For much of the past decade, debates about Africa’s structural transformation have been framed by a persistent concern: economic growth has not been accompanied by the level of industrialisation, productivity growth, and job creation associated with other regions’ earlier development experiences. This concern remains justified, but the terms in which it is usually expressed deserve reconsideration. Africa is attempting to transform at a moment when technological change, decarbonisation, demographic divergence, and geopolitical fragmentation are altering the organisation of production itself. The challenge for the coming decade is therefore not only to accelerate structural transformation, but to reconsider whether the sectoral categories traditionally used to describe it still capture the processes through which productive capabilities are accumulated, and value is created.

Classical theories of structural transformation attach considerable importance to sectoral change. William Arthur Lewis emphasised the movement of labour from traditional activities to modern forms of employment. Nicholas Kaldor identified the importance of manufacturing because of its economies of scale, technological learning, and productivity effects. Albert Hirschman offered a less linear account, highlighting instead the cumulative effects and linkages generated by productive investment.

However, Dani Rodrik’s analysis of premature deindustrialisation showed that developing economies have been reaching peak manufacturing at lower levels of income and employment than earlier industrialisers. Africa’s experience is nevertheless more complicated than a straightforward story of industrialisation failure. Labour has moved between activities, cities have expanded, and services have grown, but without the large manufacturing transition that historically accompanied these processes elsewhere.

Contemporary African economies are simultaneously confronting agricultural transformation, industrialisation, rapid urbanisation, digitalisation, expansion of services, and the transition towards lower-carbon energy systems. These processes, which appear as distinct stages in stylised accounts of earlier development, are increasingly compressed into the same historical period. This “structural compression” is occurring while automation and artificial intelligence alter the relationship between employment and production, and while geopolitical competition reorganises trade, technology, and investment. Africa is therefore not simply arriving late to an established model of industrialisation; it is navigating a model that is changing in real time.

A new model for new economies

The conventional distinction between agriculture, manufacturing, and services is becoming less informative about where productive capabilities are located. Modern agriculture can incorporate biotechnology, engineering, digital technologies, and sophisticated logistics. Manufacturing increasingly depends on finance, data, and intellectual property, while some services have become highly tradable, scalable, and technologically dynamic. In other words, the capabilities once associated mainly with manufacturing are now spread across several sectors. This is what is meant by questioning “sectoral exceptionalism”. Rather than asking which single sector should be the privileged engine of transformation, policy should ask which combinations of activities generate technological learning, productivity gains, and the capacity to create more sophisticated forms of production.

African industrial strategies have understandably emphasised domestic processing and movement into higher stages of global value chains. Yet research on global value-chain governance shows that these chains are not simply sequences of production activities; they are also structures in which control over technology, standards, intellectual property, branding, and market access influence the distribution of returns. An African economy may therefore progress from mineral extraction to processing and eventually manufacturing while remaining dependent on technologies, finance, and distribution systems controlled elsewhere. Increasing domestic value addition is unquestionably desirable, but it cannot establish the depth of structural transformation required by itself.

The practical question is therefore not simply whether a country manufactures more, but what it learns and acquires by doing so. Does a new activity create engineering skills, research capacity, financing expertise or access to new markets that can subsequently be used elsewhere in the economy? This is close to the idea of economic complexity, which sees development as the accumulation of productive knowledge that allows economies to diversify into progressively more sophisticated activities; the Atlas of Economic Complexity develops this approach in detail. There is no contradiction here with saying that modern manufacturing relies on finance, software, logistics, and research. The point is precisely that these capabilities reinforce one another: manufacturing can help generate them, but manufacturing is also more transformative when it becomes rooted in the domestic or regional economy rather than being imported as a complete package.

This is the basis for thinking about structural transformation through productive ecosystems. The proposition does not imply that manufacturing has become less important. Manufacturing remains a powerful mechanism for technological learning, supplier development, and diversification. But its transformative effects increasingly depend on the ecosystem in which it is embedded. A factory relying overwhelmingly on imported technology, inputs, and finance, with little connection to domestic suppliers or knowledge institutions, has a different developmental impact from one that contributes to the progressive accumulation of capabilities around it. Industrialisation, in this sense, concerns the development of systems within which industries can emerge, evolve and capture increasing shares of value.

The African Continental Free Trade Area takes on additional significance from this perspective. The limited size of most national markets has long constrained African industrialisation, but market size is only part of the problem. Few African countries individually possess the full combination of finance, research capacity, infrastructure, specialised suppliers, technological expertise, and demand required by increasingly complex productive systems. Continental integration offers the possibility of assembling these capabilities across national boundaries. Regional integration can therefore become a mechanism for integrating production and productive capabilities, rather than being assessed principally through the increase in trade generated by tariff liberalisation.

The decade ahead

This ecosystem perspective offers a different way to evaluate Africa’s progress over the next decade. Manufacturing value added, employment, exports, and economic diversification will remain essential measures, but they should increasingly be complemented by evidence about the capabilities generated through productive activity: the technological sophistication of domestic suppliers, the acquisition and adaptation of technology, the development of engineering and research capacity, participation in standards-setting, access to productive finance, and the extent to which one activity creates possibilities for diversification into others.

The underlying objective of structural transformation has not changed. African economies still need sustained productivity growth, technological learning, economic diversification, and large-scale creation of productive employment. What is changing is the relationship between these objectives and the sectoral composition of economies. Structural transformation will therefore be better understood as the cumulative process through which economies acquire, connect and deepen productive capabilities, progressively expanding the range and sophistication of activities they can undertake. For Africa, whose transformation is occurring while the technological and geopolitical environment itself is being reconfigured, this broader conception may provide a more useful framework for understanding the decade ahead.

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Twenty-five years ago, the terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon sent shockwaves across the world. The attack, by Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda, marked the first foreign terrorist attack on US soil and radically changed the nature of global security and how states respond to the threat of terrorism.

In a fierce response to the terror attacks, Washington launched the War on Terror, which caused a fundamental shift in the US’s approach to terrorism as a global security threat requiring military, diplomatic, and political strategies.

In Afghanistan, the US spent over £340 billion in the first ten years (2001-2011) of its war with the Taliban, according to the National Priorities Project’s report.

Except for Kenya and Tanzania – which had experienced earlier terror attacks against US interests, African states were not immediately connected to the War on Terror. It was only after the realisation that Africa’s fragile states are potential havens for terrorist groups that Washington extended its campaigns to the region.

