Reframing Africans as Subjects and Agents in Development: Lessons from the Ahaki Fellowship
By Kabazzi Maurice, a past fellow of the Ahaki Fellowship programme.
Development discourse has long positioned Africans as recipients rather than architects of their own progress. My experience as an Ahaki fellow from Uganda challenged this narrative and revealed how regionalism, when properly leveraged, can center African agency in meaningful socio-economic transformation.
Beyond Economic Determinism
Institutional economics teaches us that inclusive political and economic institutions drive growth. While this framework has merit, it often reduces development to economic metrics alone, sidelining the social institutions that determine quality of life. As I argue in “Reimagining Regionalism in SRHR: The Case of EAC and SADC,” African regional integration has prioritized economic institutions and politics at the expense of social progress—a trade-off that ultimately undermines holistic development.
This narrow focus manifests in how Regional Economic Communities (RECs) design their mandates. While tasked with building regional value chains for economic prosperity, these bodies have neglected their parallel duty to advance social development. True regional integration must facilitate African mobility for trade, yes, but equally for education, healthcare, and cultural exchange. Economic growth that comes at the expense of social welfare is not development—it is extraction by another name.
The Imperative of African-Led Solutions
The Ahaki Fellowship crystallized a critical insight: Africa will not achieve self-sufficiency through externally imposed frameworks. Development must be studied, designed, and implemented by Africans for Africans. This requires three fundamental shifts:
First, decolonizing methodologies. We must abandon colonial-era systems and outdated legal structures that were never designed to serve African populations. The African Union’s development indices still overemphasize economic prosperity while marginalizing social well-being and community cohesion. This reflects the persistence of external paradigms that measure what donors value rather than what citizens need.
Second, investing in African research capacity. Continental solutions require continental knowledge production. African civil society actors and regional institutions must prioritize research that emerges from African contexts, addresses African challenges, and centers African voices. The study of Africa cannot remain an extractive enterprise dominated by external actors.
Third, reimagining governance accountability. African states must take responsibility not just for economic indicators but for the socio-economic rights of their citizens. This means dismantling extractive political institutions and building structures that ensure equitable resource distribution and genuine public participation.
Regionalism as a Vehicle for Social Progress
Regional collaboration offers a powerful mechanism for addressing challenges no single nation can solve alone. However, RECs must deliberately harness policy frameworks that prioritize social progress alongside economic integration. This means:
- Enabling cross-border access to education and healthcare services
- Harmonizing social protection systems to safeguard vulnerable populations
- Creating regional research networks that address shared health, education, and governance challenges
- Ensuring that regional value chains create decent work and protect workers’ rights
Civil society actors play an equally critical role. By reframing policy research and program design, we can position Africans as subjects with agency rather than objects acted upon. This is not merely semantic—it fundamentally changes who holds power in defining problems and designing solutions.
From Fellowship to Framework
The Ahaki Fellowship equipped me with more than technical skills; it provided a framework for understanding development as inherently political. It demonstrated that social progress cannot be an afterthought to economic planning but must be integrated from the outset. It showed that regional cooperation, when grounded in solidarity rather than competition, can amplify African agency.
For Africans to be genuine agents of their own development, we need states willing to be held accountable, regional institutions that balance economic and social mandates, and civil society actors who refuse to replicate extractive paradigms. We need research agendas set by Africans, resources controlled by Africans, and success measured by standards that reflect African values and priorities.
The path forward requires abandoning what does not serve us—colonial legacies, extractive institutions, development metrics divorced from lived reality. It requires building what we need—inclusive governance, robust social institutions, regional solidarity, and African-centered knowledge production.
Development is not something done to Africa. It is something Africans must claim, shape, and lead.
Acknowledgement
Conceptualisation and Writing: Maurice Kabazzi | Review and Editing: Fatina Mwebe
