From the start Uber had faced a problem in South Africa, as well as in other developing countries such as Pakistan and Mexico: While there was no shortage of willing drivers, few could afford vehicles suitable for the app’s high-end market—sedan cars no older than five years, which in South Africa cost at least $10,500. The national unemployment rate, including people who have given up looking for work, exceeds 35 percent, and more than half the population lives below the poverty line.

Were South Africa simply a poor country, there would have been no demand for Uber in the first place, but it also holds the distinction of being among the least equal societies on earth. Though unemployment and poverty are rampant among people of color, cities like Cape Town and Johannesburg have robust middle classes, with many thousands of people wealthy enough to use on-demand car services. To tap into this new market, Uber devised a solution to the car-ownership problem: Find people with the means to finance new vehicles, and encourage drivers to work for them. Today some of these owners, who like drivers are termed “partners” by Uber, operate entire fleets. One Cape Town partner (who asked not to be identified) currently has 50 vehicles on the road. There are even companies offering end-to-end fleet-management services. Since launching in San Francisco in 2010, Uber has spread to more than 814 cities (and counting). But in countries like South Africa, rather than disrupting entrenched patterns of capital, Uber’s version of the gig economy has largely conformed to them.

Samantha Allenberg, a spokeswoman for Uber South Africa, declined to comment on the proportion of drivers engaged in third-party agreements. “We are aware that some drivers work for vehicle owners and would like to be their own bosses,” she said. “Driving for someone else is the first entry point for drivers to join the Uber app.” Allenberg added that the company had partnered with local banks and car dealerships to offer financing for drivers with low credit ratings.

Yet ownership by drivers remains exceedingly rare. Faiza Haupt, an Uber partner who is helping to create a new national e-hailing association for drivers, estimates that just 10 percent of Cape Town’s Uber drivers work for themselves. (Haupt, a former driver, currently has four vehicles on the platform.) Mike, who has only ever driven for partner-owners, including one fleet that rotated drivers on consecutive 12-hour shifts, believes the figure is even lower.

Uber and Lyft are failing black riders

“Uber in Cape Town is not functioning in the way Uber portrays it,” Ine Geitung, an Oslo city employee who wrote a Master’s thesis on the ride-hailing app in South Africa, told me. “Uber should put stricter and better guidelines between car owners and drivers to ensure that their platform does not contribute to exploitation, as it does today.” Critics such as Geitung, along with many Uber drivers, believe that Uber unfairly profits at the expense of the workers who make its service possible in South Africa.