each claim on 2026-11-14 (model jev-1.13-20260917, definition revision gold-guideline-v0.2).
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
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Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
