Boateng Festival Godwin, Appau Samuelson, Baako Kingsley Tetteh
Centre for Sustainable Urban Development, Columbia Climate School/Earth Institute, Columbia University, New York, USA.
Melbourne Business School, 200 Leicester Street, Carlton, VIC 3053 Australia.
Humanit Soc Sci Commun. 2022;9(1):245. doi: 10.1057/s41599-022-01258-6. Epub 2022 Jul 25.
Governments in Africa are licensing major global ride-hailing firms to launch operations in the continent. This is often presented as a refreshing development for the continent to leverage technology to address its twin problems of inefficient urban transport and rising youth unemployment. Interviews with ride-hailing adopters (drivers, riders, and car owners) and researchers in Ghana suggest, however, that whereas the technology is driving up the standards of road transport experience, the benefits are accessible to a select few (largely, the younger, highly educated and relatively high income-earning class). The lopsided power relations underlying the ride-hailing industry have also meant that the economic opportunities it avails disproportionately benefit a few powerful players (e.g. ride-hailing firms and car owners) while stimulating among online and traditional taxi drivers; deepening existing gender inequalities in access to income-earning opportunities in the commercial passenger transport sector; encouraging unhealthy driving practices, shifts from shared public transport, and inundation of the roads with more private cars. While it will be imprecise to say that the private gains of ride-hailing outstrip the public costs and, therefore, the technology is detrimental to Ghana's development, the considered evidence raises the need for sustained scrutiny of the hailing of technological interventions as though they are the magic bullets for socio-economic transformation in Africa. Overall, the paper argues that dismantling the power structures underlying Africa's urban challenges will require more than splashing apps and other tech wizardries around. Indeed, the lessons from Ghana's ride-hailing industry suggest that such exclusively technical solutions could easily take root and pattern after existing strictures of unjust power structures in ways that could exacerbate the social and environmental problems they are supposed to address.
非洲各国政府正在向全球主要的打车公司发放许可证，允许它们在非洲大陆开展业务。这通常被视为该大陆令人耳目一新的发展，即利用技术来解决城市交通效率低下和青年失业率上升这两大问题。然而，对加纳打车服务采用者（司机、乘客和车主）以及研究人员的采访表明，虽然这项技术正在提高道路运输体验的标准，但受益的只是少数人（主要是较年轻、受过高等教育且收入相对较高的阶层）。打车行业背后不平衡的权力关系还意味着，它所提供的经济机会 disproportionately 使少数几个强大的参与者（如打车公司和车主）受益，同时刺激了在线和传统出租车司机之间的竞争；加深了商业客运部门在获得收入机会方面现有的性别不平等；鼓励了不健康的驾驶行为、从共享公共交通方式的转变以及道路上私家车的泛滥。虽然说打车服务的私人收益超过公共成本，因此这项技术对加纳的发展有害，这种说法并不准确，但经过深思熟虑的证据表明，有必要持续审视将技术干预视为非洲社会经济转型的万灵药这种做法。总体而言，本文认为，要消除非洲城市挑战背后的权力结构，需要的不仅仅是到处推广应用程序和其他技术手段。事实上，加纳打车行业的经验教训表明，这种纯粹的技术解决方案很容易在现有不公正权力结构的限制下扎根并形成模式，从而可能加剧它们本应解决的社会和环境问题。
