Digital labour at economic margins: African workers and the global information economy
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SUMMARY The main aim of this briefing is to make visible the invisible and bring light to the role African workers are playing in developing key emergent and everyday digital technologies such as autonomous vehicles, machine learning systems, next-generation search engines and recommendations systems. Once we acknowledge that many contemporary digital technologies rely on a lot of human labour to drive their interfaces, we can begin to piece together what the new global division of labour for digital work looks like and build a greater socio-political response (both at the global and local scale) to make some of these value chains more transparent, ethical and rewarding.
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Despite advanced capabilities of GAI, human expertise and intervention remain crucial to unlocking its full potential.
“despite the advanced capabilities of GAI, human expertise and intervention remain crucial to unlocking its full potential (Anwar and Graham, 2020).”
From Generative Artificial Intelligence in Business: Towards a Strategic Human Resource Management Framework (2024) · cites this paper as Anwar and Graham, 2020
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- Authors
- Anwar, M. A., & Graham, M.
- Affiliations
- University of Johannesburg (ZA)
- University of Oxford (GB)
- Corresponding author
- Anwar, Mohammad Amir
- Venue
- Review of African Political Economy
- Publisher
- Review of African Political Economy
- Published
- 2020-01-02
- Volume
- 47
- Issue
- 163
- ISSN
- 0305-6244 (ISSN-L)
- 1740-1720
- OpenAlex
- W3004571690
- Cited by
- 94
- References
- 27
- Citations by year
- 2026: 11 · 2025: 9 · 2024: 26 · 2023: 16 · 2022: 25 · 2021: 5 · 2020: 1 · 2019: 1
- FWCI
- 15.72
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- papers.ssrn.com
- Locations
- Review of African Political Economy (publishedVersion)
- SSRN Electronic Journal (submittedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme
- European Research Council (335716)
- Alan Turing Institute (EP/N510129/1)
- ESRC (ES/S00081X/1)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Digital Economy and Work Transformation
- Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Industrial relations › Legal and Labor Studies
- Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Strategy and Management › Global trade, sustainability, and social impact
- Keywords
- digital labor, African workers, division of labor, digital technologies, value chain, transparency, emerging technologies, machine learning, autonomous vehicles, search engines, recommender systems
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