COMPARATIVE STUDY OF NIGERIA AND SOUTH AFRICA’S PLATFORMISED DOMESTIC WORK AND WOMEN’S LABOUR RIGHTS: LEGAL RECOGNITION, PRECARITY AND THE ENFORCEMENT OF ILO CONVENTION 189

Abstract

The platformisation of domestic work in Africa has reconfigured the conditions under which women engage in paid care and household labor. Digital domestic service platforms now mediate recruitment, allocation, supervision and evaluation of domestic workers, replacing personalized employment relationships with data-driven and customer-rating systems. While such platforms are often presented as modernizing and professionalizing domestic labor, they frequently reproduce and intensify the precarity historically associated with domestic work. This article examines these dynamics in Nigeria and South Africa, two jurisdictions that represent contrasting regulatory approaches to domestic labor. The study adopts a doctrinal and feminist political economy methodology to analyze the interaction between labor law, platform governance and gendered labor hierarchies. It situates platformised domestic work within the normative framework of ILO Convention 189, which recognizes domestic workers as workers entitled to dignity and social protection. South Africa has ratified and domesticated the Convention, extending formal labor rights and social protection to domestic workers. However, the rise of platform-mediated employment has complicated the enforcement of these rights, as subcontracting chains and algorithmic management fragment responsibility and weaken accountability. In contrast, Nigeria has not ratified ILO Convention 189 and does not explicitly recognize domestic workers in labor legislation. As a result, platformisation in Nigeria expands the reach of unregulated domestic labor and entrenches existing informality without providing pathways to protection. The article argues that platformisation does not transform the structural devaluation of domestic labor but digitizes and reorganizes it, producing new forms of invisibility, dependency and managerial control. Effective protection for women domestic workers requires legal frameworks that recognize platform companies as employers or co-employers, ensure transparency in digital decision-making systems and support forms of collective organization suited to dispersed and private-site labor. The study concludes that securing dignity and security for domestic workers in the platform economy is essential to realizing the broader principle that all labor, including labor performed in the home, is deserving of recognition and rights.