Posts tagged: digital economy

Hiring a Researcher at Oxford: Digital Entrepreneurship | Economic Geography | Sub-Saharan Africa

We are recruiting a full-time Researcher to work with us at the Oxford Internet Institute (University of Oxford) on a project that critically assesses the changing landscape of digital entrepreneurship in Sub-Saharan Africa. The Researcher will conduct a grounded, comparative empirical study of digital entrepreneurship in African cities. We are interested in the practices of digital entrepreneurship,… Read More »

Shaping the new world of work

The European Trade Union Institute has just put together a 40-page report that comes out of their conference on ‘Shaping the new world of work. The impacts of digitalisation and robotisation’, held from 27-29 June 2016 in Brussels. I spoke in the Plenary on ‘technology’, and spoke about both fears for digital workers, and potential… Read More »

Mapping the Availability of Online Labour

Digitalization and the increasing connectivity across the globe have capacitated the emergence of an online labour market. A number of platforms now facilitate transactions between employers and employees, often based in very separate locations. These platforms cater for a variety of job types, ranging from simple tasks to complex projects and services and are estimated to provide employment to tens… Read More »

The Impact of Connectivity in Africa: Grand Visions and the Mirage of Inclusive Digital Development

My colleagues Nicolas Friederici, Sanna Ojanperä, and I have recently finished a paper in which we analyse ‘Grand Visions’ of how Internet connectivity affects development in Africa. In the paper, we contrast these visions with the actually available empirical evidence to support those claims. You will be able to read our full conclusions in the paper below: Friederici, N.… Read More »

Hubs vs. Incubators: What Are the Pain Points for Impact and Efficiency?

With tech entrepreneurship on the rise across Africa, efforts to support the agenda are evolving and diversifying. There has been quite a bit of debate—sometimes of the heated kind—about whether incubators, hubs, labs, and other support organizations work. In my view, what’s often missing from such discussions is a deeper understanding of what a hub… Read More »

The Archipelago of Disconnection

22 July 2015 0

The two previous blog posts in this small series discussed Internet population and growing Internet access worldwide. In this post we turn our eyes to territories that are largely left out of global digital connectivity. We look at these areas in terms of Internet penetration (i.e. the share of their population that have “used the Internet… Read More »

Changing Internet Access

14 July 2015 0

The Importance of Being Connected The Internet is ever more important to contemporary economic, social, and political activity. Thus, it is important to map who and where is (and isn’t) connected and can (or cannot) participate. Changing Internet Penetration by World Region In our last post, we primarily discussed how the number of people with Internet… Read More »

The World Online

Description This map shows the total number of Internet users in a country (size of the country) as well as the percentage of the population that has Internet access (shade of the country). It is an update of our 2011 visualization. Data and Method The map uses 2013 data on Internet users and population that… Read More »