Informality, Platforms and the Future of Work In the Global South

Digital technologies are transforming economies, labour markets and everyday life. Public services increasingly run through digital platforms, financial systems are going cashless, taxation moves online, and AI is reshaping how people work and trade. Platforms have generated new forms of work and income, from ride-hailing and delivery to online freelancing, content creation, influencer economies and mobile commerce. Yet across Africa, Asia and Latin America, informal work is not a residual category but the way most people earn a living, long sitting outside the labour rights and welfare systems built around formal employment. Digital technologies are now promoted as a remedy. Mobile money promises to bank the unbanked, platform applications to make scattered labour visible and contributory, and online tax systems to fold informal operators within reach of the state. This session interrogates that promise, with social protection as its central question, asking whether digitalisation extends protection to informal workers or merely recodes informality while leaving the protection gap intact. Platform riders, care workers, street vendors and content creators perform work mediated by technology yet without contract, employer or social protection. Access to digital banking, social registries and platform income presupposes connectivity, documents, devices and literacies unevenly distributed across regions, classes and genders, so that systems meant to include can deepen exclusion. We ask what social protection can mean when platforms act as major employers without becoming employers in law. We welcome contributions from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the wider Global South. Comparative, empirical and policy-oriented perspectives are especially welcome.