Meaningful Work and Livelihoods in the Context of Online Freelancing Through Digital Platforms: A Kenya Case Study

This paper examines how Kenyan online freelancers perceive meaningful work within precarious digital platform labour. Although platform work is often characterized by fragmentation, isolation, and income insecurity, empirical research on how Global South workers interpret its meaningfulness remains limited. Using a mixed-methods design, the study combines a survey of 52 platform workers with 20 semi-structured interviews. Findings show that workers often describe most gigs as monotonous and lacking intrinsic purpose, yet still associate platform work with meaningfulness when it reduces hardship, provides flexibility, supports family responsibilities, and expands livelihood prospects. By distinguishing task-level from livelihood-level meaningfulness, the study shows why precarious work may be experienced as meaningful when it enables workers to pursue valued lives under constrained labour-market conditions. The findings identify policy and intervention leverage points within the broader conditions of platform work and call for further research into task- and livelihood-level differences in meaningfulness across different work contexts.