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Digital Commerce and Youth Employment in Africa Commissioned by the Mastercard Foundation 27FEBRUARY 2019 January 2019 | Page 1 | BFA Foreword The Fourth Industrial Revolution is well underway. Digital transactions circle the globe every second, data algorithms predict our behaviours, and companies have broken into trillion-dollar valuations. Across Africa, mobile phones have spread rapidly, driven both by decreasing costs and increasing benefits of connection. Financial services have reached millions of unbanked people, and some African countries have even launched satellites into space. Despite these technology-driven changes, future opportunities are uncertain. The Mastercard Foundation is keenly interested in how this rapidly changing world will affect the opportunities available to African youth. Our mission is to create a world where everyone has the opportunity to learn and prosper, and we are focusing our efforts on tackling what we see is the most pertinent challenge to stability and prosperity in Africayouth employment. Over 100 million young people will join the labour market in the next decade in Africa, and they are eager to acquire the necessary skills, connections, and opportunities to not only survive but to thrive in this changing world. Where will employment opportunities come from for young Africans? We believe that digital commerce offers great potential for young people in the future. This is not only for young people to access work, but also to sell their goods. Many young people have innovative ideas and enterprises, and they are eager to gain access to information, markets, and connections through digital marketplaces. The success of digital commerce in Africa is not assured, however. As this paper points out, there are many uncertainties shaping the trajectory of growth, and impact of these technology-enabled business models. This paper is a first step towards mapping out the possible scenarios for digital commerce in Africa and thinking through what steps can be taken towards an inclusive digital commerce system that opens opportunities for young people. We welcome discussion and debate about the scenarios and pathways laid out in the paper, and we hope that the conversations spark more ideas and actions towards inclusive digital economies in Africa. The Mastercard Foundation thanks BFA, and specifically David Porteous, Amolo Ngweno, and their team, for their capable leadership of this project. We particularly appreciate the experts and young people who participated in the workshop at which the scenarios in this paper were discussed, and we know that the thinking contained in this paper is stronger thanks to their input. Tricia Williams, PhD Olga Morawczynski, PhD Senior Manager, Strategy the question for policymakers in Africa is whether they can help wield it as a positive force for employment creation. This White Paper is based on a scenario-building project, which aimed to identify the key choicesfacing African policymakers in this emerging area. The project involved research and interviews with a range of people especially in three selected African countries where digital commerce is advancing - Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa - and two large reference countries, China and India. This was followed by a scenario-building workshop at which the different worlds were tested on a diverse group of stakeholders. This document is structured around the main questions that are on the minds of policymakers in Africa, and indeed elsewhere. What is digital commerce and how is it relevant for Africa? Digital commerce is a broad term referring to the sale of goods and services online. It encompasses all forms of e-commerce or digital trade, as well as the gig or sharing economy. Digital commerce is still nascent across Africa, generally at levels of well below one percent of retail commerce, compared with 14 percent and above in market leaders such as the US and China. The scores for African countries on the UNCTAD E-commerce Readiness Index are generally low. However, growth in Africa appears to be accelerating in various places. In these relatively early days, most African policymakers do not yet have a clear and comprehensive voice on the issues at stake or an agreed national stance toward them. Very few African countries have yet produced national digital commerce strategies. Even within national governments, the ministries of trade, commerce, labor, and information and communications technology (ICT) may well have different views about the potential of digital commerce and what to do about it. It is also not easy to draw firm conclusions for Africa from evidence of the effects of digital commerce elsewhere. On the one hand, there are rising concerns and even pessimism in Western countries about the effects of automation on jobs, while on the other hand there is growing optimism in China regarding digital commerce in all its forms. A January 2019 | Page 5 | BF AIs rising digital commerce inevitable? Because of strong tailwinds, such as increased internet connectivity and the growing reach of domestic digital payment systems, it is all but certain that digital commerce will continue to grow. However, there are material uncertainties beyond the control of any one African country policymaker regarding the way in which the international or regional approaches to digital commerce will play out in the next 10 years. For example, it is possible that agreements could emerge around the complex set of policy issues at the level of both international and regional bodies (e.g., the World Trade Organization, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the Universal Postal Union among the former, and the African Union or even the Southern African Development Community and the East Africa Community among the latter). This convergence could create an enabling general environment for digital commerce. In this possible future world, national policymakers could seek to influence emerging wider frameworks to ensure that these agreements support the growth of economic opportunity and employment within their countries. However, in a fragmenting global polity, convergence might well not be the outcome; instead, countries might be forced to adopt their own approaches in more of a patchwork fashion. But rather than speculate about which world will result, scenario thinking - the heart of this exercise - is about “future-proofing” policy options within a feasible set of different future settings. How does digital commerce link to employment? Accelerating digital commerce alone does not assure positive outcomes for employment. In developed markets employees previously in formal jobs have become “dependent contractors”, and not always by choice. However, our research found evidence of three channels through which digital commerce is shaping employment opportunities. The first is directly, through boosting employment in the expanding ecosystems forming around digital superplatforms. Amazon has become the second-largest private employer in the US, and the Alibaba Group, which has tripled its own workforce in China in the past five years, has an even more substantial impact through its complex ecosystem of logistics platforms and other supporting sectors. The second channel has the indirect effect of reducing barriers to entry and scale for smaller enterprises. The evidence for this comes mostly from China, where researchers have