Tough gigs: On-demand labour and freelancing
Conversations with Africa’s platform workers
These conversations took place between March, 2020 and September, 2020
Lynk is an on-demand local labour platform in Kenya, through which plumbers, painters, cleaners, carpenters and many other professionals secure paid work.
When COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, Stanley, a cleaner on the platform knew that his work days were numbered. The offices he, and many others on the platform, regularly clean had closed. Even homes were no longer accessible. “Clients are too conscious and everybody is afraid to offer us jobs to clean their homes or offices,” Stanley told me in June.
Stanley was part of an incubation program at Lynk, where workers were provided with a monthly salary and upskilling opportunities. In April, due to the high costs associated with the incubation program, Lynk transitioned workers out of these programs and into independent contractor roles. However for Stanley, not only did his incubation program end, but all cleaning services were discontinued on the platform due to lack of demand. Short-term relief came for Stanley when Lynk secured a contract with Safe Hands Kenya to disinfect the slums in Nairobi but that ended quickly and by July, there was no more work.
When COVID started, Lynk ensured that all pros — including Stanley — were compensated with one month of pay regardless of whether or not their clients continued to engage them. Stanley also received a recommendation letter from Lynk to help support him in his job search.
A father of two, Stanley, 34, was eventually forced to leave Nairobi and relocate to the village with his family. He sold some of his belongings including his phone, to afford the transport costs. He and his family now temporarily live with his mother in the village and his landlord has since put a padlock on their house back in the city due to rent arrears. The family, he says, will eventually have to return to the house in the city when the children resume school. Stanley now earns a living by collecting grass for cattle keepers, and is paid mostly in food. “If you are lucky, you get cash but it is also very little. It is KES150 (USD 1.4) for each time someone needs grass. I have about three clients,” he says.
Lynk’s support interventions
In addition to the one month pay, Lynk rolled out a number of interventions to help their workers weather the storm. Akinyi Ooko-Ombaka who heads the Lynk Academy told us the platform provided a monthly transport allowance of KES 30000 (USD 30) to each worker, distributed PPE, conducted multiple sensitization training and even reached out to partners for additional support. “BuildHer, one of our recruitment partners, provided food packages to all workers in our shop,” Akinyi told us. They also partnered with an organisation to provide cash transfers to their most vulnerable workers.
“While the impact of COVID is ubiquitous, workers on the platform have been affected differently not only based on their socio-economic status, but their trade. For instance we’ve seen significant growth in our Furniture segment whereas services like Beauty were the most hard hit. Even before COVID, informal workers were vulnerable COVID has forced us to think more deeply about supporting our workers to build resilience.” Akinyi said.
Freelancing
While the COVID-19 pandemic popularised freelancing (self-employed workers who take on contracts from various companies) globally as more people went online to find jobs they could do remotely, the demand side didn’t increase fast enough to meet supply. According to a survey by Payoneer, a global company that provides financial services to freelancers, close to 32% of freelancers reported that demand had greatly decreased after COVID-19 was declared a pandemic in March.
Only one out of the seven freelancers I spoke to in June was getting more work due to COVID-19. Ainomugisha, 27, a Ugandan professional content solutions provider, said the pandemic was a blessing in disguise.
“It has created a huge content gap that companies and publications world over are scrambling to fill with informative articles, essays, blog posts, newsletters, etc about COVID-19 for their respective audiences,” he said.
But for the others, hours were reduced and some long-running contracts were ended prematurely. Kwesi, a 30-year-old Ghanian virtual assistant on Upwork and Fiverr said he lost a long-term contract after the company he was working for told him they were restructuring.
“My income has gone down by more than 50%,” Kwesi told me in June. When we spoke again in September, Kwesi had just found a job as a radio presenter and now commits less time to finding online gigs.
Other freelancers in Nigeria, Kenya, and Ghana shared similar stories. Some thought that they were getting less work because of increased competition- that there were more people joining the platforms in search of work. Another global Payoneer survey reported that freelance marketplaces had seen a rapid growth in new freelancers joining the platforms.
Need for new skills
With more freetime on their hands the freelancers recognised the need to upgrade their skills in order to compete more favourably in a now crowded world of online work.
Ama (not real name), 36, an Upwork virtual assistant based in Ghana had been doing clerical work since she joined the platform in 2015. She was making up to $800 a month pre-Covid, but her income reduced to $300 in June after one of her main clients ended the contract because of COVID. She’s since received requests from clients asking if she has other skills like WordPress, database management or app development.
“Those skills are mostly requested by the clients as part of the virtual assistant job,” Ama said. She now plans to start a course on one of the three in January next year.
Carol (not real name), 26, a Ugandan on Upwork who conducts market research on products for companies that sell on Amazon is adding data visualization to her skillset so she can also get more jobs.
And Kelechi, 33, a market researcher also on Upwork, has enrolled in a digital marketing course on Udemy. While he still has a daytime office job, Kelechi is keen to make online freelancing his main source of income, and to do so he realises he needs to make sure he has a set of strong skills to stand out from the crowd.
The workers and sellers whose real names and/or photos are used in our blogs consented to their use.
These conversations were conducted with support from the Mastercard Foundation.
