The Changing Face of Development: The BoP Model

The BoP proposition emerged at the nexus of three intersecting trends within Africa’s policy landscape: the increasing role of the private sector as an engine for development; efforts to formalize and regulate informal enterprises; and the emergence of enterprise and entrepreneurship as a key platform for economic growth. Each of these issues has roots in the financial crisis of the 1980s, when doubts that a Keynesian inward-oriented model could deliver sustained economic and political stability in sub-Saharan Africa prompted a breed of Chicago-trained economists to reject a longstanding statist approach in favor of a promarket, laissez-faire development agenda, which could catalyze “proper market economies” in the region (Saul & Leys Reference Saul and Leys1999; Harrison Reference Harrison2010). The portfolio of structural adjustment policies (SAPs) forged by the so-called Washington Consensus—a radical mix of market liberalization, fiscal pruning, and public-sector privatization (Williamson Reference Williamson1993)—replaced programs focused on infrastructure development and public goods entitlements and gave rise to a range of fiscal incentives to encourage private sector engagement in market activities (Little & Dolan Reference Little, Dolan, Haugerud, Stone and Little2000). By the 1990s, the development industry was inextricably entwined with this broader neoliberal project, embedding its core tenets of economic liberalization, privatization, and market discipline in policies and programs for African development (Harrison Reference Harrison2010).

Business, in particular, emerged as a prominent actor on the development stage, initially through “defensive” corporate social responsibility schemes and more recently by assuming a proactive role as a “development agent,” fostering new for-profit business models, partnerships, and financial instruments under the monikers of “creative capitalism,” “inclusive business,” and “making markets work for the poor” (M4P) (Blowfield & Dolan forthcoming). These initiatives share a common view that business can combat Africa’s most intractable development problems, from malaria and HIV to poverty and hunger (Gates Reference Gates2008; Ashley Reference Ashley2009; Blowfield & Dolan forthcoming), a view that is increasingly shared by aid institutions and nongovernmental institutions (NGOs) alike.

In tandem with these developments came a drive to “modernize” and “upgrade” Africa’s “underproductive” informal economies (Tokman Reference Tokman2007), whose ranks had swelled in the wake of structural adjustment and economic globalization, as public sectors downsized and companies sought efficiencies by cutting labor costs through outsourcing, subcontracting, and flexible forms of labor. Departing from earlier characterizations of the informal economy as a “drag on growth,” a haven of tax evaders and illicit enterprises, informality was celebrated as a potential palliative to Africa’s development ills (Meagher Reference Meagher2013; Elyachar Reference Elyachar2005). New models championed informal economies’ natural assets—enterprise and entrepreneurship—as mechanisms for job creation and economic renewal, which would enable “millions of individuals to work their way out of poverty with dignity” (Wolfensohn, cited by Kannabiran Reference Kannabiran2005:3716). Aid agencies, regional development banks, and national governments hailed enterprise development and entrepreneurial capitalism as a way to create a “productive citizenry” of self-sufficient and empowered workers (Colvin, Leavens, & Robins Reference Colvin, Leavens and Robins2009:9) and shift marginalized communities, particularly women and youth, from a culture of dependency to one of self-reliance (Bushell Reference Bushell2008; Peters Reference Peters2001; Ferguson Reference Ferguson2007; Garcia & Fares Reference Garcia and Fares2008). Across Africa, this ethos of “productive citizenry” gained traction in the late 1990s, as several countries embraced national welfare strategies founded on “neoliberal motifs of ‘empowerment’” (Ferguson Reference Ferguson2007:74), self-sufficiency, and enterprise, promoting an entrepreneurial citizen who would supplant an underresourced and “inefficient” state (Colvin et al. Reference Colvin, Leavens and Robins2009:9). By recasting the un- and under-employed as potential entrepreneurs, African governments not only aligned a national discourse of economic self-sufficiency with the bodies of newly enterprising individuals, but also provided fertile opportunities for the BoP proposition’s empowerment-through-enterprise approach (Ferguson Reference Ferguson2007; Dolan & Johnstone-Louis Reference Dolan and Johnstone-Louis2011).

Over the last decade, as the efficacy of aid to Africa has come under criticism (Moyo Reference Moyo2009; Easterly Reference Easterly2006), the BoP proposition has gained favor as a dynamic, market-savvy strategy to integrate the continent’s poor into new networks of global production and trade. By 2011, four hundred and thirty-nine BoP initiatives were recorded in nine sub-Saharan African countries, targeting the needs of people living on incomes of under $2-a-day across a range of sectors, from health and education to information technology and energy (Kubzansky et al. Reference Kubzansky, Cooper and Barbary2011).