Transnational terrorism in West Africa

States in West Africa’s Sahel have battled localised insurgencies, but the region gradually became a theatre for international terrorism. Al-Qaeda in the Maghreb aligned with the existing Salafi groups and rapidly spread to northern Mali, Niger, and Mauritania. The rapid expansion was enabled by large ungoverned spaces, ineffective government, and ongoing Tuareg conflict, who are fighting Mali and Niger for an independent state.

Between 2007 and 2012, transnational terrorism grew effectively in West Africa as deadly insurgent groups emerged in many states, launching horrible attacks on civilians. They included the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa, Ansar Dine in Mali, and Boko Haram in Northeastern Nigeria. By 2015, ISIS had established a presence in West Africa following Boko Haram’s declaration of allegiance to their leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, leading to the creation of the Islamic State in the West African Province.

Washington was initially cautious about intervening in the Sahelian crisis, limiting interventions to building state capacity and providing military assistance. The US Department of State established the Pan-Sahel Initiative (PSI) in 2002, targeting Mali, Mauritania, Niger, and Chad, to strengthen border security and help the states combat the threat of terrorism.

In 2005, the PSI expanded into the Trans-Sahara Counter Terrorism Partnership, extending to more states, including Nigeria and Senegal and Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. The Partnership was meant to combine non-military strategies with the military component of the counter-terrorism programme in the targeted states.

The establishment of the US Africa Command (AFRICOM) in 2007 signalled US readiness for a long military campaign in Africa. Washington increased military cooperation in the France-led military operations in the Sahel and provided extensive military assistance and training to the Multi-National Joint Task Force to counter Boko Haram in the Lake Chad Basin. Washington further established Air Base 201 in Agadez, Niger, for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance across the Sahel. The US government also supported the G5 Sahel initiative, comprising Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad, and Mauritania.

US military airstrikes in Nigeria in December 2025, targeting terrorist enclaves, and the deployment of an undisclosed number of American military personnel in February 2026 for joint military operations with the Nigerian military to confront ISIS-linked groups in the country, demonstrated Washington’s direct military approach in West Africa.

The effects in West Africa

Huge US counter-terrorism investment in Africa failed to achieve its objectives. If anything, it has left West Africa worse off than in the pre-9/11 era. The Sahel moved from being a marginal theatre of global terrorism before the War on Terror to become the epicentre of terrorism two decades after 9/11. Four of the five most terrorism-affected states in the world – Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria and Mali – are in the region. From around 1 per cent of global terrorism deaths in the 2000s, the Sahel now accounts for 54 per cent of global terrorism deaths, according to the 2026 Global Terrorism Index.

The region continues to experience increased proliferation and transformation of transnational terrorist groups, especially after ISIS found sanctuary in the ungoverned spaces in the area following its expulsion from the Middle East. According to the 2026 Global Terrorism Index, four of the world’s deadliest terrorist groups now operate in the Sahel, including Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, Islamic State of the Sahel Province (formerly known as the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara), Islamic State of the West Africa Province, and Boko Haram.

The human consequences of the Sahel’s post-9/11 security crisis extend beyond terrorism fatalities. It has contributed significantly to one of Africa’s gravest humanitarian emergencies, marked by mass displacement, severe food insecurity, disrupted education, and deteriorating health services. According to UNICEF, 8.2 million children in the region are in desperate need of assistance, while 2 million of the 3.6 million internally displaced people are children. It was estimated that about 3.7 million people inMali and Niger alone faced acute food insecurity in 2025.

West Africa has become more exposed to military coups, as military juntas exploit the poor security situation to claim civilian regimes are ineffective and justify coups, eroding gains of the democratic transition of the 1990s. Between 2020 and 2023, the region saw nine coups, six of which successfully overthrew civilian governments. Today, four states, including Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso and Niger, are ruled by military juntas, and three of them have formed the Alliance of the Sahelian States to exit ECOWAS, further complicating insecurity in the West African region.

West Africa has been one of the greatest casualties of the US War on Terror launched in the aftermath of 9/11. The subsequent securitisation of the region, without addressing the socio-economic and political roots of the conflict, has left West Africa in ruins at a time when resources for state building, infrastructure, and education programmes are dwindling worldwide.

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On 4 September 2026, the United Nations voted to use a map that will show the globe Africa in its true breadth. No longer a diminished, peripheral extension of Eurocentric perspective, but a continent represented accurately in its grandeur and significance.

Most recent maps have been based on the projections of Gerardus Mercator, a 16th century Flemish mapmaker. To balance the problem of making a sphere flat, his projection elongates the size of countries in the north and shrinks those around the equator. It left Africa a smaller, reduced continent that did not reflect its status.

The map has now been revised, yet the political imprisonment of an entire continent within the lines drawn in Europe in the 1880s remains. African politicians and political elites continue to reference national sovereignty as though the borders are a manifestation of native desire rather than tools of colonial division. What significance does a more precise map hold if its inhabitants uphold the invented borders intended to separate them?

The question addresses a fundamental paradox that has shaped African politics since the official conclusion of colonial rule. In 1884, the Berlin Conference divided a continent based on the principles of European competition. Waterways, bodies of water, and elevated terrains held no significance. Communities that had engaged in trade, intermarriage, and migration across for thousands of years were divided by straight lines drawn by individuals who had never visited the areas. The Congo River basin became Leopold II’s personal estate. A Saharan boundary divided Tuareg populations between French West Africa and British Nigeria. Somalis were scattered over five territories.

In 1964, the Organization of African Unity convened in Cairo and took a critical decision. Concerned that confronting colonial borders may provoke secessionist wars and relentless disputes, the founding fathers decided to maintain the status quo. The choice was practical, and possibly inescapable given the realities of the time. However, pragmatism solidified into a doctrine. The colonial map became sacrosanct; African autonomy became synonymous with the protection of European mapping.

Integration without union

The African nation-state was not imagined by Africans. It was imagined in Lisbon, Paris, London, and Brussels, enforced by conquest, and adopted by elites who saw it as a vehicle for accumulation and dominance. It distinguishes citizen from subject, insider from foreigner, and those who support the imagined nation from those who threaten it. State political economics necessitates ethnic differentiation. Achille Mbembe’s anatomy of the postcolony shows how the African state runs through a grotesque logic of excess and abandonment. Borders are key to this logic. The state claims control over legitimate mobility while failing to provide infrastructure, security, or economic opportunity, creating a zone of hyper-surveillance and abandonment. The border is more predation than protection, and its defence uses resources that could fund continental connectivity for Africa.

