Why Africa must define its own future

Added: 2026-05-16

[00:00:00]Imagine sitting in a room at Future Africa on the campus of the University of Pritoria. A senior South African scholar, climate scientist, IPCC veteran, decades of international experience is on the panel. She pauses and tells the room something that really catches everyone off guard. She says she used to be petrified to speak in places like this, always petrified. And then she says, and I'm paraphrasing only slightly, honestly, we don't have time.

[00:00:26]And quite frankly, I don't really care anymore. we have to move. That moment, that mix of urgency and exhaustion captured something I've been hearing again and again at recent gatherings on the African continent. There's a shift happening in how African scholars, civil society leaders, and policy makers are talking about development. Not when they're addressing donors, not when they're at COP, when they are talking to each other.

[00:00:55]You are listening to In Pursuit of Development with Dan Banick.

[00:01:07]Over the past few weeks, I've had the privilege of attending several roundts in Ptoria, Adisaba and most recently a gathering in Blantire in southern Malawi that brought together politicians, administrators, civil society leaders, agricultural extension workers, NGO directors, and university scholars. And on a separate visit to Maitius, my interactions focused on artificial intelligence and its potential to promote human development. A thread that ran through every one of the other gatherings as well. The conversations were wide-ranging. Energy sovereignity, land reform, aid cuts, AI, climate finance, critical minerals, constituency development funds, the role of universities. But underneath every discussion, the same set of questions kept surfacing in different accents and disciplines. Who defines development?

[00:01:59]Whose knowledge counts? And what does African agency actually look like in practice in 2026?

[00:02:06]Today, I want to share what I heard as a set of threads I think we should be all paying close attention to.

[00:02:20]Let me start with the room in Alisaba.

[00:02:22]The first thing many participants wanted to talk about was the geopolitical moment we're living in. The dramatic cuts to American development aid, the shock to the humanitarian system, the retreat of multilateralism, the redirection of European budgets towards defense and toward Ukraine. This was rarely framed as a catastrophe. One Ethiopian participant called the disruption a blessing in disguise.

[00:02:46]Another said the country had been living, in his words, in warm water, comfortable enough not to notice the temperature and was now being forced to confront reality. A third put it rather bluntly. This is a wake-up call. I heard the same instinct echoed in Blandire, where the stakes are even sharper.

[00:03:05]Nearly 40% of Malawi's national budget has historically been funded by development partners. Malawi owes the IMF something on the order of several hundred million. And as one civil society leader pointed out fairly grimly, there's no plausible way that debt is going to be repaid through current revenue. So when participants in Blant talked about the future of aid, the talk was full of teeth. One NGO director put it this way, the future is bright, but to when and by whom that is the problem. We had vision 2020, now we have vision 2063. He was almost laughing as he said it. Vision 2063 is a very convenient deadline because most of the people making the promises won't be alive to be held to them. Another participant offered the line of the morning. He said, "If we don't do away with aid, then aid will do away with us." Meaning, if we don't take the lead in shaping what comes next, the collapse of the old model will simply consume us.

[00:04:03]That morning, as it happened, the front page of the nation in Malawi carried the headline, "Malawi EU shift focus from aid to production." Whether that headline turns out to mean anything substantive remains to be seen, but it is one more sign that the conversation is moving. But not everyone was sanguin.

[00:04:22]In Addisaba, one scholar pushed back hard. I'm not sure, he said. We can describe the collapse of the international order as an opportunity.

[00:04:30]How exactly can we benefit from a world in which there is no order and might makes right? That tension opportunity versus disorientation ran through every gathering. And I think it's the right tension to start with. The most useful frame I heard came from a participant Inadis who reached for Antonio Gshi.

[00:04:49]We're living through an interregnum. He said a period where the old order is no longer functioning but the new order has not yet emerged. The post 1945 system, he argued, was never truly rulebased. It was powerbased. The rules reflected the preferences of the victors of the Second World War. And now that hegemony is genuinely cracking, but nothing has yet replaced it. One of the younger Ethiopian participants gave us the line I had not been able to forget. She said the crossroads may be the best road precisely because it opens up multiple directions. Everything else in this episode is in some way about what we choose to do at that crossroads.

