The award of the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize to Justice Navaneetham (Navi) Pillay is unusual in several respects. She is among a small handful of lawyers honoured in the history of the Prize (19 out of 144 total laureates), and one of an even smaller number who were recognised specifically for their legal work. More commonly, the laureates who were lawyers by training were recognised for their political work in peacebuilding such as her fellow South African, Nelson Mandela. Navi Pillay is also among the minority of laureates who are women (21, out of 114 individuals who have won the prize) and in this category, too, she is unique in being awarded the prize for her legal practice and precedents established in human rights law. In her long career, she impacted South African national law as well as international law.

Navi Pillay was born to a working-class family in Durban in 1941, one of eight children. Her grandparents had migrated to South Africa in the 1890s, part of a wave of indentured migrants who were recruited to work on the country’s sugar cane. Pillay’s family were Tamil and Telugu speakers from southern India. In Clairwood, a segregated, predominantly Indian, neighbourhood where her family lived after indenture, Navi’s father worked as a bus driver while her mother cared for the family. For many Indians, education was the only route out of poverty in these early years of apartheid. Navi was a gifted scholar at the newly opened Clairwood High School, winning awards for debating. She went on to study at the segregated University of Natal (Black Section), taking classes in a potato shed. In an interview with Democracy Now journalist Amy Goodman, Pillay commented that one of the first books to catch her eye in the meagre university library was a report on the Nuremburg trials. Struck by the contrast between bad law applied to bad ends in apartheid South Africa and the lofty approach of justice through law in the trials of Nazi leaders, she was inspired to pursue her legal studies. She went on to complete a Masters degree and PhD in law at Harvard University.

She was one of only three women admitted as attorneys in the province of Natal in 1967, and the first Indian woman to open her own law practice in South Africa, mainly because she could not find any law firm that would hire her. Her practice was largely concerned with representing poor people and political activists.

South Africa was a particular crucible for thinking about the complicated relationship between law and justice. The apartheid state was founded in legalism and prided itself on acting according to the letter of the law, yet of course the law was fundamentally concerned with upholding white supremacy. The contradictions this threw up would be continually tested in the courts, and the best lawyers were those who could successfully upend the objectives of the law by recourse to arguments about the precise interpretation of legal terminology. Navi Pillay cut her intellectual and jurisprudential teeth in this milieu.

In 1971, her husband Gabby Pillay was detained under the Terrorism Act. As his lawyer, Navi successfully sued the police to prevent the use of torture in interrogation; two years later she won the same rights on behalf of Nelson Mandela, Harry Gwala and other prisoners detained on Robben Island. She had a particular concern, too, for the wellbeing of women affected by domestic violence. In 1986, together with Professor of Sociology Anshu Padayachee, she set up an Advice Desk for Abused Women. They provided legal and welfare advice to women, initially working out of their private homes before locating the Advice Desk at the (racially segregated) University of Durban-Westville. Four decades since its formation, she remains a vital supporter of the organisation.

Legal legacy

It is in women’s rights that she has made her most significant international impact. The widespread use of rape as a tactic by Serbian combatants in the civil war in Yugoslavia was a pivotal moment for feminist activists in Europe. The rapes of Bosnian women opened new conversations about sexual crimes in conflict zones, but there were no precedents for naming rape as war crimes. Judge Navi Pillay changed that. Nominated by Nelson Mandela, she was elected to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) set up by the United Nations and served as judge and president on that body.

The United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) estimates that between 250,000 and 500,000 women and girls were raped in the 1994 genocide, and large numbers of these women testified at the ICTR. Under Pillay’s leadership, the Tribunal decided to consider expanding the scope of war crimes, enlisting the aid of prominent feminist scholars such as Catherine McKinnon. Rape itself was still narrowly defined in most national legal systems as meaning penetration of women without consent. The ICTR established a new definition of rape as involving “a physical invasion of a sexual nature, committed on a person under coercive circumstances,” thus removing penile penetration as the criterion as well as widening the scope to include acts of sexual violence against men.

Furthermore, sexual violence in conflict was deemed to be an act of genocide, to the extent that it was committed with the intent to destroy a targeted group. The new definition was applied in the 1998 case of Jean Paul Akayesu, major of the Tabu commune in Rwanda, convicted by the ICTR on nine counts of genocide and crimes against humanity, including sexual assault. 