In 2021, the African Continental Free Trade Area was enthusiastically launched. On paper, it is the most ambitious trade integration project since the European single market. Yet it functions within unchanging borders, visa regimes, and political structures. But eliminating tariffs in treaties does not mean free trade when a truck driver must pass through various checkpoints, pay multiple officials, and wait days to deliver goods from Lagos to Nairobi. The AfCFTA is not a substitute for political union. It is compensation for its absence: a mechanism for pretending to integrate while carefully avoiding the question of whether Africans should live, work, and vote anywhere on the continent they call home.

The East African Community has progressed further than others by creating a common market and outlining a plan for a monetary union. ECOWAS established a protocol for the unrestricted movement of individuals in 1979; however, its execution is inconsistent, and current political unrest in the Sahel has led to border barriers reminiscent of colonial governance. As consecutive coups occurred in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, regional organisations failed to enquire why young men lacking economic prospects sought purpose in violent insurrection. Borders were sealed, sanctions were enacted, and the divisions that had made those economies reliant and those nations fragile were strengthened.

Military personnel claimed authority under the guise of sovereignty; however, the sovereignty they asserted was merely a remnant of colonialism, and the boundaries they enforced mirrored the divisions established by the French to distinguish their people from British and German rivals. Sovereignty has transformed into an obsession—a concept employed to rationalise the continuation of a power framework that benefits neither the populace nor the continent.

The ethnic conflicts external analysts sometimes misconstrue as age-old tribal disputes are largely products of a governmental framework that distributes limited resources based on territorial and ethnic claims. When politicians fail to provide progress, they resort to identity; the border becomes a bastion of an ethnic stronghold designed to maintain their authority. The turmoil in Darfur, the recurring conflicts in eastern Congo, and the strife between herders and farmers in the Sahel stem from a governmental framework that sets populations in opposition to each other inside borders that disregard ecological, economic, or cultural truths.

Decolonising the political imagination

Frontiers will not dissolve by decree, and continental government cannot be summoned into existence overnight. The issue is political imagination and trajectory. Are we constructing a future in which Africans move, trade, marry, study, and organise across the continent as a matter of right? Or are we entrenching a system in which birthplace determines the horizon of possibility? The United Nations’ correction of the world map was an external act of recognition; a concession that the global order had lied about the continent’s size and significance for centuries. But erasing the boundaries that were enforced on the continent cannot be outsourced. It demands the collective will that fought colonialism, the intellectual courage that produced Nkrumah and Fanon, and the popular energy that toppled dictators from Cairo to Cape Town. Above all, it requires the willingness to ask whether the nation-state we inherited serves as a vehicle for African liberation or a sophisticated trap.

The UN has re-established Africa’s status. Africans alone can preserve it. The Mercator projection was a falsehood, but its obviousness made it correctable. However, colonial borders have been internalised to the point where they feel natural. They have become the unexplored ground of African politics, the frame for all argument and the limit of imagination. We have spent decades decolonising the map. We have scarcely begun to decolonise the mind that looks at the map and sees the borders as permanent, necessary, and right. The greatest remaining colonial inheritance is not the distorted image the world once held of Africa. It is the undistorted, unshakable commitment of Africans themselves to the frontiers designed to diminish them.

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South Africa sits at the intersection of two major environmental challenges: managing climate risk while protecting some of the world’s most significant biodiversity. Using search data from the last two decades shows how attention and awareness of these issues has fluctuated over time. Looking back over more than two decades provides valuable insight into where we have come from and raises important questions about how these risks will shape going forward.

The global transition towards cleaner energy has placed renewed attention on Africa’s mineral resources. South Africa is central to this transition as a major exporter of platinum, palladium, manganese and chrome, which are critical to the development of low-carbon technologies. The country, therefore, sits at the heart of the global transition towards net-zero carbon emissions.

This transition, however, takes place against a complicated domestic backdrop. South Africa’s industrial and mining development has historically depended heavily on fossil-fuel-based energy, particularly coal and is vital to the country’s wider economy. This creates a dual exposure: South Africa faces the physical consequences of climate change, while businesses and financial institutions must also navigate the transition risks associated with moving towards a lower-carbon economy. South Africa currently ranks among the highest carbon emitters globally and is the largest emitter on the African continent.

“We are because nature is”

Climate-wise, South Africa is semi-arid and increasingly exposed to droughts, floods, heat and other extreme events that can disrupt communities, infrastructure and economic activity. Its coal-intensive economy also creates substantial transition pressures as climate, trade and environmental policies change.

Climate risk is only part of South Africa’s environmental context. South Africa is one of the world’s most biodiverse countries, with globally important ecosystems, species and biodiversity hotspots. Nature supports economic activity through water systems, soils, pollination, carbon storage and other ecosystem services on which firms, communities and entire value chains depend.

The intricate relationships between nature, societies, and economies create an important challenge for researchers, policymakers and financial institutions: how can climate and biodiversity risks be better understood and measured to reflect South Africa’s unique environmental and economic reality?

From environmental risk to measurable signals

Climate and biodiversity risks are related, but they are not interchangeable. Physical climate risks relate to the adverse economic, infrastructural and societal impacts of climate-related hazards. Climate transition risks arise as policy, technology and markets move towards a lower-carbon economy. Biodiversity risk similarly has both physical and transition dimensions, but is particularly dependent on location, ecosystems and socioeconomic dependence on nature.

All require political action to address, and in a democracy like South Africa such actions requires public consent. One measure of public engagement is online search behaviour. Search data do not measure the physical risk itself. Instead, it provides a measure of attention: when people begin searching for climate- or biodiversity-related issues, how strongly that attention changes, and whether major environmental, policy or social developments coincide with those changes.

Are people paying attention?

The Climate Attention Index for South Africa tracks changes in climate-related search attention over time. Public search interest on 53 terms is combined to create an overall measure of perceived climate risk in South Africa. These include general climate terms such as carbon emissions and climate resilience, as well as local terms such as the controversial Carbon Tax Act.

The South African Biodiversity Attention Index (SABAI) combines internationally recognised biodiversity concepts with terminology that reflects South Africa’s own ecological landscape. Alongside general searches such as biodiversity loss, ecosystem services and endangered species, the index contains distinctly South African terms, including fynbos, the Cape Floristic Region, Highveld grasslands, African penguins, black rhinos, perlemoen, the sardine run, the succulent Karoo and SANBI. The final biodiversity index draws on 242 terms.

