The World Bank says that Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa are the top Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries in terms of how much internet traffic flows to online gig platforms.
A gig economy is a labour market that relies heavily on temporary and part-time positions filled by independent contractors and freelancers rather than full-time permanent employees.
Gig workers gain flexibility and independence but little or no job security. Many employers save money by avoiding paying benefits such as health coverage and paid vacation time. Others pay for some benefits to gig workers but outsource the benefits programs and other management tasks to external agencies.
The term is borrowed from the music world, where performers book “gigs” that are single or short-term engagements at various venues.
In its new study, “Working Without Borders: The Promise and Peril of Online Gig Work,” the international organisation said that the results from the three countries were used to estimate the number of online gig workers in the other countries, which made up 19.35% of the traffic flow and added up to about 21.7 million gig workers in SSA.
“The gig economy is no longer just a thing that happens in developed countries. It is also becoming more important in emerging markets.” The study said that almost a third (30%) of the traffic to gig platforms comes from the United States, followed by the Russian Federation (14 per cent) and India (6 per cent).
It said that 18 per cent of people come from low- and lower-middle-income countries like India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Ukraine, while 22 per cent come from upper-middle-income countries like Belarus, Brazil, Mexico, Russia, and Türkiye.
“40 per cent of the traffic to gig sites comes from low- and middle-income countries as a whole. This shows that gig platforms are useful in rising economies and that emerging economies are important for gig platforms.
“Gig work has a lot in common with informal work and other types of nonstandard work that are common in developing countries, where most people work outside of the law and don’t have access to social insurance and benefits,” said the multilateral organisation.
Other countries with a lot of job work include the Arab Republic of Egypt, Argentina, Bangladesh, China, India, Lebanon, Mexico, Morocco, Pakistan, the Philippines, Repblica Bolivariana de Venezuela, the Russian Federation, Tunisia, and Ukraine.
The report’s writers say that gig workers have low social insurance coverage because almost half of the gig workers they surveyed do not pay into a pension or retirement programme.
“But this number can be as high as 73 per cent of gig workers in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and 75% of gig workers in Nigeria,” they said.
They also said that only 34 per cent of gig workers in Indonesia have emergency savings and that 60 per cent of them are having trouble meeting their financial responsibilities.
The World Bank said that AXA Mansard Insurance, one of the biggest insurance companies in Nigeria, offers insurance plans to self-employed artists and freelancers by changing its models to take into account their irregular income.
“Other companies, like Catch in the US, work with gig platforms to find people who don’t have health insurance through their jobs and offer them a package of services, such as help with filing taxes and so on.”
It also said that local platforms tend to be more specialised in the tasks they list. As an example, it gave the example of Findworka, an online gig work platform based in Nigeria that chose to specialise in IT-related gig work by looking for workers with IT skills and giving training to local gig workers to help them get skills in this field.
The Bank said that SheWorks, a platform for Latin America and the Caribbean, tends to focus on jobs in digital marketing, writing, and translation.
“On the other hand, global platforms usually have tasks in a wide range of categories, such as business and professional services like human resources, accounting, consulting, and marketing; creative and multimedia; software development and programming; administrative and clerical tasks like data entry and data labelling; and writing and translation.”
