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This paper investigates digital inequalities in usage within African informal sectors. In particular, we examine whether the uneven digital diffusion is embedded in pre‐existing socio‐economic inequalities. After identifying three segments of informal firms, we rely on multivariate and decomposition analyses to identify predictors of usage of digital technologies for business purposes and explain usage gaps between segments. Our findings suggest that digital inequalities are rooted in the vertical heterogeneity of informal sectors, with some firm characteristics significantly predicting professional use of digital technologies. In addition, we find that there are both common and segment‐specific levers for addressing digital inequalities between informal firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across Africa, the deployment of digital solutions such as track and trace apps and vaccine passports to tackle COVID‐19 largely failed in their public health objectives. Yet, in the process, these material interventions revealed and unleashed new potentialities of governance throughout the continent. This article examines these developments and their significance through historical and theoretical lenses. Since colonialism, African states have been built partially through responses to public health emergencies. Such emergencies have enabled authorities to experiment with and enact logics of control, extraction and legitimation. By interrogating the relationship between epidemics, power and technological artefacts, this article argues that COVID‐19 constituted an exceptional event that both unmasked pre‐existing logics of governance but also enabled experiments with novel techniques through digital technology. Digital techno‐opportunist interventions did little to curb the spread of COVID‐19, but such interventions nevertheless have ramifications and implications that extend beyond this moment. While the political outcomes of the rupture caused by COVID‐19 are not yet fully known, and are subject to resistance and reimagination from below, the political opportunity of 'crisis' reveals distinctly new ways in which states and corporations are combining to pursue logics of control, extraction and legitimation across Africa in a digital age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the relationship between digitalization and the shadow economy in 42 African countries using unbalanced panel data from 2003 to 2016. We begin by drawing on modernization theory to hypothesize that digitalization efforts in African economies represent an augmentation of public service delivery as well as a channel through which the size of the continent's informal economic activity might be reduced. We employ the fixed effects estimation technique as its baseline estimator while correcting for potential endogeneity concerns using an instrumental variable two‐stage least squares technique. We show compelling evidence that digitalization is associated with a decrease in the size of the shadow economy in Africa. However, evidence of a larger influence is driven by the availability of telecommunications infrastructure and the expansion of government online services. These findings suggest that policymakers should invest more in digital technology to formalize Africa's hidden economic activity, particularly to fill the post‐COVID‐19 financing gap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]