Twenty years of search terms

More than twenty years of search behaviour allow us to see how environmental attention has evolved alongside major climate events, biodiversity developments, policy changes and international agreements.

Figure 1. Climate attention in South Africa: 2004–2025

Figure 2. Biodiversity attention in South Africa: 2004–2025

Noticeable changes in the index occur around several significant biodiversity developments. These include the 2010 International Year of Biodiversity, the establishment of Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) in 2012, the 2019 IPBES Global Biodiversity Assessment, the adoption of the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework in 2022, and the growing international focus on nature-related financial risk associated with the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures recommendations in 2023.

What will the next two decades bring?

The first two decades of these attention data have helped identify the signals. The next two decades will explain what those signals mean.

For South Africa, the research challenge is to connect changes in environmental attention with actual economic and financial exposures: Which firms and sectors are most exposed? Do changes in climate or biodiversity attention affect investment decisions, asset prices, creditworthiness or policy? How do these risks differ across South Africa’s regions and ecosystems? And how can environmental information ultimately be incorporated into financial decision-making?

This also creates an important Global South research agenda. Climate change and biodiversity loss are global challenges, but their consequences are profoundly local. The risks facing a South African mining company, a farmer, a financial institution or a community cannot necessarily be understood through indicators designed around very different economies and ecosystems. The next stage of the work must therefore move beyond measuring attention towards integrating environmental conditions, business dependencies, financial exposures and human behaviour.

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As the debate around frontier artificial intelligence focuses on how to advance AI safely, Africa faces a parallel urgency to build control over the language data, models and digital infrastructure shaping its AI future. UNESCO’s 2025 evidence indicates less than 2 per cent of Africa’s languages have an online presence, exposing a digital sovereignty gap.

Digital public infrastructure is becoming as essential to modern economies and states as roads, ports, and electricity. The World Bank’s work on digital public infrastructure and the African Union Digital Transformation Strategy identify these systems as foundations for inclusive digital development. As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes embedded across economies and public institutions, the question is: can Africa develop capabilities to shape these systems?

This is fundamentally a question of digital sovereignty. The World Bank’s work on digital sovereignty and the UN Global Digital Compact support stronger national capabilities alongside international cooperation. For Africa, sovereignty means participating in global digital systems without becoming structurally dependent upon them. This requires the capacity to make informed choices, negotiate equitable partnerships, protect strategic interests, and retain influence over critical technologies.

Digital languages

Language is a central layer of digital infrastructure because it determines whether citizens can access knowledge, interact with institutions, learn, conduct business, and communicate effectively with AI. Connectivity without linguistic capability can therefore produce access without meaningful participation.

Africa’s linguistic diversity is poorly represented across many digital systems. African languages remain comparatively underrepresented in training datasets, benchmarks, evaluation systems, and language technologies. This imbalance has practical consequences because weaker linguistic performance can make digital services less effective and less accessible to African-language communities.

Limited linguistic data can contribute to weaker models, which reduce application quality and constrain adoption. Research from Masakhane on African-language natural-language processing, alongside the World Bank’s analysis of AI foundations, illustrates why connectivity alone does not guarantee effective participation. Populations can remain digitally connected while receiving limited benefits when systems inadequately understand their languages and contexts.

Strengthening  Africa’s digital sovereignty can reshape economies by turning control over language capabilities into an engine of inclusive development. Investment in African language datasets, models, computing infrastructure and research can enable AI to deliver agricultural advice, market intelligence, education, financial and government services in understood languages, building on FAO’s digital agriculture agenda and World Bank work on local AI capabilities. Such sovereignty can expand participation, strengthen innovation, reduce dependence and enable economies to capture value from data, languages and capabilities.

The political and security implications are equally important because AI increasingly shapes information flows and institutional communication. The OECD AI Principles and UNESCO Recommendation on the Ethics of AI emphasise transparency, inclusion, and accountability. Yet content moderation, public communication, and electoral information systems can perform less effectively in under-resourced languages. Weak linguistic capability can therefore create information vulnerabilities, distort public communication, and undermine institutional trust. African-language AI should consequently be treated as part of information resilience and democratic governance infrastructure.

The deeper political-economy issue concerns ownership and value capture. African languages contain extensive repositories of text, speech, and cultural knowledge that can become valuable AI inputs. UNCTAD’s analysis of the digital economy and WIPO’s work on AI and intellectual property highlight broader concerns about unequal digital value capture. If linguistic resources are collected locally, processed through foreign computing infrastructure, incorporated into externally controlled models, and monetised elsewhere, Africa risks reproducing extractive relationships within the digital economy.

Moving forward

The solution is not for every African country to develop its own frontier AI model. Such an approach would be expensive, technically demanding, and difficult to sustain. A more credible strategy would focus on layers where African knowledge, languages, and contextual expertise offer comparative advantages. Masakhane’s African-language research network demonstrates the potential of collaborative research, while the AU Continental AI Strategy provides a continental foundation for mobilising collective capabilities.

Three priorities should guide this agenda. First, African governments should treat language data as strategic digital infrastructure and support ethical digitisation of text, speech, audiovisual resources, and relevant knowledge while protecting privacy, intellectual property, consent, cultural rights, and equitable benefit-sharing. Second, the African Union and regional economic communities should pool research capacity, datasets, computing resources, and benchmarks through the African Digital Compact and regional digital-integration initiatives. Third, governments should use procurement and partnerships to build domestic and regional capability by requiring public AI systems to demonstrate African-language performance, responsible data practices, and measurable local value creation.

Kenya illustrates how this agenda could be operationalised. The country possesses substantial digital public infrastructure, a dynamic technology ecosystem, and a national AI strategy reflected in the Kenya AI Strategy 2025–2030 and wider digital-government agenda. Kenya can connect these assets to language technologies, research, governance, and applications. Given Kiswahili’s regional reach, Kenya could help position East Africa as a hub for multilingual AI research, standards, applications, and responsible innovation. Working through the East African Community could pool expertise, expand markets, reduce duplication, and strengthen regional bargaining power with global technology companies.