While the BoP model is most often associated with Hindustan Lever’s much-celebrated Shakti Program, which distributes consumer goods door to door across remote villages in India (Unilever 2005), the model assumes many forms (see Kolk, Rivera-Santos, & Rufin Reference Kolk, Rivera-Santos and Rufin2013). C. K. Prahalad initially conceived the BoP approach as a way for companies facing saturated markets in industrialized nations to offset sclerotic growth rates, earn profits, and reduce poverty by marketing goods and services to communities largely excluded from the reach of global markets. His proposition, articulated in The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty through Profits (2004), was based on four assumptions: (1) that there is significant untapped purchasing power at the bottom of the pyramid; (2) that business can earn much-needed profits by marketing products to this market; (3) that poverty will be eradicated through the provision of life-saving goods and the opportunities for the poor to serve as entrepreneurs in corporate distribution systems; and (4) that multinational corporations are best placed to steward this process. Though the BoP approach has been lauded in academic and policy circles, Prahalad’s initial conception has faced criticism for being a “top-down model of selling to the poor” (Arora & Romijn (2012:485) which is more concerned with building markets for business than with addressing the needs of the poor (Karnani Reference Karnani2007). In response, Simanis and Hart (2008) developed the BoP 2.0 protocol, a model focused less on instrumentally building markets than on forging new mechanisms for North–South collaboration and advancing mutual value through the cultivation of “native capacity” and “embeddedness” (Hart & London Reference Hart and London2005:33; see also Arora & Romijn 2012; London 2010).

In both iterations, BoP initiatives incorporate firms of varying sizes and levels of capitalization, from transnational corporations like Danone, which distributes fortified food through South African “microentrepreneurs,” to social enterprises such as Living Goods and Freeplay Energy, which promote low-cost health and energy solutions in East Africa. They may also incorporate goods produced by branded multinationals or local producers, spanning sectors from food and toiletries to telecommunications and energy. In all cases, however, the BoP proposition connects a wide range of initiatives that seek to convert the latent dynamism and entrepreneurial creativity of Africa’s informal economies into a usable resource for economic development.

Frontier Economics: The Usability of Unusable Spaces

In “Seeing Like an Oil Company,” the anthropologist James Ferguson argues that contemporary flows of global capital on the continent show a proclivity for particular spaces, producing zones and enclaves of capital investment that are “sharply walled off” from “the vast terrain of what he has deemed “unusable Africa” (2005:379–80). Yet while Ferguson suggests that capital hops between these sites of usability—namely, resource-extraction enclaves—it is precisely the condition of unusability that BoP capital seeks, as it is in forgotten Africa—the “unusable,” peripheral, and marginal economies of the poor—that the font of underutilized entrepreneurs and consumers can be located and made amenable to market intervention.

But how is it that the world’s largest corporations have shifted their gaze from Ferguson’s Africa of heliports and diamond mines to Unilever’s Africa of bicycles, handcarts, and women selling manufactured commodities door to door? How does business construct and normalize poverty as a field for business intervention, charting an apparently frictionless path to reconciling poverty reduction and profit generation (see Rajak Reference Rajak2007)? The concept of “governmentality” has provided a productive lens for recent analyses of neoliberalism in Africa, deepening our understanding of how the norms, conditions, and technologies of neoliberalism (and particularly the logic of the market) exercise power over individuals and populations across the continent (Hart Reference Hart2002; Watts Reference Watts2003; Ferguson Reference Ferguson2006). A key analytical focus of the governmentality literature is the ways in which the technologies of government—notation, numeration and statistics, training, methods of examination, monitoring and evaluation, accounting and measurement, and so on—make objects, including individuals and communities, visible, legible, and governable. Here we suggest that BoP initiatives exercise a form of governmentality that steers development through what Foucault (1982:341) termed the “conduct of conducts,” that is, the technologies, mechanisms, tactics, and devices deployed to shape, regulate, and manage the conduct of individuals or populations toward certain ends (Dean Reference Dean1999). As James Scott notes in Seeing Like a State, by classifying and reordering social political landscapes for administrative purposes (e.g., taxation), these technologies have enabled the state to get a “handle on its subjects and their environment,” demarcating who falls within and beyond the state’s domain of concern and/or intervention and furthering the exercise of power and authority (1998:2; see also Inda Reference Inda2005).