[00:05:40]Let me move to Ptoria because the question of African agency runs deeper than aid budgets. It runs into how knowledge is produced, who gets cited and who feels entitled to speak. The opening panelist in Ptoria, that climate scientist I mentioned at the start, made a striking observation. African scholars, she said, are not actually marginalized in the international conversation anymore. They are in the room. The problem, she said, is more troubling. They're in the room and they don't speak because they aren't sure they have anything powerful to say. She quoted the geographer Farhana Sultana who asks a simple question. Have you cited a black woman today? Because the answer, Sultana argues, changes the discourse. This wasn't a generic decolonization speech. It was specific.

[00:06:28]The panelist named the buzzwords she's trying to retire from her own vocabulary. End users. Because, as she put it, we're not endusers, we are all users. Resilience. Because the language of resilience too often turns structural neglect into a virtue. She referenced Maria Kika, the urban political ecologist at Amsterdam who wrote a paper called do not call me resilient again.

[00:06:56]After Hurricane Katrina, a New Orleans bureaucrat stood up and said exactly that. Do not call me resilient again. We are conditioned to be in this place where we need so-called resilience only.

[00:07:08]Kaiika's argument and our panelists is that the language of resilience can paper over the failure to do anything about the causes that created vulnerability in the first place. And here's another line from the historian Depeesh Chakrabarti. We cannot sacrifice equity on the altar of integration. The point being that the rush to be transdisciplinary, the rush to bring everyone into the room can become a way of looking inclusive while flattening the asymmetries that actually matter. I heard the same complaint in a different idiom in Blandire. A district commissioner, a former student of mine, pointed out almost ruthully that the corrupt civil servants and politicians failing the country are not strangers.

[00:07:52]They are products of the same Malawian universities sitting around the table.

[00:07:57]These are the graduates. He said you are all graduates. If the higher education system is producing the people who then fail the country, what does that say about the system? It reminded me of a doctoral researcher in Ptoria who told us about going to a major South African energy conference where the minister stood up and said, and I'm quoting, we're doing something we've never done before. We are listening. And then she said the minister walked out and the students sat there talking to each other listening as a performance, voice as a budget line, the structures of inclusion without their substance. So what does it mean for African knowledge to count? It certainly means citing African scholars, yes. But it also means acting as if your own analysis is sufficient. It means noticing when you've internalized a hierarchy that nobody is even enforcing anymore. And it means a serious reckoning with what universities themselves are actually producing.

[00:09:04]The most concrete area where these abstract questions came down to earth is the energy transition. Both Ptoria and Adis spent significant time on what people are calling the just energy transition and the critique was sharp. A Tanzanian colleague who works on green investment opened with what I think is the right premise. He said we don't need to debate whether Africa needs energy sovereignity. That question is settled.

[00:09:28]What we need to debate is how. His larger point was that even the so-called green economy is too often business as usual wrapped in new language. Solar farms displace communities. Wind projects externalize costs. Critical minerals get extracted from the Eastern DRC and turn into electric cars in Berlin. And the value chain remains controlled externally. He proposed a useful test for any green investment. He calls it buying in versus buying out. If the project displaces communities, it's buying them out. If communities own a share, earn rent, and retain their land, it's buying them in. Mobile phone companies in Tanzania, he pointed out, have figured this out. People host towers on their property and earn a small income. There's no reason solar can't work the same way. His point connects to something a Zimbabwean participant said in Ptoria. When she asked residents what mattered most to them about the energy transition, the answer wasn't environmental sustainability. It was energy security.

[00:10:32]People want the lights to come on. They want hospitals that work. And from the South African side, an energy economist on the panel pointed out that around 90% of South Africa's coal sector is concentrated in one province, Mu Malanga. If you decarbonize without a serious plan for the people who live there, you've simply replicated the old extractive logic with a green coat of paint. So when African voices push back against being told to decarbonize at the same speed as Norway, this isn't climate denialism. It's a serious critique of an unjust transition. A Malawian colleague of mine, Bonifac Dalani, who's the director of research for Afroarometer, drew the comparison most starkly. Less than 20% of Malawian households are connected to the electricity grid. Among those that are, the supply isn't reliable. So when some recommend electric vehicles in Africa, the obvious question is charged with what? He's not against renewable energy. He's against being asked to perform a transition that wealthy countries themselves have not completed. And the afrobarometer data here is interesting. More than 3/4 of Africans surveyed say wealthy nations should bear more of the cost of climate action, but around 1 in five say ordinary citizens themselves should take primary responsibility. This is not a continent that wants to be passive. It wants the burden distributed honestly.