found that small and medium enterprises (SMEs) established around enterprise zones (known as Taobao villages) are likely to be a more recent development. Founded by newcomers to the region, they also require far less working capital because of the ways in which merchants are paid. More fundamentally, through the third channel digital platforms reshape the nature of work itself. This is most visible in the effect of international gig platforms of various sorts, from TaskRabbit to Uber. These and others are also rapidly emerging across Africa. Most work in Africa today takes place in the so-called informal sector. The International Labor January 2019 | Page 6 | BFA Organization (ILO) has estimated that 85 percent of employment in Africa is informal. For informal workers in Africa, the spread of digital commerce is less of a threat (removing rights they do not have) than an opportunity to embark on a journey of progressive formalization. There is a substantial group of workers who will enter the African labor market between now and 2030 who will be digital commerce consumers using their smartphones to buy online. With a supportive policy environment, this group of workers may also become producers, generating incomes from diverse sources with a route to receiving forms of benefits and protection on a spectrum between todays limited but formal jobs sector and the vast but unsupported informal sector. To distinguish this digitally connected group, they are named iWorkers, and under different assumptions about growth they may make up more than 10 percent of the labor force by 2030. What options do African policymakers have? Considering their initial market conditions and the emerging scenarios in which they find themselves, African policymakers still have choices about implementing a set of “no regret” measures, which will inform and equip them to engage more successfully both locally and internationally with digital commerce as it spreads. These include collecting better data locally, monitoring international developments, encouraging training on the issues for local policymakers, and ensuring that valuable digital commerce skills, such as digital marketing and relationship management - not only technical skills such as coding - are widely taught. However, policymakers can do more than wait and see. This report makes the case for a “test-and-learn approach”, especially in the critical areas where national labor and tax laws may create barriers that exacerbate the formal-informal employment divide. There is a strong case to be made for experimenting with policy “sandboxes”, in which the effects of waiving certain existing laws can be tested and observed and the take-up of new forms of employment contracts and packages of portable contributory benefits can be trialed. Why is this issue important now? In its nascent state in Africa, digital commerce may be most susceptible to influence now. However, the window of opportunity to shape the national environments in which digital commerce plays out may not stay open for much longer. The outcomes of international and continental negotiations over the next two to five years will shape the landscape of choice one way or the other. Meanwhile, digital commerce is advancing inexorably through the startup of new e-tailers across Africa and the ongoing expansion of large platforms into new markets. In the face of these sweeping changes, doing nothing is inadvisable. Instead, African policymakers can start to engage around a menu of choices tailored to their domestic circumstances and their level of ambition and vision in this important new area. Introduction Governments everywhere wrestle with the challenges of promoting “sustained, inclusive and sustainable growth, full employment and decent work for all,” the eighth Sustainable Development Goal on the UNs 2030 Agenda. Within this goal, “dignified and fulfilling” work for young people is a particular concern in Africa. This White Paper examines whether digital commerce1can be part of the solution. Digital commerce harnesses the cluster of technologies - robotics, the Internet of Things, cloud computing, data analytics, and artificial intelligence - at the heart of what has been called the Fourth Industrial Revolution. It does so in ways that may have profound effects on the real economy in goods, services, and employment. Digital commerce is driving the wider phenomenon of the digitization of the economy, which is already disrupting entire sectors, such as retail and travel, globally. It has also deeply challenged traditional laws and policies in areas such as cross-border trade and taxation as it reshapes global value chains. While it is undoubtedly an engine of change, is digital commerce always or mainly an engine of sustainable development that will create more employment opportunities than it destroys? To crystallize the issues and understand the dynamics surrounding digital commerce and its possible impact on youth employment in Africa, BFA embarked on a scenario-building exercise. We drew on burgeoning literature as well as country-level dipstick research in five countries in order to answer this driving question: Which choices by African policymakers will increase the positive effects of digital commerce on employment outcomes, especially for youth, by 2030? We report our findings in this paper, which we have organized into five parts: 1. What is digital commerce, and how is it relevant to Africa? 2. Is rising digital commerce inevitable? 3. How does digital commerce affect employment? 4. What options do African policymakers have? 5. And why is this important now? Section 1 What Is Digital Commerce and How Is It Relevant to Africa? “From an African perspective, this means that e-commerce has the potential to contribute towards increasing intra-African trade, which currently stands at around 18 percent and therefore help realize the objectives of the Boosting Intra-African Trade Action Plan and most important, of the recently launched African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), which is one of the flagship projects of Agenda 2063. African Union Concept Note, July 2018 January 2019 | Page 9 | BFA 1.1 The Digital Commerce Landscape Digital commerce is a broad-ranging phenomenon without an official definition. For example, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has described it as “the sale or purchase of goods or services, conducted over computer networks by methods designed for the purpose of receiving or placing of orders.”2The 1998 World Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial Conference Declaration on E-commerce is similarly broad, defining it as “the production, distribution, marketing, sale, or delivery of goods and services by electronic means.”3At its most general, it refers to the digitization of commerce of all sorts - goods and services as well as domestic and cross-border, as depicted in Figure 1.1 below. Unless in a title or publication, we choose to use the term digital commerce rather than e-commerce or digital trade, which have narrower connotations. In this section, we set out the landscape of digital commerce globally against the perspective in Africa. Figure 1.1. The Landscape of Digital Commerce 1.2. Consumer-facing Digital Commerce Offers Potential for Employment Growth Digital commerce can be segmented in a number of ways, which we briefly explore in this section. The first dimension, defined by
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