Research on platforms in the Global North has typically focused on how these businesses, by marking workers as ‘self-employed’, have avoided state-led worker protection laws and exposed workers to predatory extraction (van Doorn 2017; Moazed 2022; Thelen 2018; Woodcock and Graham 2020; Zanoni 2019). Little attention has been paid to the position and perspective of platform designers, managers and owners in creating these predatory models (Vallas and Schor 2020: 272). Based on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2014-2015 and 2018-2019 in Ghana’s capital Accra, this paper shows how the Ghanaian technology entrepreneurs who founded, designed and (initially) owned the Ghanaian real-estate platform HousinGhana (a pseudonym) coped with their predatory inclusion in the global economy in their quest for business success. Following McMillan Cottom (2020: 443) predatory inclusion is defined as the inclusion of marginalized people into ostensibly democratizing and equalizing mobility schemes on extractive terms.

Publicly in Accra, new digital technologies such as platforms were celebrated as democratizing and equalizing tools. They were framed as allowing Africans to participate in ‘global’ technological innovation and economic growth on more equal terms than in the (colonial) past, due to these technologies’ imagined low requirements for capital investment and accessibility. While Ghanaian tech entrepreneurs such as the founders of HousinGhana initially believed in this promise, they struggled to make it into a reality. To cope, they developed various self-narratives: they perceived their struggles as due to their limited racial and class status and lack of legal support from the Ghanaian state. In this position, they claimed, they could not enforce the middle-class economic behaviour they desired from their platform users, but had to adjust their platforms’ design to broker between the tastes and interests of different user groups. They also resorted to venture capital investment to improve the platforms’ chances at expansion and survival. While the Ghanaian founders of HousinGhana framed the venture capital firms’ involvement as a way for them to learn to be a ‘global player’, they also considered their marginalized position ‘painful’. Stripped of their ownership, they worked on acquiring ‘data insights’ on the African market and profit that was ultimately flowing to the new Asian owners. Thus, they produced new forms of older economic inequalities involved in technological development in Ghana.

According to HousinGhana’s initial owners, an stronger Ghanaian state with more enforced (labour/consumer) laws reflecting middle-class values was necessary to change this dynamic of predatory inclusion. This case study thus encourages us to use theory developed from the South (Comaroff and Comaroff 2012) to rethink what platforms are and do and how they (re)connect capital owners, workers and the state.

Conectez vous pour accéder au texte complet