[00:12:10]In Alisaba, one session focused on what people there called homegrown solutions.

[00:12:16]And one participant actually asked the right question. What is home? He said, which place, which issue are we calling home? What is the boundary? It's really an excellent question because the word does so much work. National, regional, continental, village level, local. The same panel offered a concrete example.

[00:12:36]The Simeon Mountains National Park in northern Ethiopia has had decades of conflict between local communities and conservation authorities. International donors have spent serious money on the problem. But this past year, the breakthrough came when communities themselves used their own customs and cultural practices to declare the area protected. They did it without any external cost. There were, the panelist told us, no major incidents. But Blantire showed us in much harder light what the trouble with homegrown is. Take the affordable inputs program, Malawi's flagship fertilizer subsidy. 20 years billions of quattra focused almost exclusively on maze. As one participant pointed out, the government through this subsidy is making Malavians continue to choose maize as the staple food.

[00:13:27]Communities in northern Malawi, for example, traditionally eat cassava. And the legumes that would have done much more for food and nutritional security and farmer income, ground nuts, soybeans, pigeon peas, have never received the same support. Or take the constituency development fund. 5 billion quatcher is now being decentralized to the constituency level. A real and important transfer of power. But participants in the room described the unintended consequences. One constituency proposed 300 small projects. Another proposed using the money to build chief's houses. The decentralization is real. The mindset shift to match it is not there yet. And then there's localization itself which is meant to be the answer. Malawi has an NGO regulatory authority pushing international NOS's to channel funding through local organizations.

[00:14:22]So what do international NOS's do? They often rebrand according to some. One participant told us that a specific international organization simply registered itself under a new local name. Yes, same organization, new name, now technically a Malawian local NGO eligible for the localization stream.

[00:14:42]That's not even the most striking part.

[00:14:45]The most striking part is the capacity building merrygoround. Donors often say local NOS's lack capacity, but they apparently do not wish to fund the capacity itself. They demand specific policy documents, child safeguarding policies, monitoring and evaluation policies and the names of those required documents change just often enough that small local organizations can never quite be ready. And then having declared local organizations to lack capacity, the international NOS's hire their staff from those very local organizations.

[00:15:22]So who actually has the capacity? It's the same people. They just work in different buildings. I tried in my closing remarks in Blantire to push back on the entire vocabulary of capacity building. I've been in this business a long time and I still don't know what it really means. We always seem to be talking about A building B's capacity in relation to C, never in relation to A itself. The donor will tell you to be more demanding of your own government.

[00:15:52]They will not tell you to be more demanding of the donor. Compare that with Paul Kagami in Rwanda who directs his donors. Japan, you do education.

[00:16:01]China, you do infrastructure. Norway, you give money. Take it or leave it.

[00:16:05]Malawi, by contrast, too often says yes to everything. I wish Malawi would say no thank you more often. That is what saying no thank you sounds like. A country that knows what it wants.

[00:16:24]Let me turn to one more thread because it ran through every conversation I've had this year and it was one of the focus areas of interactions I had in Maitius where we are in discussions to establish a center of excellence on sustainability at the University of Maicius. Almost every African government is now writing an AI strategy. Ethiopia has launched an AI university. The African Union has a draft framework.

[00:16:48]Maitius like many small island states is asking how it can possibly hold its own against companies whose budgets are larger than its national GDP. My answer which I gave in Maitius and which I'll repeat here is that small states should not try to out compute Google, Microsoft or Open AI. The strategy has to be asymmetric. The most valuable AI work for places like Maitius or for that matter Malawi or Tanzania is not training a frontier model. is the application layer. Fine-tuning existing models for problems the country understands best. Multilingual education in Creole, French and English. Climate adaptation for a small island, the ocean economy, bilingual public administration. That is where competitive advantage and local sovereignity actually lie. There's also a somewhat simple lever which is procurement. Government and paristatals buy a lot of digital services.

[00:17:46]Contractual requirements on data localization, audit rights, exit clauses and explanability give a small state real leverage over very large vendors.

[00:17:56]Provided those clauses are actually written, defended and enforced. What I find most encouraging is that the catching up case is no longer aspirational. It is already happening.