Though a substantial literature has examined governmentality in reference to state and aid institutions, less attention has been paid to the corporate form.^{Footnote 2} Yet in the same way that censuses, surveys, and maps have been shown not only to measure but also to produce the state (Foucault Reference Foucault and Sheridan1995; Scott Reference Scott1998), or that statistics and accounting also construct “the economy” (Mitchell Reference Mitchell2005; Mackenzie et al. Reference Mackenzie, Muniesa and Siu2007), management techniques, practices, tools, and infrastructures (market identification, product innovation, accounting, logistics, consumer segmentation, etc.) bring into being the markets of inclusive business. They allow global firms, as E. Neville Isdell, former CEO of Coca-Cola said, to “see Africa” (quoted by Mahajan Reference Mahajan2008, italics added), and thus render its frontier economies amenable to business’s market solutions. Crucially, the BoP does not exist outside of its articulation through these tools; it is described and then populated rather than discovered. Hence, just as states produce citizens, these technologies produce the poor as knowable market subjects—consumers and entrepreneurs who become the objects of marketing and distribution experts.

Management technologies serve as “ways of seeing” (Boyd Reference Boyd2010) in another sense. They create and stabilize a framing of poverty as a product of market failure and its solution as the advancing of enterprise and market integration—a framing that facilitates the organization of informal economies as the objective of corporate governance and positions market engagement as commensurate with development imperatives. This process, in which the solution drives the identification of the problem, has been well documented in the field of development by anthropologists, including Ferguson (Reference Ferguson1994), Escobar (Reference Escobar1994), Li (Reference Li2007), and Mosse (Reference Mosse2005), each of whom has examined how the discourses and practices of development institutions render objects of improvement amenable to certain forms of intervention in ways that frame the possibilities of development itself. The following traces how this process unfolds with BoP initiatives, focusing on the four distinct courses of action that businesses undertake in order to define, know, and repurpose Africa’s informal economies.

Recasting Poverty Problems as Market Solutions

Drawing on Foucault (Reference Foucault and Rabinow1997), Li (Reference Li2007) describes how the process of problematization—that is, the way in which a phenomenon is identified as problematic and is subsequently designated as a target of social intervention—makes certain types of intervention knowable and thinkable. Applied to BoP capitalism, the process of problematization reflects how business frames the scope of its intervention. For example, business tends to define and recognize problems that can be redressed by a market solution, viewing development concerns as potential product, systems, or distribution innovations (see also Ferguson Reference Ferguson1994). Thus the concept of the “bottom billion”— Collier’s (Reference Collier2007) term for the one billion people trapped in poor and/or failing economies—hinges on its members being both problematic (e.g., poor, in ill health, etc.) and amenable to market regimes. As Peter Chernin, chairman of Malaria No More, put it, malaria is “a logistics problem, a business problem” (cited in Perry Reference Perry2011:70). Indeed, in many cases the notion that a particular product will be the solution to a development dilemma is predetermined as the problem itself is recast in market terms. As the World Economic Forum’s (2009:6) report on unleashing the potential of the BoP acknowledges, “companies can reframe the problems” they encounter in BoP markets by “finding ways to leverage them into business opportunities”—transposing, for example, concerns about hunger, environmental degradation, and disease as market opportunities for fortified yogurt, cook stoves, and bed nets. This process of problematization frames the possibilities of thought and the legitimacy of solutions (Allen Reference Allen2011), thus making a bar of soap or a cook stove as (or often more) rational as tackling infrastructure and environmental management. It also produces a self-reinforcing system, since interpreting poverty as market failure inevitably produces market solutions.

Building Legitimacy

Though business may identify solutions to development concerns in ways that align with corporate agendas, its authority as a moral actor hinges on amassing legitimacy from fields of expert knowledge. For example, businesses draw credibility from the tools of scientific knowledge—surveys, measurements, and observations—that confer epistemic weight to their diagnoses and an authoritative connection between a development problem and a market or commercial solution. Randomized control trials (RCTs) are now widely carried out in Africa as companies, in partnership with NGOs, research institutions, and business schools, seek to substantiate correlations between goods and their development outcomes. To illustrate: P&G, which manufactures Always sanitary pads, commissioned an RCT on the link between menstruation and adolescent girls’ school attendance in Kenya and Malawi, while Health in Your Hands in Ghana, a global initiative that promotes hand washing and hygiene through public–private partnerships, surveyed women’s hand-washing behavior to demonstrate the connection between hand washing and reductions in child mortality (and thus the need for soap) (Scott et al. Reference Scott2007). Indeed, scientific assessments of market-based initiatives are now part of the fabric of the BoP, particularly in public health contexts such as the burgeoning industries of fortified food and nutraceuticals in which “the social credentials of a product depend upon evidence of its effects” (Cross & Street Reference Cross and Street2009:6; see also Street & Cross Reference Street and Cross2012). Science facilitates this transfer of meaning, transforming the domain of commercial products into a sphere of ethical, humanitarian, or social goods: soap is not simply a cleaning agent but also an antidote to infant morbidity and mortality; sanitary pads are not only a personal hygiene product but also a pathway to girls’ education, a reduction in early pregnancies, and their entrance into the labor market. By tapping sources of scientific expertise, business is thus able to confound the distinction between moral and market objectives.

