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Daniel Adeyemi
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In 2015, Femi Taiwo wasnât planning to start a new company until he was duped by a company he outsourced a project to.
Already behind schedule, he found a company online that claimed it could execute the project. In the end, they couldnât deliver and wouldnât refund his money. He eventually lost over â¦300,000 (at that time about $1,500) made as a deposit payment in his desperation to deliver this project.
Back then, foreign freelance sites were not as popular as they are now. After that incident, he checked around and realized that the popular marketplaces – Konga, Jumia and others – were selling products but he couldnât find a proper marketplace for services in Africa.
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The coronavirus has given Africa’s growing gig economy a boost with outsourcing and remote work embraced more because of the need for social distance. In the past few years, Africans have begun taking advantage of several remote work platforms modelled after popular ones like Fiverr and Upwork.
As established in this article, many of these platforms have either failed or are struggling to scale. They are often plagued with funding challenges, buyer-seller distrust, securing user data, and sorting out payment methods, to mention a few.
However, the region is believed to be outgrowing some of these challenges by adopting collaborative tools and technologies. On the one hand, using gig workers’ online and offline services is cost-effective because fees can be negotiated based on schedule, unlike full-time employees. And on the other hand, sellers have more options.