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Small and Medium sized Businesses (SMBs) make up majority of employment in Africa (around 80%). Understanding the digital transformation that SMBs in Africa went through during the pandemic can play an important role in uncovering how to build solutions that better support the African business and African worker. In this paper we report on findings from a qualitative study with 40 SMBs in Kenya. The study aimed to understand the lived experience of digital transformation, the impacts of COVID-19 on their businesses, and how they responded to such impacts using technology. We found that COVID-prompted digital transformation was reactive and opportunistic, plus social and collective. Moreover, the socialness of business goes way beyond digital transformation, and influences how SMBs in Kenya start, develop and are sustained. In illustrating this, we offer a lens to understanding work and workers of SMBs in Kenya and similar contexts across the globe.

This paper reports on the changes in the monetary ecology around loan payments by auto rickshaw drivers shortly after the introduction of a mobile app in Karnataka, India. A for-profit, social enterprise facilitates loans for purchasing auto rickshaws. The mobile app was designed and implemented to provide accurate, timely loan information for drivers, to support the collaborative work of loan collection payment, and streamline the workflows of the organization. In this paper, we report on the initial experiences with the app, and argue that its introduction led to a tighter coupling of the actors involved and moved control to the back office, which especially impacted the pre- and at-transaction interactions of the monetary ecology. The paper reflects on how these changes impact adoption and use of the app and suggests a number of changes to the design which might address the observed problematics.

Ride-hailing services have received attention as part of the growing work around the sharing economy, but the focus of these studies has largely been on drivers. In this paper, we examine how ride-hailing is transforming the transportation practices of one group of passengers - people with visual impairments in metropolitan India. Through a qualitative study consisting of interviews and observations, we examined the use and impact of these services on our target population, who otherwise contend with chaotic, unreliable, and largely inaccessible modes of transportation. We found that ride-hailing services positively affects participants' notions of independence, and we tease out how independence for our participants is not just about 'doing things alone, without help' but is also situated, social and relative. Furthermore, we show how accessibility, in the case of ride-hailing in India, is a socio-technical and collaborative achievement, involving interactions between the passenger, the driver, and the technology.

Synchronous text communication is becoming recognized as a valuable workplace communication medium yet some studies of group text chat indicate that its properties can lead to interactional incoherence. We consider this issue through a detailed analytic examination of text chat transcripts by showing how participants manage their interactions through considering multiple threads, turn taking and topic change. We reveal the routine practices that participants employ to create and manage coherent interaction. These practices arise from the turn taking system in operation, which facilitates straightforward repair of misunderstandings. We conclude by considering the implications of this for design and for the organisation and management of interactions of various forms.