At the same time, business gains legitimacy through its attachment to recognized, creditable institutions. For example, though business is typically the architect of BoP initiatives, in practice such initiatives are institutional assemblages that draw together the private sector, NGOs, international aid institutions, social enterprises, philanthrocapitalists, and business schools (Schwittay Reference Schwittay2011a).^{Footnote 3} Development institutions (humanitarian, multilateral, quasi-governmental, and nongovernmental organizations), in particular, now eagerly pursue public–private partnerships at the BoP with corporate–NGO partnerships underwriting most, if not all, BoP schemes. Unilever, for example, partners with Women First to bring toiletries, cosmetics, soap, and detergents to rural consumers of Mozambique, and with DANIDA, CIDA, UNICEF, and WHO in the Ghana Hand Washing Initiative. P&G partnered with the Girl Child Network (GCN) and the Forum of African Women Educators (FAWE) to provide fifteen thousand girls in Kenya with sanitary pads and they also have a highly visible partnership with Population Services International (PSI), capitalizing on the company’s “brand equity” in public health to bring PUR water purifiers to Uganda (as well as to other parts of the world). It is this assemblage—the circuit of poverty capitalism—that circulates, consolidates, and reproduces the BoP model.

NGOs’ fluency with the lexicon of the “local” has afforded them a pivotal role in the BoP assemblage. They are often well placed to fill Africa’s institutional voids—the absence of physical, sociopolitical, and economic infrastructure to smooth the functioning of markets (Khanna & Palepu Reference Khanna and Palepu2010)—by assisting business to penetrate markets, build successful rural distribution channels, and achieve access to a low-cost labor pool of informal entrepreneurs (London & Hart Reference London, Hart, London and Hart2011). As a result, NGOs often exert considerable instrumental power in BoP networks, navigating between the social practices and “local” values of the poor and the interests of global corporations (Elyachar Reference Elyachar2012). As one company described the situation, “For us, the bottom of the pyramid is the future. If you want organic growth in the business, there is no way out but to tap that segment, which is down at the bottom and to do that, you have to partner with people who know the needs at the BoP” (Swiss Contact 2011:7). NGOs thus inhabit what Simmel terms the role of tertius gaudens (the third who enjoys), an actor that makes “the interaction that takes place between the parties [the “poor” and multinational corporations] and between himself and them, a means for his own purposes” (1950:154). In this case the reward is access to a new funding stream, since mining the social networks of the poor—their affective ties and informal economic strategies—as “infrastructure” for distribution systems is an opportunity that multinational corporations are eager to secure (Elyachar Reference Elyachar2006).

BoP’s Intended Beneficiaries

Building a BoP economy includes not only the identification and securing of legitimacy for a recognized development problem and product solution, but also the specification of an afflicted group whose lives will be uplifted through BoP initiatives: what Prahalad (Reference Prahalad2004) identifies as the value-conscious BoP consumer and the enterprising, self-regulating entrepreneur. This specification works through practices of what Li (2007:7), borrowing from Foucault, terms “rendering technical” the domain to be governed as a field with specific limits and characteristics. This process entails assembling information about what lies within its boundaries and developing techniques to mobilize the identified entities (individuals). Drawing on primary research conducted with representatives of Always sanitary pads in Ghana, Avon Cosmetics in South Africa, and LivelyHoods, the following discussion describes how business maps and defines its beneficiaries (the poor) and subsequently converts them into aspirational consumers and enterprising entrepreneurs. This entails two processes: specifying and understanding target beneficiaries and shaping them as market actors.

