Exclusion by Design: How Africans Are Kept out of African Development
Bemnet Agata and Gugu Resha,
It is no secret that the international development sector has been marred by controversies about what to call the differences between industrially or economically advanced countries and those that are less advanced. From first world vs. third world, to developed vs. developing, and Global North vs. Global South: these are merely different ways of framing the Western-Northern hegemony over the rest of the world.
This hegemony stays firmly rooted not only by the binary labelling of countries, but by attitudes, assumptions and global practices that continue to say, “The West knows best”, and has spilled into the very foundations of international development organisations around the world.
Consider a scenario in which three candidates are competing for a prestigious Africa Expert Director role at an international organisation in Zimbabwe.
1) James from the UK – African experience includes a charming six-week stint in Malawi during a study abroad program,
2) Caroline from the US – Globalisation and development major, enrolled in the Peace Corps in Cambodia, currently based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, receiving hardship stipends in addition to his salary. He is provided with a garden home villa and requires a local interpreter for his fieldwork,
3) Noma from Zimbabwe – A local advocate with over a decade of experience in African development, deeply connected to grassroots efforts and community needs.
After numerous interviews the successful candidate is Caroline from the United States! The winning factor: Caroline’s “fresh perspective” and “enthusiastic energy” have won over the hearts of the panel.
This scenario sheds light on a broader issue within the international development sector where individuals, like Caroline, with limited on-the-ground experience and superficial engagement with African communities, often occupy influential roles.
But how did we get here?
After World War II, the Bretton Woods institutions were formed to promote the global development agenda of peace, security, economic cooperation and assistance to impoverished countries. When these institutions and their various agencies slowly replaced the aid sector with international development organisations as the main vehicles for furthering these objectives globally, they brought a stronger emphasis on economic theories and methodologies such as evidence-based interventions and prescriptive economic and social policies. With Africa being one of the biggest destinations for the development sector, it is suspicious that the majority of development experts and practitioners in the region are not Africans.
Exclusionary foundations of international development
One look at the state of African research, development, and knowledge production reveals a stark under-representation of Africans in these spaces. Despite making up 14% of the global population and its exponential economic growth, Africa only contributes 1.1% of the world’s scientific knowledge. The consequences are profound. This means that the theory and evidence that these economic and social development interventions are based on are not formulated by Africans or African contexts. More importantly, how can they proclaim to be responsive to the historical and contemporary challenges of African countries?
This exclusion can be attributed to exclusionary hiring practices and the structure of the development sector, including limited access to funding opportunities for African researchers, language barriers in academic publishing, unequal partnerships between African and Western research institutions, disproportionate intellectual property rights, and lack of recognition and support for indigenous knowledge systems. These dynamics have consistently marginalized African researchers and practitioners in decision-making positions.
We cannot speak about African development without mentioning the complex realities of race and gender in these spaces. Our own experiences as young African researchers and conversations with our peers have revealed similar patterns within numerous development organisations including international non-governmental organisations (INGOs), development agencies and advocacy organisations in Eastern and Southern Africa.
Development organisations in Africa have a notoriously racially tiered structure: executive leadership, specialists, researchers and management were largely white European, while the administrative roles and community engagement and implementers or “champions” were largely black and brown people. These patterns force us to grapple with some serious questions: “Who is a legitimate producer of knowledge?”, “Is African leadership and knowledge intentionally being pushed out of these spaces and if so, why?”.
Intentional or not, these dynamics matter because they further entrench the underpinning systems of inequality that they claim to be working against. Therefore, these racial hierarchies of power signal that much has remained the same at the structural level – with white people at the helm of authoritative roles and black people being only fit to occupy so-called entry-level roles. They signal a lack of trust in African capabilities and agency as thinkers, knowers and leaders within their own contexts.
The lack of representation of locals, specifically black and indigenous persons, in middle and high-level organisational roles has far-reaching consequences. These same patterns spill over into research and development, resulting in blind spots, biases and misguided assumptions about local people and their contexts. When left unchecked, these further result in the limited efficacy of programmatic interventions or worse, ethically problematic consequences despite the well-meaning intentions of these organisations.
Black women the worst affected and least represented
In the international humanitarian NGO space, women, particularly Black women, face significant marginalisation in the political economy of knowledge production and decision-making. Historically excluded from leadership and research positions, they continue to struggle for representation and influence. Black women grassroots activists and their local collectives that have championed critical issues like food sovereignty, reparations, and odious debt cancellations, are often overlooked and undervalued despite their crucial roles in grassroots mobilisation and humanitarian aid implementation.