Africa’s digital sovereignty cannot therefore be measured through connectivity, data centres, or AI adoption. It depends on whether African institutions possess the infrastructure, data, skills, research capacity, governance systems, and bargaining power necessary to shape technologies embedded within their economies and societies. The World Bank’s AI foundations framework and AU Continental AI Strategy support this broader conception of capability. Language is central because it determines whether citizens can meaningfully interact with increasingly intelligent digital systems. A connected population that cannot effectively communicate with technologies shaping its economy and public institutions remains only partially included in digital transformation.

The strategic test is whether African societies can move beyond being places where digital technologies are merely deployed and increasingly become environments where technologies are researched, adapted, governed, commercialised, and shaped according to African priorities. Developing linguistic data, research capacity, standards, talent, institutions, and regional markets would enable Africa to move from primarily consuming digital technologies towards co-designing them. The end goal should be intensifying strategic capability rather than isolation, supported by mutually beneficial partnerships and local capacity building. Hence, Africa’s digital sovereignty will depend on whether it can connect to the digital world and shape the intelligence through which the world increasingly operates.

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When people think about the harms of colonialism and apartheid, they often focus on land, political power, or physical violence. However, another form of harm deserves serious attention: epistemic injustice—the ways domination can shape, suppress, or devalue people’s knowledge, beliefs, languages, and ways of understanding the world.

To properly account for the injustices of colonialism and apartheid, we must follow the “accepted benefits principle,” which combines two key ideas: compensation should genuinely benefit victims and victims should have a meaningful say in accepting what they receive.

Colonialism as a knowledge project

Colonial domination was not only a political and economic project; it was also a knowledge project. Colonial regimes attempted to influence how colonised people understood themselves and their world. This involved devaluing indigenous cultures, languages, religions, philosophies, and systems of knowledge while elevating those associated with the colonising powers.

The South African case illustrates this clearly. Under apartheid, education was deliberately organised along racial lines. Measures such as the Bantu Education Act of 1953, the Extension of University Education Act of 1959, and the Afrikaans Medium Decree of 1974 helped shape who could access education, what education they received, and which languages and intellectual traditions were privileged.

The result was not simply unequal access to institutions. It was a reshaping of the intellectual environment in which generations of people developed their identities and ideas. This is why epistemic injustice is an important dimension of colonial and apartheid wrongs.

Why “Restoring the Past” is not enough

One possible approach to reparations is the “restorational principle”: put victims in the position they would have occupied if the injustice had never happened. If colonialism damaged a community’s intellectual traditions, perhaps justice requires restoring precisely those traditions.

However, this approach can produce counterintuitive results. Simply returning people to an earlier intellectual or cultural condition may not always improve their lives today, and it could even make them worse off. That is because a tradition can contain beliefs or practices that are false, harmful, or no longer useful.

We should resist the assumption that everything in an indigenous knowledge tradition should automatically be revived or treated as valuable simply because it was marginalised by colonialism. Recognising historical suppression does not require bringing to life in the present every element of the past, which the logic of the restorational principle prescribes.

The limits of giving victims complete control

Another possible approach is the “control principle,” according to which a group such as a people or nation that was wrongfully deprived of something should regain control over it. This has an important strength: it respects victims as agents rather than deciding for them what justice requires.

However, complete control can also generate difficulties. A group might control educational resources in ways that fail to benefit all individual members or indeed in ways that harm some of them.  

The alternative to both approaches says this: victims should have a meaningful role in deciding what compensation they receive, while the compensation must also be objectively beneficial for each of them. This opens up practical questions about who and how that decision is made, but this principle should be the starting point.

The accepted benefits principle

The “accepted benefits principle” has two basic requirements: that the compensation should provide an objectively good benefit to the victim, and the victim should agree to or accept the proposed benefit.

This framework shifts the focus away from mechanically restoring a lost past or automatically ceding control over what had been taken. Instead, the aim is to improve the lives of people who were wronged while giving them a say over how that is done.

Consider an ordinary compensation example to illustrate the idea. Someone whose land was taken under apartheid might in the present genuinely prefer financial compensation to receiving the land back. Having grown up away from that land they may not know how to, or want to farm, for example. Justice does not require returning or providing control over exactly what was lost, if another item would be preferred by the victim and would in fact make her life better.

The principle also fits practices in many ‘traditional’ African societies, where compensation is negotiated among offenders, victims, their families, and broader communities. Negotiation matters because if victims would prefer one good or service over another, respect counsels giving it to them, at least if receiving it would indeed make their lives go better.

Epistemic reparations

Applying the accepted benefits principle to epistemic injustice means asking which goods would truly improve the lives of people affected by the colonial suppression of their ways of interpreting the world in ways that are acceptable to them today.

Using the suppression of African philosophical enquiry as an example, possible measures include creating academic posts devoted to African philosophy, employing scholars with relevant linguistic and cultural knowledge, funding research, supporting publication and dissemination, and providing time and resources for curricula to become more Africanised.

Universities could also host intercultural panels, workshops, and conferences in which African philosophers engage with philosophers from other traditions. This supports a decolonial approach that does not simply replace one intellectual tradition with another, as the restoring of the past and control principles might authorise; it instead encourages different knowledge systems to learn from and challenge one another.

A broader vision of decolonisation

However, university reform is not the whole solution. Only a small proportion of Africans attain bachelor’s degrees, meaning that change at a university would directly reach only a minority of the population. If epistemic marginalisation affected society more broadly, as it surely did, then reparations must also reach people outside higher education.

For this reason, access to African philosophical and intellectual traditions should be expanded through public education. Possible approaches include short courses, winter schools, public lectures, subsidised books, online videos, television programmes, and social-media content.

The larger principle is that decolonisation should not mean automatically declaring every indigenous belief true, justified, beneficial, and worth incorporating into our lives today.  Epistemic reparations should be less about replacing one orthodoxy with another and more about creating conditions in which previously marginalised perspectives can be heard, examined, developed, and used so that they contribute to human flourishing in the 21st century.

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For the last 25 years, Somalia’s reconstruction has been assessed by counting things. Constitutions drafted. Parliaments seated. Commissions established. Laws passed. Elections held. Given where the country was a quarter of a century ago, that is understandable. A state that had ceased to exist needed institutional forms before it could have institutional behaviour.

What is now needed is a level playing field and agreed upon laws so that the country can move forward. We may have seen a first step towards that, or the latest in a long line of false dawns.

The court ruling

On 24 August 2026, the Federal Supreme Court annulled Galmudug’s state assembly and local council election results, which had been held on 30 July. In doing so, the Court did something no Somali court had previously attempted; it enumerated, provision by provision, what the 2024 National Electoral Law requires.