BoP initiatives aim to reconstitute the poor as “modern” consumers by selling affordable and accessible products to remote and fragmented markets. This process requires a reconceptualization of the development beneficiary from a rights-bearing subject—a citizen whose rights are bestowed and enshrined by the state—to a “value-driven consumer” whose needs, desires, and preferences are fulfilled through the marketplace (Kuriyan et al. Reference Kuriyan, Nafus and Mainwaring2012). According to the director of U.K.-based Business Fights Poverty, “for too long development has been about treating poor people as recipients, as dependents, and actually for the first time we’re seeing them treated as agents of their development . . . [,] as customers . . .” (University of Oxford 2012). For Cola-Life, a BoP venture that distributes antidiarrhea kits through the distribution chain of Coca-Cola in Zambia, this shift to “users and choosers” (Cornwall Reference Cornwall2000:26; see also Kashyap Reference Kashyap2012) has occasioned a transition from supply-driven to demand-driven development. In the former, a need, such as food, is identified and distributed to the people who need it; inefficiencies arise if the need has been poorly identified or improperly understood. In the latter, a demand is created for a commodity through aspirational marketing, which pulls the commodity into remote communities. It is choice, rather than need, that characterizes the new development beneficiary.

There is a degree of choice and editing in this process, however, as some categories of persons fall most frequently within the purview of BoP initiatives and are privileged as priority segments. Women, for example, are often preferred beneficiaries/customers of such schemes because they are widely viewed as gatekeepers to BoP’s new regimes of consumption: not only are most goods marketed through these systems—cleaning products, food products, cosmetics—purchased and used by women, but women also diffuse new consumption practices through the household and the wider community. As Katherine Lucey, founder of Solar Sisters, a grassroots distribution network in Uganda, Tanzania, and Nigeria, said, “In these communities, women are the customers for energy, they manage household energy needs . . . so they can evangelize about the product” (Proctor Reference Proctor2013). Children fulfill a similar function. As Blažekovic (Reference Blažekovic2010) writes of P&G’s strategy in Uganda, they are targeted as “agents of change” in the family who will catalyze brand loyalty for years to come.” P&G employees believe that . . . children will go home from school, show their parents the usage of PUR and thereby induce them to use it.”

Nevertheless, notwithstanding the colonial legacy of Unilever and Cadbury in parts of Africa, businesses’ capacity to read the needs of rural markets is constrained. All companies engage in “market intelligence” to illuminate the underutilized and “invisible” poor—those who have long occupied interstitial spaces of African economies—and to make them visible to the sights of global business. Corporate market research, often conducted in partnership with market research firms or NGOs, allows business not only to “see” but also to understand the consumption behavior and aspirations of target BoP customers.

Central to this process has been a shift toward the use of ethnographic studies and so-called Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) techniques to hone what business terms its “native capability,” that is, its capacity to engage “in deep listening and mutual dialogue with income-poor communities” (Rave Reference Rave2010: 7). As Leila Janah, the CEO of Samsource, noted,

Today “rural immersion programs” are commonplace in bottom-billion markets so that multinational corporations like Danone, Nestle, Dupont, and Pepsi can acquire a deep understanding of how the poor live, consume, and work. Corporate/NGO teams glean local knowledge and practices through visits to village elders, homes, churches, health and education facilities, and so on. Observation and a range of participatory methods are deployed to capture tacit knowledge and what companies consider hard-to-find, unarticulated consumer needs. Participatory map-making, for example, charts how mobility, infrastructure, and household wealth shape the potential of the poor to access products and services. The understanding derived through these exercises forms a knowledge bank, allowing companies to produce a schematic of market potential that classifies the poor in terms of purchasing power, consumption patterns, demographics, and shopping behavior, and in so doing demarcates who falls within and beyond the concern of inclusive business (see Kashyap Reference Kashyap2012; Brighenti 2007).

Once the poor are identified and understood, business begins the process of catalyzing consumption. As frontier markets for BoP goods, informal economies are spaces where firms not only calculate existing consumer behavior but also work to cultivate new aspirations, desires, and consumption habits, actively fashioning people into reliable consumers (Street & Cross Reference Street and Cross2012). As a representative of Unilever told us, when they were starting the business, “the market was not there, it was not there at all. So, be it in soaps, or be it in detergent or oral care, . . . when Unilever embarked on this business, what it did is—[it] created this market” (interview, Oct. 31, 2009).

The creation of BoP markets is a sociotechnical undertaking, often requiring the construction of new consumer subjectivities. New objects such as solar lanterns, vitamins, and sanitary pads bring new concepts such as “nutrition,” “wellness,” and reproductive health (Street & Cross Reference Street and Cross2012) and instill new ways of conceptualizing the body, health, and personhood. As a P&G representative said of PUR in Uganda, “You’ve got to make people aware of water-borne issues, issues of water, period. You’ve got to convince them they can do something about that and then you’ve got to convince them to use a product like PUR” (cited by Blažekovic Reference Blažekovic2010). On the subject of introducing new products to “virgin” BoP markets, a South Africa Avon entrepreneur remarked, “we are not only selling these products to people, but we are also educating them on how to take care of themselves” (Focus Group Discussion, Pietersburg, South Africa, April 5, 2007). She said that when she showed people roll-on deodorants, “they would ask if they were stinking or something like that,” compelling her to carry a stash of deodorants and lotions so people could try them.

