Downward social mobility among young Ghanaian digital entrepreneurs: navigating family expectations and digital start-up dreams

Since the 2000s, digital entrepreneurship has been framed by policymakers, NGOs and international corporations as a solution to Africa’s high youth unemployment. In this article, I explore how the promise of serial digital entrepreneurship – the idea that repeated business failure will eventually result in a profitable digital start-up – lured young adult Akan digital entrepreneurs into downwardly mobile trajectories. Building on the recent anthropology of (de-)kinning, I show that young adult Akan were given and/or negotiated a window of opportunity during which their families allowed them to invest most of their resources in establishing their own middle-class career and marriage. As families tried to close this window out of concern for the young adults’ ability to achieve a middle-class lifestyle and redistribute opportunities to siblings, serial entrepreneurship could encourage entrepreneurs to distance themselves from their kin in their continued unprofitable pursuit of digital start-up success. When these young adults finally wanted to quit entrepreneurship, they could find themselves far removed from obligations of care and opportunity from kin and the waged job market, trapped in the precarious pursuit of digital start-up ‘dreams’. This article contributes to debates on the African middle classes by conceptualizing downward social mobility in Ghana as the de-kinning that occurs when family members fail to reach mutual understandings about how to pursue middle-class aspirations.