A polling date fixed at least 90 days in advance, in writing. Campaigning opening 45 days before the vote and closing 48 hours before it. Voter registration completed before the process advances, a provisional roll published, the final register shared with the Interior Ministry and with parties 30 days out. Candidate lists lodged 120 working days before, the verified final list published around 100 working days out. Results declared as named winners holding named seats rather than as party totals, with returns posted from every polling station.

Three further stipulations were also laid out. The Electoral Commission cannot vary a statutory deadline by issuing a new regulation itself. Where a breach impinges the credibility or integrity of the outcome, it voids the election. And party members are competent witnesses against the electoral authority, because those closest to a process are best placed to describe it.

What the same court had already approved

Despite this welcome development, five months earlier, the same court certified Mogadishu’s district council elections. That vote was announced on 30 November for 25 December, giving 25 days’ notice, not the 90 days the court has now affirmed. Candidate lists were filed between late November and mid-December. The final list of candidates appeared on 24 December, the day before polling. No provisional or final register was published at any point; the commission released aggregate registration figures in October and nothing more. Results were declared as party vote and seat totals, and parties complained publicly that they had not been told which of their candidates had won which seats. Six days after the count, one party’s tally in Waaberi fell from 2,968 votes to 407, the difference moving to the ruling Justice and Solidarity Party, which the commission attributed to a data-entry error caught in internal verification. The court ratified the results on 28 March 2026 on the ground that no complaint had been filed within the legal period.

In May, the Court validated South West State’s assembly and council elections. That process announced polling for 28 April with 22 days’ notice, postponed the candidate application deadline to 27 April, one day before the vote was due, moved polling to 10 May, and reopened voter registration in Baidoa and Xudur for a further ten days after the point at which the law requires the register to be closed and circulated.

Three elections. One commission. One law. Different results.

Mimicry of competence is a strategy

Development scholarship has a name for institutions that adopt the outward form of effective ones without the underlying function: isomorphic mimicry. The usual reading treats it as a capability problem. Governments copy what donors recognise, but the copy underperforms because the capacity behind it was never built.

Somalia’s electoral institutions do not fit that reading, and this is the uncomfortable part. The court demonstrably possesses the capacity. It applied the law rigorously in August, and the reasoning was not borrowed or boilerplate. The commission has the operational capacity to register voters and run polls across three states in eight months. The statute is detailed enough that its breaches are identifiable to the day.

There is a more generous reading of all this, and it deserves a hearing. Legality rarely arrives all at once. Courts tend to enforce first where the political cost of enforcing is lowest, a precedent is set, litigants cite it, and the scope widens from there. On that reading, the inconsistency between March, May and August is not evidence of selective enforcement. It is a new beginning: Galmudug is where the sequence starts, and the earlier certifications belong to the period before it. We can still hope that is the case.

What has happened since

The Court has ordered the Galmudug election to be re-run at the earliest reasonable time, but attached no supervisory mechanism and ordered no observation, although the petitioner had asked for it. The commission that ran the void election will run the replacement, under the same chairman, unwatched, with no date set.

Nor has the August standard travelled backwards. Mogadishu’s 390 councillors were seated on a process that the August ruling would void. They remain in office, and nobody has proposed otherwise, not the court, not the commission, not the government’s international partners.

The stakes are not confined to state elections. According to the constitution, Parliament’s term expired in April and the President’s in May. Amendments passed in parliament in March extended both beyond their expected terms. Puntland, Jubaland and the national opposition reject the amended text. Each side now disputes the legality of the other’s authority, and there are elections looming.

Somalis turn out for votes they believe are real. The constraint has never been public appetite. It is that the machinery assembled in their name has become very good at producing the appearance of process while retaining the ability to set the process aside when it wants to.

The court has told us what a lawful election in Somalia looks like. It must now be the standard by which all future elections are held.

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The post A key court case has set a precedent for Somali democracy. Will it be enforced? first appeared on Africa at LSE.

Africa was largely absent from the first Race to the Moon. But it has an opportunity to help shape the next one, and that race is already underway.

In April, NASA’s Artemis II carried Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen around the Moon, the first humans in more than 50 years to travel so far from Earth.

US companies are landing spacecraft on the Moon, while NASA works with industry to return astronauts to the surface and support its emerging Moon Base initiative.

China intends to land astronauts on the Moon before 2030 and is working with international partners toward an International Lunar Research Station.

This is not our parents’ or grandparents’ race to plant a flag, collect Moon rocks, and come home. This time, the objective is for a prolonged stay.

That makes places such as Shackleton Crater strategically important. Located almost directly at the lunar south pole, its interior remains permanently shadowed and may contain water ice. Water could support astronauts, produce oxygen and potentially be converted into rocket propellant. Whoever develops reliable access to these resources could gain an important advantage in the emerging lunar economy.

The Moon’s economy offers both immediate and long-term benefits. Helium-3, a rare isotope deposited in lunar soil by the solar wind, could support advanced fusion energy. However, the more immediate opportunity back on Earth lies in building and operating the necessary infrastructure, including landers, cargo services, power systems, communications networks, navigation, robotics and scientific instruments. Science conducted in space has already produced benefits on Earth, from improved medical imaging, water purification, and communications to better weather forecasting, disaster monitoring and agricultural planning. Experiments in microgravity have also advanced our understanding of human health, materials, and biological processes in ways that are difficult to replicate on the ground.

And this time, Africa has an opportunity to help shape it.

African technology is going to the Moon

Africa2Moon is an African-designed and built low-frequency radio astronomy experiment selected for China’s Chang’e 8 mission, currently planned for 2029.

It will use three small antennas known as Bounced African Low Lunar Spheres, or BALLS, operating together as a radio telescope. This scientific instrument listens for cosmic radio waves below about 20 MHz, a largely unexplored band blocked or distorted by Earth’s ionosphere.

The longer-term ambition is a much larger array of 55 antennas on the lunar far side, one associated with each African Union member state. The number has symbolism but also scientific value. A larger, more widely distributed array will collect fainter signals, distinguish their direction more precisely and produce sharper maps of the low frequency radio sky. The far side can offer a rare window into the early Universe as well as solar and planetary activity.

Africa2Moon is not the continent’s only contribution to lunar exploration. The Egyptian Space Agency has partnered with Bahrain to develop a hyperspectral camera for China’s Chang’e 7 mission, which will identify materials on the lunar surface and study the Moon’s south polar environment.

