“Online Academic Writing” in Kenya – Entrepreneurship or Exploitation? A View from the Post-colony

• In Event: 21st Century Socialism & Education Panel #6: Capitalism, Neoliberalism and the rise of entrepreneurship discourses in Africa and Asia: A South-South Exchange

Proposal

With growing urgency, international agencies including the World Bank and the UN have promoted education as an essential component of inclusive and equitable development, with a commitment to universal primary education re-inscribed in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). (United Nations, 2000) (United Nations, 2015) In response to these global policy commitments, Kenya introduced free primary education in 2003, and the gains of the policy reform are already apparent with significant increases reflected in primary and secondary school enrolments. Moreover, there has been an unintended benefit of a rise in college enrolments as well as an increase in the ranks of university graduates.

While previously the Kenyan civil service and the private sector were able to absorb almost all university graduates entering the job market, as a result of the World Bank’s structural adjustment program implemented in Kenya in the 1990s, there has been a growing crisis of youth unemployment, with some describing youth unemployment in Kenya as a “ticking time bomb.” (Danner, Kerrettes-Makau, & Nebe, 2016) As a consequence, the responsibility of securing decent employment has shifted from the government or private sector and is now the burden of the individual. As this unemployment crisis has grown, there has been a convergence in popular and policy discourse that exhorts young Kenyans to become entrepreneurs. This paper is based on preliminary research that is part of a longer-term project that examines how Kenyan youth interpret and navigate the two discourses that are directed toward them – first, education as a way out of poverty and the path to socio-economic mobility; and second, entrepreneurship as a way to find decent, respectable employment.

My research shows how Kenyan college graduates are recruited to become online academic writers and “online academic writing” has become a booming industry in the global outsourcing economy in which university graduates write academic papers for a fee for university students primarily in the global North. Kenyan graduates who work as “online academic writers” view themselves as ‘entrepreneurs’ who are using their education to meet a need in the global economy.

My paper argues that despite educational gains, the inequalities that structure the international economy produce Kenyan youth as ‘entrepreneurs’ in ways that position the ‘entrepreneur’ as precarious labor from the South in service to the North. In developing my argument, my aim is to contest the dominant policy discourse of education as a path to social mobility for youth in the global South, and of entrepreneurship as a panacea to unemployment in the global economy.

Danner, H., Kerrettes-Makau, M., & Nebe, J. M. (2016). Youth Unemployment in Kenya: A Ticking Time Bomb. Retrieved from https://books.google.com/books?id=R0ShnQAACAAJ
United Nations. (2000, September). Millennium Development Goals and Beyond 2015. Retrieved from http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/
United Nations. (2015, September). Sustainable Development Goals. Retrieved from https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/

Author

• Verity Norman-Tichawangana, University of Massachusetts, Amherst