The case was to establish the jurisprudence for the International Criminal Tribunal on Yugoslavia which used the Akayesu judgment and further refined definitions of non-consent and penetration. Pillay’s leadership of the ICTR reframed international law on sexual violence in conflict, eventually making possible UN Resolution 1820, adopted in June 2008, which recognised that sexual violence during conflict posed a threat to international peace and security.

Pillay’s unique and growing expertise in human rights law and its application to genocide was harnessed again when the United Nations elected her as Special Rapporteur on Human Rights (2008-2014) and then when she was appointed Chair of the UN’s Independent Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory. This Commission found that both Hamas and Israel had committed war crimes, and in a second report in September 2025 determined that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. It is these latter two judgements that have been highlighted by Israel and its supporters in their opposition to the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Judge Pillay. The critics seek to portray her as antisemitic, hateful and determined to single out Israel. The opposite is true. Her profile is one of fairness, consistency and commitment to justice whether that is in the family or in the sphere of international law.

In making the award, the Nobel Committee noted the role she has played in protecting the international rule of law at a time when it is under the greatest threat since the inception of the post-World War Two consensus. Under apartheid, Pillay defended the best uses of the law against its worst. That example has never been more important in the face of the most powerful states acting outside the rule of law and seeking to restore might over right.

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Today, more than 400 million Africans are between ages 15 and 35. That number is projected to pass 830 million by 2050. Whether this generation becomes an engine of continental – and global – prosperity or fuels its instability will be decided over the next decade, and the decisive variable is simple: work.

Young Africans have told us clearly and repeatedly: Employment is a top policy priority. The question is whether governments and development partners are listening.

What we’re hearing from young Africans

Afrobarometer, the pan-African survey network, asks ordinary citizens what they think and experience. Its recent rounds of face-to-face interviews across nearly 40 countries paint a sobering picture of the continent’s youth.

Jobs come first. Across 38 countries surveyed in 2024/2025, unemployment tied with health as the most important problem that 18- to 35-year-olds wanted their governments to fix. Asked where government should invest more to help young people, 48 per cent chose job creation; education came a distant second at 16 per cent. Today’s young Africans are the best-educated generation in the continent’s history, yet among those aged 18-25, 45 per cent are looking for work.

Many are looking for the exit. Facing a lack of opportunity, young people are increasingly looking to move abroad: 55 per cent of 18- to 35-year-olds have considered emigrating. Economic factors are the main driver. Each young person who leaves takes along the education that their family paid for and the potential that their country needs.

Patience with democracy is thinning. Young Africans still support democracy (62 per cent), and most reject military rule (64 per cent). But over the past decade, youth rejection of military rule has fallen by 12 percentage points, and 57 per cent say the army would be justified in taking over if elected leaders abuse power. Cheering crowds of young people greeting coups in the Sahel were not an aberration; they were a warning.

A generation of would-be founders

The same surveys reveal something vital about young Africans’ outlook. When asked which sector they would most like to work in, 52 per cent said they would opt to start their own business.

These are not people waiting for handouts. They are traders, makers, coders, and farmers who want the chance to build something of their own. What holds them back is not a lack of ambition but a lack of markets, capital, and connections: fragmented national economies, expensive cross-border payments and transport logistics, credit priced as if every African borrower were a default risk, and flights between neighbouring capitals that route through Europe or the Gulf.

Unlock entrepreneurship and three problems ease at once. Joblessness falls as young founders hire their peers. The pull of emigration weakens when opportunity exists at home. And the drift toward military intervention and military rule slows, because a young person with a stake in a growing economy has every reason to preserve and defend the constitutional order that protects it.

Where development assistance would make the greatest difference

If official development assistance (ODA) is to matter to this generation, it must go where young entrepreneurs hit walls they cannot climb alone. The right kinds of investment can create opportunities for dignified and fulfilling work for Africa’s youth:

A market big enough to grow into. The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) promises a single market of about 1.4 billion people. For a young agro-processor in Kumasi or a software startup in Kigali, it turns a national customer base into a continental one. But the agreement is only as useful as the customs systems, rules-of-origin certificates, standards bodies, and trade-information portals that make it work at the border. Funding the necessary plumbing, and training small firms to use it, would turn a treaty into trade.

Payments that don’t detour. The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) lets businesses pay across African borders in local currencies instead of routing through dollars or euros. With the Bank of Central African States joining in July, it now spans 28 countries and more than 190 banks and fintechs, and its transaction volumes have grown roughly tenfold in a year. Aid that helps commercial banks, mobile-money operators, and fintechs connect to PAPSS would cut the cost of every cross-border sale that a small trader makes.