[00:18:08]CAD for TB triages tuberculosis from a chest X-ray in about 5 seconds in remote settings without internet or a radiologist. Ruby Health screens for anemia from a smartphone photo of a fingernail. Farmers Darly in Ghana gives small holder farmers crop disease detection and weather updates in their own language over WhatsApp. None of these tools trains its own foundation model. What unites them is fit. They meet people where they actually are. On a basic phone, in a clinic without specialists, in a classroom without enough teachers. But here is a harder side. The same technology that can help detect TB can also normalize mass surveillance, predictive policing, realtime facial recognition, social scoring. These can shrink civic space long before they used to make any specific arrest. Deep fake audio and video have already been used to impersonate political leaders in elections. Large language models combined with personality inference can now generate politically tailored messages at scale with no human in the loop. There's also bias which is not primarily a technical problem. AI systems reproduce bias because they are trained on data drawn from societies that are themselves unequal and because their development teams remain overwhelmingly Euroamerican.

[00:19:35]A facial recognition system never benchmarked on dark skin tones fails dark-kinned users. A translation tool that ignores maian creole will not serve Maician citizens. The right kind of audit looks not at average accuracy but at performance. across subgroups because that is where bias hides. So my own view in one sentence, AI will widen the gap between rich and poor countries by default and narrow it by design. The deciding variables, public investment in skills and connectivity, smart procurement, regional cooperation, a willingness to set rules rather than only follow them are within reach of every government in the rooms I've described. The risk is not that the global south will be dependent on AI in some abstract sense. The risk is that countries will accept terms of dependency they could have negotiated harder.

[00:20:39]So what do I take from these four gatherings? When I tried to summarize the Blantar conversation at the end, I offered five threads and I'll repeat them here because I think they travel beyond Malawi. The first is the gap between idealism and self-interest.

[00:20:53]We're still looking for leaders, donors, NOS's, scholars who not just trying to milk the system. Almost everyone on every side is now operating with vested interests in the language of altruism.

[00:21:05]We have to call out the hypocrisy, including our own. The second is evidence-based policy and the absence of it. We heard it in Ptoria, in Addis, in Blantire. Decisions get made on ethnic, regional, factional or personal grounds.

[00:21:18]And then evidence is wheeled out to justify what was already decided. The trust between universities and government in every country represented in those rooms is weaker than it should be. The third is talking past each other. The minister who walks out of his own listening session. The morning headline that says shift from aid to production without any real detail on how. The fourth is the buzzword problem.

[00:21:44]Resilience, end users, capacity building, localization.

[00:21:48]These words travel well across institutions precisely because they have stopped meaning anything in particular.

[00:21:54]Retiring them or filling them with substance is part of what reclaiming agency means. And the fifth, the one that ties everything together is bargaining power. Saying no thank you requires having somewhere else to stand.

[00:22:08]It requires alliances within Africa, stronger continental and regional institutions, diaspora networks, south south cooperation, and eventually actually mobilizing the resources within. As one Blantire participant put it, we're not in a social contract with our government to source aid. We are in a social contract for them to deliver services. It is our taxes funding it.

[00:22:34]That sentence reframes the whole question. I want to end with one more line because it is the thing I keep coming back to. Good intentions do not always lead to good outcomes. The development industry is full of good intentions. So is African leadership. So am I when I sit on these panels. Good intentions are not the test. The test in the end is what citizens want. And across all four of these rooms, what citizens want eventually came down to the same thing. Decent jobs, reliable electricity, a clinic that works, a school that teaches their children something useful, a government that does not require a bribe, whatever else development means. And I have a working definition I tend to use that development is the purposeful movement of societies towards more livable life conditions. Whatever else it means, it has to deliver that. The crossroads may indeed be the best road, but only if Africans choose the direction and only if the direction actually leads somewhere worth arriving at. That is it for this episode. Thank you to everyone in Ptoria, Adisaba, Blanta, and Maitius whose words and questions shaped this.

[00:23:45]The senior scholars who pushed back on resilience, the Tanzanian voice for buying in rather than buying out. the Malawian district commissioners and NGO leaders who were unsparingly honest in a room full of strangers. The doctoral students who refused to be polite about being talked over and the Maitian colleagues who pressed me hard on AI.

[00:24:07]I'm Dan Banick and you've been listening to In Pursuit of Development.

[00:24:18]Thank you for listening to In Pursuit of Development with Professor Dan Banick from the University of Oslo. Please email your questions, comments, and suggestions to in pursuit of [email protected].