Description
The growth of cities across the Somali Horn of Africa is being shaped by the arrival and settlement of people displaced from rural hinterlands by conflict, climate-linked ecological shocks, and associated economic pressures. Although displaced people live in conditions of extreme precarity, they are nonetheless active users of information and communications technologies (ICTs). People employ different features of (now) ubiquitous mobile phones to maintain multi-scalar social networks, navigate urban space and labour markets, transfer and store money, and receive international aid. Building on a wider body of literature on refugee connectivity – but addressing an empirical gap in understandings of the implications of ICT use by internally displaced populations in East Africa - this paper explores mobile phone infrastructure as a connector between the micro-level and transnational political economies of urban marginalisation and globalised urban reconstruction in Somalia. The findings caution against techno-optimist developmental discourses, highlighting instead benefits, constraints and risks entailed in ICT-mediated connectivities. Everyday mobile phone use connects marginalised urban populations into entangled humanitarian, telecom sector, and diasporic investment-linked networks that are central to the growth of Somali cities and urban economies. ICTs can reinforce labour exploitation in growing urban economies, and structure power imbalances between receivers of international aid and the transnational regimes that govern precarity in Somali cities.
