Date of Award

8-2024

Document Type

Campus Access Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Global Governance and Human Security

First Advisor

Stacy D. VanDeveer

Second Advisor

Timothy M. Shaw

Third Advisor

Nada M. Ali, Joseph N. Cooper, Michelle Sikes

Abstract

The global sports industry revenue amounted to nearly 487 billion dollars in 2022 (Gough, 2023). Yet when the revenues are distributed regionally, Africa is categorized as ‘other’. This data implies that the value of sports in Africa is unknown yet assumes that all regions contribute to the value of this industry in various ways. A factor that may result to undocumented value of sports in Africa is the existence of informal economies. Thus, this study hypothesizes that the informal nature of economies and markets in African countries like Kenya may explain the lacuna generalized as ‘other’. According to the Kenya national bureau of statistics about 1.4 million people are engaged in the community, social, and personal services sector of the informal economy (Faria, 2021). Bearing this in mind, there is a possibility that individuals also engage in unregulated or semi-regulated activities and businesses related to sports that mobilize wealth or interact with the market. Therefore, this study explores how people engage with sports in the informal sector. It asks the question: What are the characteristics of sports in Kenya’s informal sector? It focuses on women’s football and e-sports case studies to establish factors that may determine characteristics of the sector. The idea is to identify patterns that are undetected due to informality. Data was collected through in-depth interviews for women’s football with purposive sampling technique. While e-sports used both close-ended interviews of randomly sampled participants and open-ended in-depth interviews of intentionally selected participants. The target population of the dissertation not only works in the informal sports sector but also live in informal settlements. A crucial factor since those who engage with sports in informal settlements are marginalized by the nature of global sports industry that renders their labor invisible and without value. This creates a specific sports system adapted to its environment and with limited contact from the mainstream. Analytically, intersectionality is used in the dissertation to dispel oversimplifications or generalizations of a particular group of people and their lived experiences (Calow, 2022). It challenges the current analysis of the global sports industry that assumes the experiences of those in the margins as similar due to their difference from the dominant sport system. Concurrently, intersectionality determines how the social categories identified play an active role in determining the structure and functioning of economic and labor systems. Therefore, a nuanced and comprehensive approach to data analysis is applied to identify the characteristics of Kenya’s informal sector and its relation to global actors by looking for processes that are fully interactive, historically co-determining, and complex. The findings identified that Kenya’s informal sector is characterized by inequalities and inequities of gender, class, and location that impact access and voice of those that exist in the sector. The main features of the informal sports sector were: 1.) Women’s labor is categorized as care work and is inadequately compensated. 2.) Women’s football was established through a global development project, 3.) Women’s football is trapped in a cycle of aid dependency with foreign donors, unable to become an activity that interacts with the market, 4.) E-sports are exclusionary based on gender and class 5.) E-sports has adapted to its environment creating an economic activity for those who choose to engage with it.

Comments

Free and open access to this Campus Access Thesis is made available to the UMass Boston community by ScholarWorks at UMass Boston. Those not on campus and those without a UMass Boston campus username and password may gain access to this thesis through resources like Proquest Dissertations & Theses Global (https://www.proquest.com/) or through Interlibrary Loan. If you have a UMass Boston campus username and password and would like to download this work from off-campus, click on the "Off-Campus UMass Boston Users

Download
Off-Campus UMass Boston Users

Additional and Related Files

signed - Busolo Milimu Signature page - PLAYING OFFSIDE (1).pdf (134 kB)

Share

COinS