The Problem

Across Africa and the wider Global South, we are sold a familiar bargain: accept extraction now, and prosperity will follow.

Platforms promise flexibility and deliver precarity, managing workers by algorithm while stripping away the protections of employment. Devices consumed in the Global North end their lives as e-waste in African communities, which carry the health and environmental costs. Supply chains push risk down onto the smallholders and workers least able to bear it. Businesses treat responsibility as PR, rather than as a standard operating procedure. Even philanthropy, for all its claims of neutrality, shapes the working conditions of the organisations it funds.

None of this is an accident of the market. These are design decisions that serve particular interests, too often made in rooms where the people who live with the consequences are absent.

What We Believe

A responsible market is accountable in four ways:

• Ethically: it treats workers and communities with dignity, not as disposable inputs.
• Socially: it organises production and exchange around collective flourishing, not wealth concentration.
• Environmentally: it operates within ecological limits and pays its own environmental costs instead of passing them on.
• Politically: it answers to democratic governance and community oversight, not just private control.

Building such markets is not an act of charity, or only a matter of compliance; it is better design, and it begins by changing who gets to shape decisions.

Where & How We Work

The digital frontier: platform and gig work, and data justice.
The ecological frontier: e-waste, the circular economy, and responsible and sustainable business.

Across both frontiers, we follow power: between employers and workers, corporations and communities, producers and those who bear environmental costs, and Global North consumption and Global South disposal.

Regulating today’s markets is not enough. Alongside documenting where markets fail, we study the community innovations that point beyond them: cooperative ownership, circular production, fair trade networks, care economies and commons-based management. These are the blueprints.

Whoever we work with, every engagement follows these commitments:

• The people we bring into the room are paid for their time and expertise.
• Participants hear what came of their contribution.
• We do not facilitate decisions that have already been made.
• We retain the right to publish anonymised learning, because what we discover belongs to the public conversation.

What We Do

Research. We study how markets distribute power, risk and reward. Our participatory methods treat the people most affected as co-researchers, whose knowledge is expertise, not data. [11]

Policy and frameworks. We turn evidence into policy proposals and practical frameworks that regulators, businesses and movements can use. [12]

Convening. We host closed-door Market Salons that bring together businesses, regulators, workers, researchers and investors to work through contested questions honestly, away from the performance of panels and press releases.

Decision Labs. When an organisation faces a consequential decision, we bring the people it will affect into the room with the people making it. Decision Labs replace consultation as a box-ticking exercise with real deliberation that shapes what happens next.

Critical friendship. For leadership teams and boards committed to doing better, we offer ongoing, candid challenge: questioning the assumptions behind strategy and asking who wins, who loses, and who was never asked.