Credit priced on African realities. The African Credit Rating Agency (AfCRA) opened in October. Its focus on local-currency debt, corporates, and sub-sovereigns matters because 23 African economies have no rating at all from the big three agencies, and that perceived risk costs the continent up to £56 billion a year in excess borrowing costs. The AfCRA will change that only if it earns investors’ trust. ODA can help it build rigorous methodologies, data systems, and an unimpeachable track record.

Corridors that carry goods to market. A continental market needs roads, rails, and ports. Corridors on the continent are too often designed to move minerals out rather than to move African goods between African markets. Development assistance can change that.

Skies that connect neighbours. The Single African Air Transport Market now has 38 committed states and has opened more than 100 new intra-African routes since 2018. Yet flying between many African capitals remains slow and costly. Support for aviation regulators, harmonised air-service agreements, and cargo corridors would let a young exporter ship perishables or meet a buyer in a day, not a week.

From services to opportunity

For decades, most development assistance to Africa has paid for services: clinics, classrooms, food parcels, etc. These saved and improved millions of lives, and the need has not vanished. But a model built on delivering services breeds dependency and treats young Africans as beneficiaries. It cannot, on its own, give them what they are asking for, which is the chance to earn a living and build something of their own.

At a time when donor budgets are shrinking, every dollar must work harder. A dollar that helps the PAPSS onboard another bank, the AfCRA publish another credible rating, or the AfCFTA clear another border bottleneck does not disappear when the programme ends. It lowers costs for millions of businesses, permanently. It also strengthens African institutions, rather than parallel systems run from donor capitals.

The shift needed from ODA is not from generosity to austerity, but from provision to empowerment: from doing things for young Africans to removing the barriers that stop them from doing things for themselves.

Delivering public services is the job of African governments, not development partners. When citizens pay taxes and receive schools, clinics, and clean water in return, the social contract is renewed, and accountability grows. When donors pay for those services instead, governments answer upward to Brussels, Beijing, Oslo, and Washington rather than downward to their own citizens, and the social contract quietly erodes.

Afrobarometer data leave little room for complacency. A generation that cannot find work at home will look abroad, and a generation that sees no stake in the system will be tempted by those who promise to overturn it. But the same data points to the way out. Young Africans want to build something of their own. Give them the chance to do so, and they will do the rest.

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Violence in South Kivu, in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), is often reduced to “inter-ethnic clashes”. This framing obscures the targeting of the Banyamulenge, whose citizenship in DRC remains contested. Lasting peace requires naming these dynamics and ensuring that minority protection is central to the process, not a side issue.

For nearly a decade now, South Kivu’s High Plateaux of Uvira, Fizi, and Itombwe (the Highlands) have been a battlefield of regional conflict. The DRC, Burundi, Rwanda and a myriad of local and foreign armed groups are all fighting in the region. It started with Burundi and Rwanda trading accusations of supporting rival rebels. Since 2015, military confrontations have devastated South Kivu’s Highlands, destroying almost the socio-economic tissue.

The Banyamulenge

Part of the violence can trace it roots back to the unresolved question around the Banyamulenge Congolese citizenship. The grievance stretches back to colonial-era administrative decisions to exclude the community from land rights and customary local authority.

Citizenship contestation was the starting point. The greater danger is now the interplay between local conflicts and regional competition over security and resources, combined with the use of technological warfare.

Since 2015, the highlands have seen a prolonged siege, systematic cattle looting, and forced displacement that followed the destruction of almost entire villages. The displacement, coupled with impoverishment and trauma associated with intense warfare, has broken up the social fabric, damage that will persist long after any cessation of hostilities.

Communities have lived for several years under humanitarian conditions described as a de facto blockade. Access to the Highlands was already complicated by a lack of roads. Caught in the middle of belligerents, basic goods that cost a few dollars elsewhere have seen their prices increased many times more in besieged towns like Minembwe. Sugar, salt, and soap are 400 per cent more expensive than they were in 2024.

Cattle, the primary form of wealth for many highland families, have been looted or destroyed on a mass scale. Villages have been burned, health facilities collapsed, and maternal and infant mortality keeps rising. As a minority and contested community, the Banyamulenge have been specifically affected by violence from local and foreign militias. The concentration of these effects tracks closely with where Banyamulenge and other minority communities live.

