A Specter of Change: Why the Africa Policy and Futures Forum?

In the last two years, Africa has had a headwind of crises. From the #EndSARS protests in Nigeria to conflicts in Cameroon, protests in South Africa to the increasing rise in coups (Guinea, Sudan) as a result of state capture, the continent has been in pandemonium. Old conflicts of inequality, corruption, and the decline of public morality are now surfacing more broadly due to the pandemic — creating an epiphany for social change. This wave of change and transformation in our national debates and new youth movements is inevitable and necessary in our intervention of creating decentralized conversations on the state of Africa and the role of young people in driving social change. This is a unique time in Africa’s history, and the specter of change in the social and political structures is cataclysmic, making the struggles and optimism of this generation a catalyst for creating prosperity for millions of people across the continent.

It’s a time of hope.

More importantly, recent events have taught us that young people are tired of the political elites, tired of unemployment, tired of political instability, tired of social regression, and they want radical social change. Now!

But even amid the hope, the optimism, and the euphoria for change, there will continue to be deepening economic growth, social unrest, and oscillating political instability until there are strategic and decisive actions from both governments and citizens to confront Africa’s problems through grassroots and place-based solutions. This change will not ensue by happenstance but through deliberate effort and short and long-term development planning.

If anything, the pandemic has taught us that Africa, despite the history of the last fifty years, hasn’t made as much progress to solve its own problems. Globally, it is marginalized and crippled by its history of dependency. This is evident by its marginalization in the global distribution of COVID-19 vaccines and the emergence of phrases like ‘vaccine nationalism’ to justify its inadequacy in the development of science and technology. In spite of being the richest continent in natural resources, Africans are poor. The continent is at a significant impasse. And it has been so since independence with civil wars, conflicts, military coups, and tribal upheavals as a result of political marginalization, dictatorship, mass corruption, and focus on economic growth without democratization.

As these issues continue to persist, we need new models and conceptual frameworks of development. A process that considers particular contexts and non-ideological approaches aimed at alleviating poverty, increasing access to education, and empowering Africans with opportunities. This will require making ordinary citizens direct participants in political and economic decisions through decentralization and empowering those at the periphery to engage in the political process actively. We also need governments to answer to the needs of their people by directly engaging in national stakeholders’ dialogues and bridging the gaps between policymakers and ordinary citizens.

This is why we’ve founded the Africa Policy and Futures Forum; a new-generation think tank that facilitates critical, evidence-based, and non-ideological dialogues on the state of Africa. We want to do so by conducting conversations on Africa’s grand challenges, examining their complexes, and finding ways to tackle them more sustainably and efficiently.

We aspire to fill in the historic gap between and among African policymakers, academics, and ordinary citizens through more decentralized and open dialogues. The Africa Policy and Futures Forum is a product of months, cumulatively years of thinking, re-thinking, working, and re-working and consolidating ideas on contemporary African challenges and ultimately solutions. Solutions that are contextual, place-based, evidence-based, community-driven, built from the grassroots. When we think about Africa, we think about young people playing a pivotal role in nation-building and collective conversations about the state of affairs of countries within the region that’s centrally decentralized and tailored toward building a network of future policy wonks and academics to work together in dialogues that are healthy and contextual in defining the problems first and foremost without extrapolation.

We believe that more than any time in African history, the conversations for nation-building are shifting not just to decolonize African institutions but also concrete steps necessary for creating economic prosperity, strengthening the social safety net, increasing social mobility, jobs creation, and leveraging new tools of development to address Africa’s biggest challenges. However, these discussions are often initiated in the west or by policymakers who ignore local contexts or the voices of the most affected.

To address this, we want to create the space for policymakers, academics, ordinary citizens, and stakeholders from across different spectrums on the continent to freely exchange ideas across two significant facets:

The Fate of Africa Forum

The Fate of Africa Forum creates the marketplace for the exchange of ideas among stakeholders of Africa on contemporary issues that affect the continent. Conversations range from development, philosophical debates, socio-economic debates, where we are, and a new vision for the future.

Journal of African Challenges

The journal is a bimonthly publication that features critical research papers on Africa’s biggest challenges. The focus of the journal will be to serve as the repertoire of knowledge exchange and solutions.

Panelists at the Fate of Africa Forum have knowledge about the continent and are interested in ensuring change across the landscape. For our part, we’re not political activists or ideologues, that’s why the space at the Africa Policy and Futures Forum seeks to create a marketplace for the exchange of ideas, to encourage dissent, and suggest practical policy solutions for some of Africa’s biggest challenges.

We’re interested in the implication of public policy on ordinary citizens and the role of young people to be a caravan of hope and change. We hope to amalgamate voices from across the continent to have critical dialogues on the problems that confront us, something that is needed more than ever.

Finally, those who relate to our mission and are burdened by the struggles of our generation, this is a call to action; join us! We need you.

Ansumana Konneh,

Co-Founder, Director of Strategy and Research

Africa Policy and Futures Forum