There’s a story the technology industry likes to tell about the gig economy in Africa. It goes something like this: digital platforms are creating new pathways to employment, unlocking entrepreneurial potential, and building the future of work across the continent. It’s a compelling narrative. It’s also, based on the latest available data, largely wrong — or at least, wrong about what’s actually happening.
New research from Ipsos Strategy3’s 2025 multi-country Gig Economy Study, covering Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa, paints a different picture. Not of a new economy being built, but of an old one being rerouted through smartphones.
The numbers behind the reframe
Consider Kenya. The country’s gig economy is now valued at approximately $1.03 billion and supports an estimated 1.55 million workers. Those are real numbers. But set them alongside the labour market context and a different pattern emerges.
In 2024, Kenya created an estimated 782,300 new jobs. Of those, roughly 703,700 (around 90%) were in the informal sector, according to provisional data from the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics. The formal economy barely moved the needle. Meanwhile, the number of active digital labour platforms operating in the country grew from 11 in 2015 to over 40 by 2022.
What happened isn’t that platforms created employment where none existed. What happened is that informal work; selling goods, transporting people, performing small tasks for cash, migrated onto digital infrastructure. The boda boda rider became a Bolt driver. The market trader became a Jumia seller. The neighbourhood handyman became a micro-task worker. The work was already there. The app was new.
This isn’t a minor distinction. It fundamentally changes what we should expect from gig platforms, what we should demand from policy, and how we evaluate whether this sector is delivering on its promises.
What the platform layer actually adds
If gig platforms are digitising existing informal work rather than generating net new employment, the question shifts from “how many jobs are they creating?” to “what are they adding to work that already existed?”
The Ipsos data suggests three things.
First, income visibility. In Kenya, the majority of ride-hailing earnings flow through M-Pesa. This creates something informal work historically lacked: a verified, timestamped record of economic activity. As we explored in our earlier piece on Kenya’s commission cap, these transaction histories are becoming the basis for credit access, savings products, and insurance. Financial services that were structurally inaccessible to informal workers.
The World Bank’s Global Findex data underscores the shift. Across sub-Saharan Africa, 40% of adults now hold a mobile money account, up from 27% in 2021. Formal savings reached 35%, climbing 12 percentage points over the same period. Gig platforms didn’t cause this trend, but they’re accelerating it by channelling millions of micro-transactions through traceable digital rails.
Second, price standardisation. Before ride-hailing apps, negotiating a fare with an informal taxi driver was unpredictable for passengers and inconsistent for drivers. Platforms introduced fixed pricing, route optimisation, and demand-based adjustments. For drivers, this removed some of the friction and uncertainty of informal transport work. It also, notably, created new forms of dependency; when the algorithm sets the price, the driver loses bargaining power even as they gain volume.
Third, a coordination layer. Matching supply and demand in real time; connecting a driver with a passenger, a seller with a buyer, a freelancer with a client, is genuine value creation. It’s not job creation in the traditional sense, but it reduces the dead time, geographic mismatch, and information asymmetry that characterised informal markets. For a Nairobi driver who previously waited at a taxi rank hoping for a fare, an app that routes passengers directly is a meaningful improvement – even if the underlying work is identical.
The narrative problem
None of this diminishes the gig economy’s importance. But it does challenge the framing that dominates investor decks, platform press releases, and policy conferences.
When ride-hailing is presented as “job creation,” it implies that the workers didn’t have economic activity before. Most did. When e-commerce is described as “entrepreneurship,” it obscures that many participants are doing what market traders have done for generations, selling goods to local buyers, just through Instagram or Jumia instead of a physical stall. When gig work is called the “future of work,” it glosses over the fact that for 90% of Kenya’s new workforce entrants, the present of work is informal, and platforms are one of several ways that informality now operates.
The narrative matters because it shapes where money and attention flow. If gig platforms are “creating” jobs, the policy response is to support platform growth. If they’re digitising informal work, the policy response is broader: strengthen the digital infrastructure that makes informal work more productive, extend financial inclusion tools beyond ride-hailing to e-commerce and freelancing where women participate at higher rates, and build social protection systems that recognise platform-mediated informality as what it is — not a new category of work, but an old one wearing new clothes.
What this means going forward
Kenya’s gig economy is projected to keep growing. Smartphone penetration sits at 30–40% and is climbing. Government programmes like Ajira Digital (516,500 people trained by April 2024) and Jitume Digital Hubs (117 centres operational) are actively funnelling young people toward digital work. The e-mobility push is lowering operating costs for drivers. Regulation is maturing.
All of this is positive. But the most honest way to describe what’s happening isn’t “Africa is building a new digital workforce.” It’s “Africa’s massive informal economy, the one that already employs the majority of the continent’s workers, is being wired into digital systems that make it more visible, more financeable, and more productive.”
That’s not a lesser story. It might actually be a bigger one. The informal economy across sub-Saharan Africa is estimated to account for 35–40% of GDP in many countries. If digital platforms can meaningfully improve the productivity, financial access, and working conditions of even a fraction of that workforce, the impact dwarfs anything a narrow “gig economy” framing captures.
But it requires dropping the pretence that this is something new. The work isn’t new. The workers aren’t new. What’s new is the layer of technology. And the question is whether that layer serves the people doing the work, or merely extracts from them more efficiently.
Data covers Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa, with 250 survey respondents per country, supplemented by focus groups and in-depth stakeholder interviews. Additional sources: World Bank Global Findex 2024, GSMA, KNBS, KEPSA, IMF.
