Latif, Farhan2025-09-182025-09-182025-09-182025-09-12https://hdl.handle.net/10012/22472Digital platforms are reshaping how online freelance work is organized and experienced in the Global South, but their implications for sustaining a meaningful and decent livelihood remain inadequately understood. While platforms offer new ways of making a living, particularly in labour markets characterized by informality and limited work opportunities, they often fail to meet the normative benchmarks typically associated with good-quality employment. These tensions raise questions about what constitutes a sustainable livelihood in the context of rapidly changing platform work, where conventional markers of decent work are increasingly difficult to apply to fragmented digital labour. My PhD research focuses on the intersection of platform work quality and development in the Global South. At its core, it explores the complexity of sustaining a fulfilling and good-quality livelihood through digital platforms, with particular attention to asymmetries in experienced work quality, local development realities, and the diverse, subjective aspirations of platform workers. Building on this foundation, my research bridges the knowledge gap by analyzing both workers’ subjective experiences of work quality, framed in relation to decent and meaningful work, and the resilience of their livelihoods to labour market disruptions, such as those driven by artificial intelligence (AI). Grounded in a mixed-methods case study of 52 Kenyan platform workers, this dissertation is structured as a collection of four interrelated research papers. The first paper is a systematic literature review that consolidates the fragmented empirical literature on platform work in the Global South, examining the quality of work, the complexities of skills development, and future career prospects. It then distills the insights into an analytical framework, offering a tool for analyzing how local contextual factors shape platform-labour outcomes. The second paper examines workers’ perceptions of work quality in relation to decent work standards, using a development lens. The findings of this paper situate platform work outcomes along a continuum from opportunity to precarity. The third paper focuses on how experiencing meaningful work evolves within the platform work economy. It discusses why many platform workers in the Global South perceive seemingly menial platform tasks as meaningful and analyzes the socioeconomic dynamics that shape this perception. The fourth paper examines the impact of generative AI on platform work. The paper introduces a task-based model to assess the impact of AI on work, offering an evaluation of four freelance occupations and an early-stage empirical validation of the model. Overall, this research advances theoretical debates on labour informality, decent and meaningful work, and automation risks to sustainable livelihoods by framing platform work as a complex livelihood strategy that simultaneously extends and disrupts traditional pathways of work. Empirically, the dissertation documents persistent inequalities and precarious conditions while highlighting developmentally important forms of opportunity access, worker autonomy, and worker resilience in Kenya’s platform economy. The dissertation offers policy-relevant insights, underscoring the need for adaptive labour regulation to extend protections to freelance platform workers, reorienting social safety nets to meet evolving demands, and inclusive digital economy governance so that platform-based work contributes to equitable and sustainable development.enplatform workfreelancingAI impact on workmeaningful worklivelihood sustainabilitydecent workDoctoral Thesis