The Experience of Platform Livelihoods: A Literature Rewiew for Digital Development

There is growing interest in the economic development community about how people can participate in the platform economy to find work and earn a living. Opportunities in roles like online freelancing and ride-hailing are beginning to be found throughout low- and middle-income countries, as is social commerce—the selling of goods and services via social media platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp. To inform policies, product, and programs, there is still insufficient attention paid to how individual work seekers and entrepreneurs pursue livelihoods in the platform economy.

To address this gap, this paper draws on a literature review to make five main foundational contributions. The paper proposes and defines platform livelihoods as the superset of platform work by individuals and platform sales by micro- and small enterprises and farmers. This resulted in an illustrative set of nine diverse platform livelihood types.

Via a review methodology of 75 studies, the paper identifies twelve core experience elements of platform livelihoods and discusses each in turn. The paper analyzes studies of the nine platform livelihood types, drawing distinctions between them. These findings are combined into an online evidence map. Finally the paper discusses how these livelihood elements and types interact with four crosscutting themes (gender, rurality, youth, and COVID-19) and four emergent dynamics (hidden hierarchies, amplification, contestation/appropriation, and fractional livelihoods).