US lunar ambitions

The United States is pursuing a very different model from Apollo. NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services programme increasingly relies on private companies to deliver science and technology to the Moon.

Intuitive Machines reached the lunar surface in 2024. Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost followed with a successful commercial landing in 2025. Astrobotic and Blue Origin are developing additional lunar vehicles, while NASA is working with SpaceX and Blue Origin on future human landings.

The result is an emerging ecosystem of landers, rovers, communications providers, universities and thousands of specialist suppliers.

The new Moon race is becoming an infrastructure race. Like the smartphone in your pocket, a lunar base will depend on power, communications, navigation and data networks, but on the Moon, almost everything must be built from scratch.

Communications will be the Moon’s invisible lifeline. Astronauts, spacesuits, rovers, landers and scientific instruments must be able to “talk” to one another, to spacecraft overhead and to mission control on Earth. On the Moon, losing signal will be far more serious than losing WiFi at home.

Before astronauts can live on the Moon, they will need a reliable lunar communication network, and someone must build it.

This creates opportunities for African universities and companies in scientific instruments, AI, autonomous systems, software, communications and ground infrastructure.

African countries do not need to replicate every part of a lunar programme. They can create greater value by developing specialised capabilities that the wider lunar ecosystem needs.

Sovereignty in the new space age

The countries and companies that create value, African or otherwise, will have greater influence over partnerships and a stronger voice in shaping the future beyond Earth.

The US led Artemis Accords promote principles including peaceful exploration, transparency, interoperability, emergency assistance, scientific data sharing and coordination of activities. What began with eight countries in 2020 now has over 70 signatories.

Africa is increasingly represented in the Artemis framework. Nigeria and Rwanda joined in 2022, Angola in 2023 and Senegal in 2025. Morocco, Botswana and Mauritius followed in 2026, bringing African participation to seven countries.

Africa2Moon, meanwhile, is expected to travel aboard a Chinese spacecraft, a reminder that African space programmes are operating within a growing strategic competition between Washington and Beijing.

Although countries may cooperate with multiple partners, decisions involving technology, security, data, resources and technical standards carry long term consequences. The competition over Shackleton Crater and the wider lunar south pole illustrates why. The question is increasingly not simply who reaches the Moon, but who builds the infrastructure, establishes the standards and develops the capabilities that allow people to remain there.

Against this backdrop, African universities, space agencies and companies must identify the problems they are best positioned to solve, from ground station coverage and scientific research to communications, data analysis, component manufacturing and workforce development. By creating genuine value, they can strengthen their capabilities, attract more meaningful partnerships and secure a lasting place in the emerging lunar economy.

Many of the engineers and entrepreneurs who will shape Africa’s place in that economy are sitting in African classrooms today.

For a young student, looking up at the Moon and knowing that African built technology is operating there could transform what feels possible. It is more than inspiration. It is belief.

Africa was largely absent from the first race to the Moon. It should not watch the next one from the sidelines. This time, it has an opportunity to help build what comes next.

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African universities train postgraduate students to identify research gaps, generate knowledge, and defend their findings. But one question is too rarely asked of postgraduate research: what can society or the market do with this knowledge?

A Master’s dissertation or doctoral thesis is expected to contribute to knowledge. That principle should remain central to postgraduate education. But in Africa, that goal should increasingly be accompanied by another question: what value can be created from that knowledge?

The economic context makes this urgent. According to the World Bank, 10 to 12 million young Africans enter the labour market each year, but only three million formal jobs are currently created annually. Universities cannot close this gap alone, but they can ask whether their postgraduate education is sufficiently aligned with the challenge.

Academic careers remain important, but universities cannot absorb every highly qualified graduate. South Africa’s national tracer study of doctoral graduates found that PhD holders were generally highly employable, but also identified limited academic posts and difficulties among some recent graduates in finding work aligned with their expertise.

Africa’s most highly trained people should only be competing for existing positions. Some should be equipped to create new ones.

A researcher who spends several years understanding a difficult problem may possess an algorithm, process, intervention, dataset, framework, technology, or specialised methodology with economic value. Yet postgraduate training rarely involves a serious assessment of that commercial potential. That is a missed opportunity.

Invest in entrepreneurship and research

Africa is not short of entrepreneurship and innovation initiatives. The African Development Bank’s Jobs for Youth in Africa Strategy set out to support the creation of 25 million jobs and equip 50 million young Africans with relevant skills. The Tony Elumelu Foundation has invested more than £76 million in direct funding to African entrepreneurs. The African Union’s Science, Technology and Innovation Strategy for Africa 2034 calls for stronger links between government, academia, and industry, as well as entrepreneurship training for scientists and stronger innovation ecosystems. The policy ambition exists. The problem is partly one of sequencing.

Much of Africa’s entrepreneurship infrastructure meets researchers after the research has been completed. Incubation, venture building, intellectual-property strategy, customer discovery, and market validation often arrive after graduation, or only when an unusually entrepreneurial researcher approaches a technology-transfer office.

By then, a potentially patentable result may already have been disclosed. The researcher may have moved on. The supervision relationship may have ended. Commercial thinking has entered too late.

The World Intellectual Property Organization describes research commercialisation as the process through which knowledge, discoveries and inventions are converted into economically valuable products and services. This should form part of postgraduate reflection itself, not begin only after graduation.

Commercialisation as research process

Master’s and doctoral candidates should be required to assess the commercial or translational potential of their research before completing their degree. What in this research, if anything, would someone be willing to pay for, fund, or adopt?

The question also needs to be broader than private-sector sales. A government may procure a solution. A hospital may adopt a clinical method. A development organisation may fund deployment.

A commercialisation section should examine potential customers, intellectual-property status, competing alternatives, route to market, regulatory considerations and possible business model.

This does not mean forcing every graduate to become an entrepreneur. Some research has no immediate commercial application, and fundamental research may create value over decades. A rigorous assessment should be allowed to conclude that commercialisation is premature or inappropriate.

The objective is not to make every thesis a startup. It is to ensure that every postgraduate researcher can recognise when research could become one.

Commercialisation requires changing the defence

Adding a commercialisation section will achieve little if it becomes another box to tick.

Where research has significant translational potential, universities should involve an appropriate industry practitioner in the final assessment process.