What can be done

Preventing further violence in this region requires disentangling specifics from the broad and complex socio-security context. It requires moving beyond generic humanitarian appeals toward measures that name the specific dynamics at work. Five steps stand out.

First, international monitoring should review the simplified labelling that collapses the complex violence into generic “inter-ethnic clashes.” A disaggregated, honest accounting of who is being targeted and why is a precondition for any effective response.

Second, humanitarian access needs enforcement, not just appeals. Corridors into the highlands should come with monitoring mechanisms and real consequences — including sanctions on commanders documented as blocking aid or striking civilian areas — rather than being left to the goodwill of belligerents.

Third, humanitarian access needs to be accompanied by protection mechanisms of at-risk civilians and local populations. As the highlands has become an epicentre of regional competition between DRC, Burundi, and Rwanda, the protection of at-risk communities and populations should constitute one of the priorities of the international community.

Fourth, the flow of weapons into the hands of local militias needs curbing. Much of the violence against civilians is carried out by combatants supplied through regional networks; without controlling that supply, any political settlement will remain fragile.

Fifth, and most fundamentally, the DRC’s citizenship framework needs revisiting. If Congolese law continues to tie full citizenship to ancestral land-owning status, minority communities, specifically the Banyamulenge, will remain legally vulnerable to exactly the kind of exclusion that has fuelled violence since the 1990s.

None of these steps guarantees peace on their own. But together they shift the frame from crisis management to prevention — treating protection of minority communities not as a side issue to the regional war, but as central to whether South Kivu has any durable peace at all.

Standardised international reporting formats often struggle to capture local nuances.  The formats leave peacebuilding actors to capture the contextual specificity that would help design appropriate stability policies. The formats tend to ignore the blind spot that has let violence against the Banyamulenge be flattened into generic narratives of inter-ethnic conflict.

The violence since 2015 is the most destructive that the Highlands has experienced since the 1990s. Its long-term repercussions run deeper than the current casualty count. A generation of children is growing up without reliable schooling or healthcare. Displaced families are losing their land tenure and social ties between and across communities breaking up. Impoverished families keep sinking into traumatic experiences and poverty.

Each cycle of violence hardens the narrative that certain groups do not belong to Congo. These narratives outlive any single military campaign and become harder to dislodge with time. Left unaddressed, this trajectory does not simply produce a humanitarian emergency; it produces a permanently fractured region, primed for the next round of mobilisation.

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Ten years ago, 38 per cent of young South Africans aged 15 to 34, were not in employment, education or training (NEET). Today that share is 45 per cent. Those figures, drawn from the Quarterly Labour Force Survey run by Statistics South Africa, are a good place to start a conversation about inequality in Africa. South Africa is often treated as the continent’s exception: the industrialised, middle-income outlier where the usual story of a young, growing population failing to find work does not apply. The data says otherwise. Exclusion here has widened over the decade, falls unevenly by age and race, and increasingly by gender too. It is a sharp case study of a pattern playing out across much of the continent.

A trap, not a queue

NEET differs from the unemployment rate in one important way: it also counts young people who have stopped looking for work, or never started, catching exclusion the jobless numbers alone miss.

Figure 1: South Africa’s youth NEET rate, quarterly, 2016-2026 (25-34 rate estimated). Source: Statistics South Africa, QLFS.

Stats SA tracks NEET in two overlapping bands, 15 to 24 and 15 to 34, and the gap between them is a clear sign that exclusion here is not a phase young people pass through. Over the decade, the NEET rate for 25-to-34-year-olds has climbed from around 46 per cent to 54 per cent, while the rate for 15-to-24-year-olds has risen more gently, from 31 per cent to 36 per cent. The gap between them, 15 points a decade ago, is now over 17. The people worst affected are not school leavers waiting for a first job. They are adults in their late twenties and early thirties, many with further qualifications, who have still not found a foothold. A policy conversation that treats this as a queue that clears with time and growth is describing a problem that no longer exists.

Race still writes the odds

For a continent still grappling with the enduring legacies of colonialism and, in South Africa’s case, apartheid, the racial breakdown is the sharpest illustration of how unevenly growth and exclusion are shared. A decade ago, the NEET rate among Black African youth stood at 41 per cent, against 14 per cent for white youth, a gap of 27 points. Today those rates are 48 per cent and 19 per cent, a gap of 29 points. That gap has not closed with growth or three decades of redress policy; it has widened. Mixed-race youth followed a similar upward path, from 35 per cent to 41 per cent. Indian/Asian and white youth rates are drawn from much smaller samples and swing more sharply between quarters, as the chart shows, so those two lines are best read as indicative rather than precise.

