Africa's youth driving a transformative future

Mail & Guardian

7 days ago

Young people who are pessimistic about their economic futures are unlikely to sit idly by waiting for change. They will demand it. Photo: Nichole Sobecki/AFP
Africa's challenges and opportunities are interrelated, as are its past and its future. Meeting them requires holistic and interconnected solutions. Africa must assert its leadership and exercise full agency over its destiny.
Africa is the world's youngest continent, home to more than a billion young people, constituting 60% of its population, with this number projected to double over the next quarter of a century. By 2050, one in every four people on the planet will be African.
As birth rates decline elsewhere, Africa's youth represents a demographic opportunity and the potential for a powerful force with a multi-layered transformative agenda. They want change, and are driving it from the ground up, pushing the world to re-imagine democracy, development, governance, leadership and institutions at all levels.
Open Society has always invested in young people in Africa. Our roots go back 45 years to the height of apartheid in South Africa, when our founder, George Soros, undertook his first major act of philanthropy by funding scholarships at the University of Cape Town. Those students become part of the generation that saw the fall of apartheid and, as the preamble to the 1996 Constitution states, laid 'the foundations for a democratic and open society'.
As Open Society's first president from Africa, I'm proud to continue this tradition with the launch of three, multi-year initiatives that invest in the holistic aspirations of an emerging generation for a more inclusive, just and peaceful continent. This work is African-led and born of African realities. It is guided by ubuntu principles — dignity, shared humanity and justice — and rooted in the conviction that communities on the ground are best placed to make decisions about their lives. At a time when many funders are retreating from Africa, we are reaffirming our commitment.
The three initiatives — Democratic Futures, Resource Futures and Transformative Peace — address issues that are interlinked. Civic engagement by citizens cannot flourish where communities are trapped in conflicts and subject to exclusion.
Peace cannot be sustained without a more inclusive system of governance that also delivers economic justice. And resource wealth, if not managed for the benefit of the people and communities from which it is extracted, can fuel violence, injustice and feed corruption.
There are both structural and super-structural factors that underlie Africa's pathway to prosperity and our work centres the democratic developmental role of African states in achieving transformation working in partnership with their citizens.
The solutions to Africa's governance, development and security problems offered by the three initiatives are mutually reinforcing, creating a cohesive strategy that shifts power to the people. More responsive and accountable governance enables more inclusive economies — a more equitable distribution of resource wealth weakens the drivers of conflict. And lasting peace allows for more inclusive forms of democratic practice.
The three initiatives centre African agency, without ignoring the global inequities and double standards that constrain development such as debt, inequitable risk profiling, unfair trade and punitive tariffs. The global has local impact and the local can reshape the global.
The Gen-Z protests in Kenya that began last year have grown into a movement for economic and political justice — one that has sustained its strength in the face of violent state repression and abductions, rather than dialogue and de-escalation. In Senegal, young people were at the heart of a popular movement that resisted repression for two years before sweeping away a president who was determined to extend his rule for a third term.
What is striking about these and other movements is that they represent a break from traditional forms of political organising with leadership hierarchies. They come together in digital spaces and manifest themselves in the streets; the repression they face is streamed live and documented. They shun the divide-and-rule carve-ups of their communities, transcending lines that were drawn by ethnicity, religion and region. They are locally rooted in action but have resonance nationally and regionally.
While these mobilisations have disrupted the status quo, the path to meaningful political change remains uncertain. There are complexities to youth engagement: some young people embrace activism while others navigate survival in economies that exclude them and many are sceptical of democratic institutions altogether. It is important to harness this passion and energy into the skillsets needed to step into the political leadership of the future.
Activism alone does not create change and where institutions are unresponsive to its demands, we have seen frustration, disengagement and even support for military regimes, as in Mali and Burkina Faso. The efforts of young people who aspire to futures centred on the principles of dignity, inclusion and accountability require sustained support to help them move from protests to a trajectory of transformation.
West Africa, Ghana and Senegal have recently demonstrated the durability of their democracies — that while transitions of power may be challenging, they can be peaceful. Both democracies can serve as models for regional governance and civic engagement. But they also need support to address the economic challenges that undermine these democracies, particularly the crushing burden of unsustainable debt payments to international financial institutions. These are the consequences of a broken system where indebted African countries are forced to pay high interest rates on their borrowing and inflict austerity that hits the poorest people the hardest.
For centuries, Africans were subjected to slavery, racism and colonialism, the impacts of which are still with us today. We are proud to support calls for justice, reparations and cultural restitution to reclaim narratives of identity and memory for people of African descent. As part of these efforts, we have worked with the global reparations movement led by groups across Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and the US, as well as supporting the work on this front by the governments of Barbados and Ghana.
Our second initiative, on Resources Futures, focuses on Africa's potential to leapfrog in its development — and avoid the resource curse. There is a scramble for the critical minerals under its soil, whether it's cobalt in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, lithium in Zimbabwe or platinum in South Africa. These are the coveted raw materials of green energy's future, the batteries that will power electric vehicles, wind turbines and electric grids.
For centuries, Africa's resources have been extracted to enrich others and to impoverish its people. That risk is severe at this moment. The countries that hold these deposits are vulnerable to economic coercion, forced into deals made on unjust terms. Many of these countries are weighed down by debt and are desperate for urgent cash. Alone, they do not have the bargaining power to negotiate fair deals for their minerals with big buyers like the US or China.
Open Society wants to provide support that enables the supplier countries to build their capacity and competence to be able to negotiate better deals as well as build strong local content policies and capacities to undertake value addition, including through regional value chains.
The negotiations around critical minerals will require a wider bargaining bloc, within Africa and beyond it, in other developing countries that face the same challenge. There are imperatives that must anchor such negotiations and the rights and interests of mining-adjacent communities, as well as preventing extraction from becoming exploitation, so that their human rights are respected, the local economy benefits, jobs are created and the environment is protected.
The role of communities is also central to our third initiative, on Transformative Peace. The people who suffer in conflict, and are affected by its consequences, have for too long been viewed as objects, not as the agents of peacebuilding.
Elite-driven, externally imposed frameworks have failed to rehumanise the victims and survivors of conflict — and they have failed Africa.
Lasting peace needs to have a social dimension focused on healing, a political dimension through transitional justice and an economic dimension that creates reparative economies. These three elements, each necessary for the success of the other, are not possible without communities being at the heart of peacebuilding efforts, especially women and young people. Examples of where women have been critical to peacebuilding include Rwanda, Liberia and Sudan.
Transformative peacebuilding needs to be bottom-up, not top-down. The infrastructure created by communities who possess the requisite local knowledge and social capital can be scaled up. It can support experts and governments in creating infrastructure across Africa's regions and beyond them — especially at a time when conflicts are intensifying, widening and proliferating.
Our work in Africa does not exist in isolation. It is a key part of broader efforts, globally, to help build a more just, inclusive, equitable and peaceful world. One where the local leads to change at national, regional and, ultimately, global level. And one where Africa asserts its place in the world as a continent of leadership, innovation and ideas, forging new paths, discarding outdated systems and redefining its future.
Binaifer Nowrojee is the president of Open Society Foundations.