Academic examiners should remain responsible for methodology, originality, theory, and scholarly quality. Commercial experts should interrogate a different set of claims: Does a market or adopting institution exist? Is there an identifiable customer? What would it cost to move from research prototype to deployment?

Universities could recognise particularly strong projects as High Commercialisation Potential, Outstanding Applied Research, or High Societal Translation Potential, with promising projects moving directly into programmes to support their growth.

The defence would then become not only the end of a research journey, but for some candidates the beginning of a venture.

Postgraduate education should include value creation

Universities must remain places where questions can be investigated even when there is no immediate customer.

But this should not prevent us from asking whether postgraduate education is doing enough with discoveries that do have practical and commercial potential.

It is still possible for a student to spend several years becoming one of the world’s most knowledgeable people on a particular problem and graduate without ever being formally required to ask who outside academia needs the solution.

The objective is not to replace scholarship with entrepreneurship. It is to connect knowledge creation to value creation.

With millions of young people entering African labour markets each year, postgraduate researchers should not be trained only to ask: Where can my qualification get me employed? Some must also be able to ask: What can I build because of what I now know?

For some, the answer will be a patent. For others, a company, licence, social enterprise or new service. For some, the honest answer will be that commercialisation is not appropriate.

All are acceptable answers. But we should ask the question. After all, isn’t that what academics are good at?

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In contemporary Africa, Indigenous Knowledge Systems are increasingly being recognised as vital structures for conflict resolution, community governance, and social cohesion. In Zimbabwe, traditional institutions preside over marriage, inheritance, and communal disputes. These culturally rooted methods have endured for generations. But a critical paradox remains largely overlooked: women, who preserve, transmit and sustain these systems, are continually excluded from forums where this knowledge is applied and decisions are made.

Women perform the majority of the everyday work that maintains peace within communities, as mothers, mediators, caregivers, aunts (madzitete), spirit mediums, and custodians of oral tradition. They convey cultural values and practices, and in most cases prevent disputes from escalating by facilitating the reconciliation process before disputes reach formal traditional courts. These contributions are not marginal; they are the anchor for communal stability and social cohesion.

Ironically, the same women are largely absent from formal indigenous decision-making spaces. If indigenous conflict resolution is to remain relevant, it must recognise women not just as custodians of customs, but as legitimate sources of knowledge and decision-makers.

Repeated patterns of exclusion

In Zimbabwe, women are central to the production, preservation and everyday practice of indigenous knowledge, yet their authority is often diminished when it enters formal decision-making forums. Women are recognised as custodians of cultural practice and preservation, while being denied equal recognition as authorities on culture. This results in continued marginalisation in community-led justice systems, despite their vital knowledge.

For years, arguments on indigenous governance have framed culture or traditional practices and gender equality as mutually exclusive and customary institutions are described as inherently patriarchal. These practices have been defended as untouchable and unchangeable entities of African identity and must be preserved as such.

In Domboshava, just outside of Harare, traditional court proceedings (dare) remain overwhelmingly dominated by men. Women attend court normally to conduct supportive and ceremonial roles rather than participate in formal deliberations. Cultural roles require women and girls to communicate through male representatives, while outspoken women risk ridicule and being labelled as disrespectful or culturally inappropriate. In this case, women are physically present during traditional court proceedings but rarely possess equal authority to influence outcomes and decisions. Thus, their inclusion becomes symbolic. However, what is paramount is that these views overlook a more apparent reality: that indigenous knowledge systems are dynamic, and they evolve in response to changing social dynamics.  

Why does it matter?

Women’s substantive participation would strengthen the traditional conflict justice systems by bringing diverse knowledge from their everyday roles in mediation, family reconciliation, caregiving roles and community peacebuilding into formal courts. Marginalised groups hold invaluable insights because of their social standing; without their insights, we risk reproducing the inequalities that inclusive peacebuilding seeks to address. Black African women’s experiences cannot be confined to gender; their lives are shaped by colonial legacy, spirituality, kinship, community responsibilities and indigenous cultural expectations. Acknowledging these intersecting factors gives a more nuanced appreciation of how indigenous governance processes operate and exclude women and girls. This would reflect the experiences of people at the centre of social cohesion at household and community levels

Interacting with indigenous conflict resolution systems from this diverse perspective shows that women and girls’ marginalisation goes beyond gender equality debates. It is a form of epistemic injustice, which is a systematic failure to acknowledge their contributions and knowledge as legitimate. Women possess expansive real experience within mediation, restorative justice, familial reconciliation and social cohesion, yet this knowledge is often secondary in formal indigenous conflict resolution structures. Women and girls must participate not only as custodians of cultural practices, but as legitimate actors in decision-making, for indigenous governance to contribute meaningfully to the fulfilment of inclusive sustainable goals.

Beyond Zimbabwe

Many African societies, governments and development agencies are increasingly turning towards indigenous practices to strengthen conflict resolution, conflict prevention, and local governance. International frameworks such as the Sustainable Development Goals call for inclusive societies that leave no one behind and promote women’s participation in decision-making processes. However, these goals cannot be achieved if indigenous governance institutions continue to value women’s domestic contributions while stifling their voices in governance matters.

Indigenous practices should not be abandoned but strengthened through the inclusion of substantive participation by women.

Indigenous knowledge systems still bolster local legitimacy and remain culturally sensitive, accessible and meaningful alternatives to the formal justice apparatus.

The role of women as custodians, mediators, and community peacekeepers should be formally recognised to guard against the invisibility of their contributions. Traditional conflict resolution structures could establish advisory councils of experienced women to ensure that perspectives on family conflicts, domestic disputes, and community reconciliation are formally considered before decisions are made. Of equal importance is investing in younger generations. This can be achieved through teaching young girls conflict resolution practices as future leaders. Finally, dialogue with traditional leaders is paramount to strengthen gender inclusion while preserving cultural institutions.

The debate should move beyond the question of whether indigenous knowledge systems are compatible with gender equality, to whether they can achieve their purpose while excluding many people who already sustain them. The main theme emerging from Domboshava is clear; indigenous knowledge systems offer valuable pathways for community-based peacebuilding. But their legitimacy rests upon recognising women and girls as central to preserving them. Women’s knowledge and roles should no longer be regarded as secondary; they are essential, without which culturally grounded peace cannot be achieved.

This research was funded by the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa and the Mastercard Foundation, as part of a study on decolonising conflict resolution mechanisms in Zimbabwe’s indigenous knowledge systems.

The image for this article was generated by AI

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