Figure 2: Youth (15-34) NEET rate by population group, quarterly, 2016-2026. Source: Statistics South Africa, QLFS.

A gender gap that is narrowing, and may be flipping

The gender story cuts against the usual assumption that young women carry the heavier NEET burden. For most of the past decade, young South African men recorded a higher NEET rate than young women: 43 per cent against 34 per cent in 2016. But the gap narrowed over the following years, unevenly but consistently downward, and in the second quarter of 2026 it flipped: Stats SA’s own data now puts the female NEET rate for 15-to-34-year-olds at 48.9 per cent, against 41.9 per cent for men, a crossover confirmed for the 15-to-24 band too, 38 per cent against 35 per cent. A decade-long narrowing that flips sign this cleanly, in one release, is one of the sharpest inflections in the entire dataset.

Figure 3: Youth (15-34) NEET rate by sex, quarterly, 2016-2026. Source: Statistics South Africa, QLFS.

What the next decade likely holds

None of these trends look set to reverse on their own. South Africa’s growth has not come close to the pace needed to absorb its youth population, and the sectors historically able to absorb low-skilled labour, such as mining and manufacturing, are shrinking as a share of the economy. Unless that changes, the older youth cohort will keep absorbing the brunt of exclusion, the racial gap will persist as a legacy of unequal starting points in schooling and networks, and the gender story is the one to watch. For the rest of the continent, still years behind South Africa in industrial and educational development, that should read as an early warning sign of problems to come rather than one unique to South Africa.

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In June 2026, during internal training and evaluation, an experimental OpenAI model accessed Australian government websites without authorisation. One of the systems it reached was Services Australia’s Medicare Statistics Reporting Service. OpenAI says it found no evidence that anyone’s medical records were accessed, but it later apologised to Australians and acknowledged that both the incident and its initial response should have been handled better.

The Australian case was not an isolated anomaly. During cybersecurity testing, OpenAI models circumvented controls intended to keep them off the internet and compromised parts of OpenAI’s own infrastructure and systems belonging to Hugging Face. Anthropic has separately disclosed four incidents in which its Claude models gained unauthorised access to real third-party systems during cybersecurity evaluations.

It is tempting to describe such episodes as AI “going rogue”. That language is vivid, but it can mislead. Current AI systems are not rebellious persons plotting against their creators. The more sober concern is troubling enough: highly capable systems can pursue assigned goals in ways that cross boundaries their designers did not intend them to cross.

That has sharpened the argument over guardrails. Bill Gates recently said that “no one thinks self-regulation is enough” and called for government involvement in safeguards and monitoring. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called for slowing the development of frontier AI, a position that has also received support from Sam Altman and Elon Musk.

President Donald Trump has pushed in the opposite direction. In September, he wrote that “the only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT”. His administration has since promoted voluntary company safeguards, including internal controls and third-party audits, rather than comprehensive binding regulation.

The debate is usually presented as innovation versus regulation. Akan ethics suggests that we should begin elsewhere.

Onipa na ohia: put the human being first

There is no single “African ethics”. The continent contains many moral traditions. But Akan thought from Ghana offers a useful way of reframing the problem.

The Ghanaian philosopher Kwasi Wiredu drew attention to the Akan expression onipa na ohia. Its meaning is richer than a simple claim that humans are more important than machines. Wiredu interprets it in two related ways: human value derives from human interests, and human fellowship is among our most important needs.

This is both a humanistic and a relational idea. Human beings matter, but we do not flourish as isolated individuals. Our wellbeing depends on relationships of trust, cooperation, and mutual dependence.

Applied to artificial intelligence, onipa na ohia gives us a simple principle: technology should remain oriented towards human purposes and human flourishing. Innovation is valuable because of what it can do for people, not simply because greater capability can be achieved.

This matters when AI becomes more autonomous. Intelligence is not wisdom. Capability is not moral permission. Autonomy is not moral authority. The fact that an AI system can cross a digital boundary does not mean that it should. And the fact that a company can build a system capable of doing so does not give that company the sole moral authority to determine what risks everyone else should bear.

