Platform parasitism and the reconfiguration of African urban mobility: A systematic synthesis of emerging evidence and research agenda

Over the past decade, platform urbanism has become a defining feature of the socio-technical transformation of African cities, as digital platforms increasingly mediate the movement of people, goods, and services. Far from being a marginal innovation, platform-mediated mobility now shapes labour relations, governance arrangements, and everyday socio-spatial practices. Yet the growing body of research on these dynamics remains fragmented, limiting broader theorisation of how platform mobility is reconfiguring African urban mobility and what this reveals about platform urbanism more broadly. This paper addresses this gap through a systematic synthesis of scholarship on digital platform-mediated mobility in Africa. It makes three contributions. First, it deploys and advances the concept of platform parasitism (PP) to argue that mobility platforms in African cities derive value not simply through disruption or regulatory evasion, but through selective embedding within both formal institutions and informal, non-state arrangements. Second, it synthesises evidence across five thematic domains: user characteristics and equity, travel behaviour, employment and livelihoods, safety and security, and governance and regulation. Third, it identifies major empirical and conceptual gaps across geographies and populations to develop a focused agenda for future research. Ultimately, the paper argues that platform parasitism in African urban mobility is constituted through layered dependencies on organised informality, infrastructural deficits, digital inequality, and persistent concerns around trust and safety. African cities are therefore not exceptional cases at the margins of platform urbanism, but critical sites for theorising its uneven, relational, and deeply embedded forms.