High-level interventions and policies from organisations that claim to bring solutions to these challenges while sidelining the local systems, insights and communities involved are likely to end up white-washing the efforts of existing local initiatives and propagating white-saviour dynamics.
The hiring practices within international development organisations contribute to entrenched wage disparities, perpetuating the undervaluation of Black labour. These organisations often justify unequal compensation through “cost of living adjustments,” which result in expatriate wages being up to 900% higher than those of local employees, forcing African employees to subsist on minimal salaries within their own countries. All the while their expatriate counterparts from the Global North receive generous comprehensive remuneration packages, including hardship bonuses, health insurance, and housing allowances. This not only reflects but cements systemic inequities as the challenges of living in Africa warrant hyped-up financial incentives for expats.
Despite the popularisation of corporate-imported “diversity and inclusion” initiatives aimed at remedying exclusion, the development-world reality remains troubling. White women, while being beneficiaries of diversity and inclusion efforts, often occupy positions of power within these organisations. The overrepresentation of white women in leadership positions projects the illusion of progress through the fulfilment of gender quotas and conceals the ongoing marginalisation of African women and other underrepresented groups.
This window-dressing is exacerbated by the inherent bias prevalent in hiring committees often composed of predominantly white board chairs and executives within most INGOs. As a result, African women often face exclusion due to intersectional identities – where their compounded differences render them less relatable and more distant from those who hold power.
The disproportionate representation in the development sector manifests in a disjointed landscape with persistent gaps between visionary aspirations and actual policy outcomes. Limited resourcing of African researchers and practitioners, coupled with the NGO-isation of social change and shifting priorities among development partners, has notably hindered politicised movement building. The dominance of INGO donor-driven agendas from the global North exacerbates this disconnect by seeking simplistic solutions for complex African development challenges, leading to misguided interventions and incongruous policy objectives.
By focusing on narrow aspects of African development without a comprehensive, historical, socio-political analysis or a well-articulated theory of progress, these “silver bullet “interventions fail to address the complex realities and diverse lived experiences within African communities. Furthermore, existing local development initiatives that are African-centred, community- and women-led are undermined or eradicated altogether in favour of more ‘reputable’ and better-resourced international organisations.
Getting African development right: what’s needed for a different approach
Decolonisation, which is often touted as the solution to structural inequalities in development, has been diluted from its powerful political and historic roots. Decolonisation should go beyond rhetoric. It must transform power dynamics, curb institutional biases, and foster an environment where all individuals, especially Africans, are valued and supported. This commitment must also include closing financial wage gaps and providing material compensation that fairly reflects the value of their contributions.
The current development landscape has been shaped by historical power dynamics and colonial legacies, and often favours external expertise over local practitioners, embodying elitism, racial bias, and androcentrism. This reinforces the supremacy of Western knowledge as unquestionable truth while marginalising localised knowledge systems as subjective or inconsequential. Thus, we African practitioners must relentlessly question who produces knowledge, what is deemed as knowledge, and whose experiences are valued as valid sources of insight.
Placing Africans at the forefront of development is crucial for realising a prosperous continent and advancing a Pan-African vision that protects against external control and profit-driven interests. In the face of escalating ecological, fiscal, gendered, and militarised crises, our responses must match the scale and urgency of these challenges to envision a resilient Africa where we have control over our own strategic vision for the continent.
Africa stands at a critical juncture in its development. In the new paradigm aiming to shift power, we must prioritise reframing policymaking away from hegemonic power structures and recognise that genuine solutions emerge from within communities. By challenging the exclusion of Africans from critical professional and developmental research spaces, we endeavour to break through barriers and build a new world where Africans are positioned as indispensable architects of innovative solutions to the multifaceted global challenges we collectively face.
Gugu Resha: Gugu Resha is a South African policy researcher and advocate for inclusive democratic participation and representation, as well as progressive economic and social equity solutions. She has worked with social justice-driven non-profit organizations and think tanks and holds an MSc in Philosophy and Public Policy from the London School of Economics and Political Science. (Email: [email protected])
Bemnet Agata: Bemnet Agata is an Ethiopian advocacy and research professional with diverse experience at the local, national, and multilateral levels, focusing on gender justice, human rights, development, and feminist organizing. She holds an MSc in Human Rights and Politics from the London School of Economics and Political Science. (Email: [email protected])