Social media influencers: women, work and redistribution in Cameroon's digital economy

This study examines the role of female fashion influencers in Cameroon. Although the fashion industry in Africa is amongst the fastest growing globally, most studies of social media influencers not only overlook Africa but also understand economic value solely in financial terms. Yet, unlike Western influencers, young Cameroonian women seeking to create influencer positions and build their brands must engage in distribution offline – of advice, images, garments, money – to reward followers for their work of advertising their styles. As such they are constructing a unique influencer economy that differs radically from the Western models on which the existing literature is disproportionately focused. This study thus asks what counts as economic and other value for social media influencers in the Cameroonian influencer economy and how these values, and thus the economy, is created and sustained. Through participant observation, semi-structured interviews and netnography, this project investigates the redistributive practices of young Cameroonian female social media influencers building networks of followers, sharing images, and building brands. As the first fully-fledged study of fashion influencer economies in/from West Africa the project examines models of valuation underpinning influencer economies based on redistirbution in view of fostering new areas of interdisciplinary and decolonial research on alternatives to the formal digital economy. I shall carry out the fellowship at the University of Cape Town (UCT), under the supervision of Prof. Divine Fuh, and University College London (UCL), under the supervision of Prof. Daniel Miller.