In certain cases, such consumer education strategies echo the “modernizing” projects of colonial and postcolonial Africa—whether promoted by missionaries, nationalists, or development experts—which sought to reshape consumer habits through the regulation of their everyday practices. For example, like the colonial and missionary officials who expanded the practices and discourses of empire by introducing the disciplines, routines, and practices of personal hygiene (Burke Reference Burke1996; Hunt 1992), P&G now has an army of contracted nurses who travel from school to school in Ghana providing puberty education.^{Footnote 4} In 2008 we attended a training session in Accra at which girls were instructed in proper hygienic sanitary practices, which included not only the importance of wearing underwear but also the qualities of a good menstrual protection system such as discreteness, comfort, and security. In the process everyday bodily practices assumed an enterprise form: menstruation, for instance, was cast not as a maturation process but a hygienic problem that required a market solution: an Always Sanitary Pad. But marketing education is aimed not only at creating future generations of sanitary pad users or hand washers but also in constituting a hygienic norm whose fulfillment necessitates brand allegiance across a portfolio of products (Cross & Street Reference Cross and Street2009). As a Unilever representative told us, “Of course, when we are talking about toothpaste it happens to be ‘Close-Up’ . . . . When we are talking about soap, it happens to be ‘Lifebuoy’” (interview, Dhaka, Bangaldesh, Oct. 31, 2009). As marketing has long shown, once you shift consumers’ behavior in a particular realm, you are well placed to gain their loyalty across an entire category of products.

Marketing education accentuates the visibility of certain products, bringing them into recognition as the (commercial) remedy for development dilemmas. At times, however, using a product requires solving another development issue: for example, water for soap or toilet facilities to change a sanitary pad, infrastructural issues that are elided by a focus on commercial solutions. As a South African Avon entrepreneur said, “We are talking about cleansing and some of them [target consumers] don’t even have water. . . . Then you come and tell them to buy moisturizers and cleansers to wash their face and they are more worried about how to get their water than [how] to clean their skin” (Focus Group Discussion, Pietersburg, South Africa, April 5, 2007).

Shaping Entrepreneurs

As noted, BoP initiatives aim not only to bring new consumer goods and services to the “poor,” but also to provide opportunities for entrepreneurs to engage in new forms of commerce by selling products door to door. Women are central to this vision. Ever since the Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus brought the entrepreneurial spirit of poor women into global policy discussions, women’s entrepreneurship has been embraced as a catalyst for economic growth, empowerment, and human development in a range of institutional settings (Johnstone-Louis Reference Johnstone-Louis2013). From NGOs and multilateral organizations to national governments and multinational corporations (e.g., Coca-Cola, ExxonMobile, Walmart), substantial resources have been marshaled to support women’s economic empowerment. Female “entrepreneurs” have emerged as one of the primary conduits through which corporate actors perform on the development stage (see Johnston-Louis Reference Johnstone-Louis2013). Coca-Cola, for example, is currently “empowering” five million women in Africa and emerging economies through employment as “micro entrepreneurs” who will deliver Coke to “every village, every community, every township” (Muhtar Kent, CEO of Coca-Cola, quoted in Stanford Reference Stanford2010). Entrepreneurial opportunities in woman-centered direct-sales networks—from Solar Sisters in Uganda to Health Keepers in Ghana, Yogurt Mamas in Tanzania, and Women First Mozambique—are proliferating across the continent and gaining favor in development circles (e.g., World Bank, Asian Development Bank, USAID, DFID), where they sit comfortably amidst efforts to repurpose “informal,” “subsistence,” or otherwise “underproductive” workers through new forms of corporate engagement.

