E-Commerce and the Care Economy: Expanding Flexible Growth Pathways for Women Entrepreneurs in Africa

Abstract

Background: Africa’s digital marketplace is expanding rapidly, yet the continent’s 250 million working-age women still perform three-quarters of unpaid care work, restricting their capacity to exploit online opportunity. This study introduces Digitally Flexible Entrepreneurship (DFE), a care-sensitive lens that reframes unpaid care as a core input to production rather than an external social cost.
Objectives: We examine how e-commerce can reconcile income generation with caregiving constraints, identify the structural barriers that persist, and map policy levers capable of converting isolated success stories into broad-based, gender-inclusive growth.
Methods: A PRISMA-guided review distilled evidence from 82 peer-reviewed and policy sources (2019-2025). Findings were triangulated with four illustrative Rwandan case studies—Olado, Kasha, HeHe and Ki-Pepeo—using an integrative mixed-methods design that combined narrative synthesis, policy analysis and structured cross-case comparison.
Results: Participation in platform commerce cuts women’s weekly transaction and travel time by 4.0–6.3 hours, raises average gross margins by up to 18 percent and expands market reach beyond local catchments. Nonetheless, “structural drag” persists: gaps in digital literacy, gendered cyber-harassment, mobile-money ceilings and patchy rural broadband jointly suppress scale. Six actionable levers—from bundled digital-skills-plus-childcare programmes to AfCFTAaligned gender-responsive finance clauses—offer a one-to-one pathway from barrier removal to inclusive growth. Modelling with IFC and World Bank data suggests that closing the e-commerce gender sales gap could inject US $15 billion into Africa’s GDP and create over 250 000 ancillary jobs by 2030.
Conclusions: By positioning flexibility as an economic, social and ethical imperative, the study bridges care-economy ethics, critical realism and platform political economy, offering scholars and policymakers a blueprint for mainstreaming DFE in national digital-trade strategies.