French conglomerate Total. Numerous players are focusing on this area, and it seems crowdfunding is currently being approached through this prism (for example, by sending premium SMSs). Answering a question about the risks of direct competition with European and North American players, in the case where a platform such as Kickstarter allies itself with Intouch to launch a service specific to West Africa, the Intouch representative responded:
We need patient players who have already tested certain models. And it will be dificult to avoid international players—in fact, they are already readying themselves for Africa. You wonder who will dare take the first step, even if we have seen some preparing to do so, but we’ll see what comes of it.
For all these reasons, it is dificult to consider these players as properly endogenous, and one should emphasize that development is still low compared with the situation in the North and in East Asia. This is particularly the case for many of the countries where we carried out fieldwork, such as Ethiopia and Burkina Faso, where at the time of writing no endogenous crowdfunding platform had emerged and almost all fundraising campaigns have been realized through Western players, generally by soliciting contributions from people living in the countries of the North, including diaspora communities. This comparatively low level of development is partly a matter of Internet penetration and the technical resources available to local populations, even though the use of mobile telephones and collective computer stations has grown sharply over the last fifteen years. The limits of social financing in sub-Saharan Africa and some Latin American countries are also related to the low usage of banks by local populations (10 to 15% of the population in Senegal, for example), and to the fact that, until now, crowdfunding has been the province of economic players (contributors, large groups and platforms) based principally in the West. We do, however, observe certain adaptation strategies by platforms, or strategies of circumvention by project creators. (In Africa, these strategies include building links with ‘mobile money’ applications and encouraging users to contribute directly. In Latin America, they include the use of MiCochinito, which enables cash payments in local shops.)
Hence, we observe a substantial number of players from the North interested in crowdfunding in various ways, beginning with the two major US platforms, Kickstarter and Indiegogo, for funding local projects. This includes South Africa, where Thundafund, Backabuddy and Jumpstarter nevertheless strive to compete with the US ofer by highlighting their supposed proximity to project creators and contributors. In Latin America, we also see a substantial number of exogenous players, along with an apparent retreat on the part of financing players from the North in terms of participation in local companies: it very much seems as if they are waiting for the market to crystallize around a small number of players in order to work out how to invest or what acquisitions to make. There is also a significant local implantation of North American players in Latin America. Kickstarter is the most present: according to Sebastian Di Lullo, CEO of Ideame, it alone is responsible for half the total amount raised by all Latin American players in 2016–17. Ideame also pursues a strategy of purchasing national players and opening ofices in diferent countries in the hope of attracting diferent categories of the population—particularly the most wealthy and those who see themselves as being part of a ‘creative class’. We therefore observe a domination characterized both by the consolidation of a number of players present over the whole territory and by pressure from the most powerful players on the international level. This twofold domination is on the one hand a brake on the emergence of local players (numerous platforms have closed or are barely surviving in various Latin American countries, including KapitalZocial in Peru or La Chèvre in Colombia) and on the other hand manifests itself in the normalization and standardization of these apparatuses on the North American model. Although the expansion strategy of Thundafund, for example, is more limited, these remarks generally hold for sub-Saharan Africa, but with one caveat: the presence of large players from the North seems to go hand in hand with the emergence of seemingly endogenous players, whose crowdfunding platforms constitute only one element in a wider palette of mobile services.
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Cultural Crowdfunding: Platform Capitalism, Labour and Globalization