These systems are premised on the notion that poor women are “natural” entrepreneurs who lack not enterprise and initiative but opportunity. In the words of John Hatch, the CEO of FINCA, one of the largest microfinance institutions in the world, “Give poor communities [market] opportunities, and get out of the way” (cited by Banerjee & Duflo Reference Banerjee and Duflo2011:206); this is an idea that is central to the World Bank’s World Development 2000/2001 and Moving Out of Poverty (2009) reports (Harrison Reference Harrison2010). But while a meritocratic ideal of social mobility—the notion that everyone has a shot at being a successful BoP entrepreneur—circulates among donors and corporations, Africa’s informal economies are not “naturally” fertile ground for BoP’s brand of entrepreneurial capitalism. In reality, not every individual can be an entrepreneur, even if he or she wanted to. Not only do myriad structural factors influence the taking-up of entrepreneurial opportunities, including differential access to startup capital, reproductive responsibilities, and uneven educational opportunities, but women are no more naturally predisposed toward entrepreneurship than any other form of work (see Banerjee & Duflo Reference Banerjee and Duflo2011). For BoP models to work—that is, for the economies of poverty to be converted into opportunities for individual empowerment and corporate profit (Roy Reference Roy2012a)—women must be molded into entrepreneurial subjects. As an iSmart representative told us, distributing products door to door is

This “shaping” is effected through technologies of management and government that craft entrepreneurial identities and subjectivities, on the one hand, and “self-driven” entrepreneurial subjects with the requisite traits of industry and market discipline on the other.

Women, first of all, must envisage themselves as entrepreneurs before companies and NGOs can capitalize on their labor as instruments for development and corporate profit. One of the main ways these subjectivities are forged is through deportment, and in particular through branded uniforms and bags. Living Goods Community Health Providers don branded T-shirts and hats, as do Women First, Solar Sister, and Yogurt Mamas. Avon entrepreneurs in Soweto wear Avon fragrances and carry glossy catalogs and free samples, all of which serve as marks of distinction, stylizing them as upwardly mobile professionals in the new South Africa (see Dolan & Johnstone-Louis Reference Dolan and Johnstone-Louis2011). These objects are signature features of BoP markets; they identify women as market actors, testifying to the coupling of material rewards and personal transformation such systems afford. They are also signifiers of belonging, conveying ideas about the kind of person a BoP entrepreneur is, and conversely, the kind of person she is not. As an iSmart entrepreneur, said, “first impressions matter a lot.” The uniform, she said, makes her look professional, signals to others that she is trustworthy—not a “hawker” or “con man”—and endows her with a new social positioning as someone who is a “hardworking” member of society. It thus sets her apart, as someone who is not simply “making do” through survivalist activities but is “one the move” (interview with iSmart entrepreneur, Nairobi, June 20, 2013). However, while these distinctions attenuate the stigma associated with the allegedly “backward” sphere of petty trade, they may offer little substantive relief from everyday vulnerabilities that informal workers experience. The Nairobi City Council, for example, recently asserted that branded uniforms constitute a form of advertising, for which iSmart must, but does not, have a license. The threat of arrest, however, falls to the individual entrepreneur, whose branded body thus signals not the idealized respectable businesswoman but the canny hustler evading the eye of the state. This fluidity can unsettle the stability and possibilities of the BoP project, since sustaining geographies of distinction—between the productive and unproductive, the professional and hustler, the insider and outsider—is vital for producing the economies of prosperity that the BoP approach promises.

Another key to all BoP distribution systems—whether launched by Avon, Coca-Cola, Unilever, or Anglo-American—is to educate workers, who typically have little familiarity with the norms and routines of formal employment or with the precepts of market logic. Though many women in these systems have long been “petty entrepreneurs” with lengthy personal histories of market exchange and ongoing reciprocal relationships through which they trade goods, favors, and services (Dolan et al. Reference Dolan, Johnstone-Louis and Scott2012a), becoming a BoP entrepreneur requires what the Shell Foundation (n.d.) terms “business DNA” and what an iSmart entrepreneur (interview, Nairobi, June 20, 2013) called fluency in a “business language”: entrepreneurial values of responsibility, competition, and risk-taking, a positive attitude, and market discipline. Business uses several technologies to inculcate this logic, all of which aim to produce a market subjectivity with clear business acumen (Dolan & Johnstone-Louis Reference Dolan and Johnstone-Louis2011; Schwittay Reference Schwittay2011b). These technologies function not as instruments of “managerial gaze,” but rather as “calculative devices” (Callon & Muniesa Reference Callon and Muniesa2005:1229) that allow companies to govern BoP entrepreneurs at a distance (Rose Reference Rose1999) and deflect the responsibility for achieving poverty reduction and “empowerment” to the poor themselves.

