Towards a life of poverty and uncertainty? The livelihood strategies of Gécamines workers after retrenchment in the DRC

Benjamin Rubbers

Review of African Political Economy, 2017, vol. 44, issue 152, 189-203

Abstract: In 2003, with the support of the World Bank, the Congolese state-owned enterprise Gécamines implemented a voluntary departure programme for 10,000 employees with more than 25 years of service. These employees were asked to regard their severance pay as a capital to be invested in new activities. Based on ethnographic research, this article explores how ex-Gécamines workers made a living in the phase of their ‘reintegration’. In doing so, it develops a sociological approach to popular economic practices that attempts to move beyond the phenomenology of uncertainty recently advocated by several Africanist scholars.

Date: 2017
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DOI: 10.1080/03056244.2016.1273827

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