BoP schemes induce this process of self-governance by creating “spaces of calculability,” contexts that facilitate “the capacity for economic calculation” (Callon Reference Callon2009:270) such as trainings, performance targets, progress reviews, and monitoring systems that seek to instill and assess the achievement of entrepreneurial attitude and skills. For example, when one of us attended an Avon training session in 2009 in Soweto, entrepreneurs were told that “you have to try and be ambitious so that you can succeed.” The Avon manager went on to describe a bed-ridden Avon entrepreneur whose ambition alone had turned her into the highest earner in the area. Managing her sales using “a phone and a laptop on her stomach,” this “amazing” woman was touted as an example to the trainees, who were reproached for being outperformed by a woman confined to her bed. As April, the iSmart entrepreneur, said, “you cannot give up. You should keep up the spirit. Have it in mind that even when some disappoint you, not everyone will disappoint you” (interview, Nairobi, June 20, 2013).

This emphasis on achievement is the foundation of BoP initiatives. As one South African Avon entrepreneur said, “This is a numbers game. . . . You set yourself a target. . . . You say ‘I am going out prospecting and I won’t come back until I have ten names’” (interview, Johannesburg, Sept. 11, 2007). Targets are erected as motivational tools that will, as the Coca-Cola CEO Muhtar Kent explains, produce “an entrepreneurial mentality,” instilling women with the sense that “they are chasing pennies down the hallway” (cited by Bhasin Reference Bhasin2012). But they also draw a distinction between those who will pull themselves up by their bootstraps and activate their futures through entrepreneurial initiative and those who will not.

This duality is reinforced through monitoring. For example, BoP entrepreneurs are typically assigned a geographic zone, a demarcated target market for which they shoulder responsibility. These areas are concisely mapped, not on the basis of poverty, health, education, or other socioeconomic indices, but through market segments and points of sale (Dolan et al. Reference Dolan, Johnstone-Louis and Scott2012b). Such zones are key objects of management; it is within them that inventories are managed, sales and revenues tracked, and accounts assessed—data that render these sites readable to corporations and provide a blueprint for sales and growth. These data do not simply relay facts but also shape and govern entrepreneurs in often hidden ways (see Carrier & Miller Reference Carrier and Miller1998). An Avon manager, for example, described her relentless attention on an entrepreneur’s performance, telling us that if sales go down “there is going to be trouble. . . . I am going to be on the phone. When I am really, really mad, I will SMS them at midnight and they just hate it” (interview, Johannesburg, Sept. 11, 2007). Though sales data represent market efficiencies (where, what, and how much a product sells), they also reflect the entrepreneurial fitness or deficiencies of workers, serving as an instrument of what Anagnost (Reference Anagnost2006) terms “value coding” that separates the “productive” from the “unproductive” (Dolan & Johnstone-Louis Reference Dolan and Johnstone-Louis2011), or as an iSmart entrepreneur put it, someone who is “hard working” from someone who is “lazing around at home” (interview, Nairobi, June 20, 2013). As the experience of Avon entrepreneurs in South Africa suggests, the exercise of performance metrics and monitoring transforms individuals with diverse histories, working lives, and aspirations into two categories: the responsible, enterprising, and ambitious and those who are not, leaving the latter further marginalized from the empowerment offered through inclusive capitalism.

Though management technologies aim to diffuse the “entrepreneurial form to all forms of conduct” (Burchell Reference Burchell, Barry, Osborne and Rose1996:275), this does not only act on the individual; rather, it draws the social infrastructure of informal economies into inclusive capitalism (Elyachar Reference Elyachar2012), as the commercial success of BoP initiatives hinges on the capacity of women to extend market rationalities to noneconomic spheres of life. Women are exhorted, for instance, to draw the affective world of family, kin, and community into their business, and conversely, to create affective ties with other entrepreneurs. Social occasions and celebrations are similarly transformed into commercial opportunities: a funeral, an Avon entrepreneur reasoned, provides a good opportunity to show off a new fragrance, and by engaging in conversations with other funeral attendees, one might generate a trove of new customers (interview, Johannesburg, Sept. 19, 2010). Similarly, an iSmart representative claimed that church is a particularly fruitful venue for sales as the congregation provides an attentive audience for product demonstrations and marketing messaging (interview, Nairobi, June 26, 2013).

The absorption of affective ties into the world of economic activity is not a phenomenon exclusive to BoP initiatives; as Elyachar’s (Reference Elyachar2006) work in Egypt shows, the cultural practices and social relations of informal economies are often viewed as assets in “new” approaches to development such as microcredit, an observation also embodied in Roy’s (Reference Roy2010) term “poverty capital.” Yet in the case of BoP, the social networks of the poor are not only harnessed as an instrument for development; they are also the infrastructure that makes informal economies usable for capital.