An African relational approach therefore reverses a common question. Instead of asking how much regulation AI development can tolerate before innovation suffers, we should ask how much autonomy AI can exercise while remaining answerable to the human beings, communities, and institutions affected by its actions.

Guardrails are a form of responsibility

Seen from this perspective, guardrails are not expressions of fear about technology. They are expressions of responsibility for one another.

Some guardrails should be built into AI systems themselves. A system that is uncertain whether it has permission to enter a network, obtain data, or take a consequential action should not infer that because it can enter a system it has permission. It should stop, ask, or escalate the decision to a responsible human.

Anthropic’s own investigation is instructive. In one incident, a Claude model treated a real website as though it were still part of a cybersecurity exercise and failed to adequately question whether it had permission to attack it. When researchers replayed crucial moments, the model questioned ownership and authorisation in only a tiny proportion of runs.

We might think of this as the beginning of an “algorithmic conscience”: not consciousness or moral personhood in a machine, but a design orientation that makes powerful systems sensitive to boundaries, vulnerability, consequences, and occasions when human judgement must take over.

Other guardrails must sit outside the code. Developers should test powerful systems before deployment, report serious failures, and accept independent scrutiny. Governments should establish enforceable minimum standards for systems capable of causing serious public harm. Regulation need not treat every chatbot like a frontier cybersecurity agent; oversight can be proportionate to capability and risk.

Relational ethics also tells us why company self-regulation cannot be the whole answer. AI companies possess expertise that regulators need, but the effects of their technologies extend far beyond their laboratories. They can reshape work, education, healthcare, public institutions, and information systems. When the benefits and risks are distributed across society, those who create the technology cannot be the only people entitled to decide what counts as an acceptable risk.

Africa must be part of the solution

African countries should not become passive recipients of AI systems whose rules, assumptions, and acceptable levels of risk were decided elsewhere. The global conversation is too often framed as a technological race between the United States and China. But AI will also shape African labour markets, languages, schools, public services, and political institutions. Communities that will live with those consequences deserve a role in defining the limits.

Onipa na ohia therefore gives us more than a slogan for “ethical AI”. It offers a test for the emerging age of autonomous systems: when technological capability and human flourishing pull in different directions, the human community must retain moral priority.

The safest future is not one in which AI sets its own limits. Nor is it one in which technology companies alone decide those limits.

If artificial intelligence is to serve humanity, then humanity—in all its relationships, communities and diversity—must remain responsible for drawing the boundaries to ensure it benefits us.

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In its communication of 5 March 2026, the African Group at the World Trade Organization (WTO) urged members to protect governments’ ability to, among other things, develop industries. Africa’s experience suggests a principle: shared commitments should reflect differences in countries’ ability to fulfil them.

First articulated in 2019, Afri-Multilateralism describes how African countries can shape international rules by acting collectively. Despite their differences, they can agree on common positions that reflect their industries, public finances, institutions, infrastructure, and vulnerability to crises. Diversity becomes a basis for designing workable rules.

Countries may be equal before the rules yet differ greatly in their ability to pay for compliance, administer regulations or absorb the effects of wealthier economies’ policies. ‘Principled differentiation’ means designing obligations around those differences, so that reciprocal commitments are fair in practice as well as equal on paper.

A country seeking different implementation should explain the obstacle, show how it affects compliance, report the measures taken, and undergo review. This would keep obligations predictable while allowing rules to respond to experience, without making flexibility permanent or ignoring the conditions that justify it. For example, Kenya needed assistance to process import documents before goods arrived, as required by the WTO Trade Facilitation Agreement, and secured a grant in 2025 to assist with the implementation of that requirement.

The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) embeds flexible integration and variable geometry in Article 5 of its founding agreement, allowing countries to move at different speeds towards shared goals. Afri-Multilateralism applies that approach to international negotiations.

Making flexibility part of the rules

African members accept that trade commitments should work both ways. But the same rule can impose different burdens on countries with different industries, institutions and access to finance. WTO provisions does allow some adjustments to obligations. However, the repeated demands from African ministers for more flexibility suggest that these measures have not consistently given governments the practical freedom needed to develop industries and diversify their economies.

Many of the available provisions are not binding, depend on voluntary assistance, or postpone compliance without addressing its difficulty. Extra time alone cannot supply missing technology, public funds, or productive capacity. Nor should eligibility to these provisions depend solely on national income or a country’s development label. The test should be: can the country implement a specific rule, given its industries, export dependence, institutions, climate risks, food needs, technology and access to finance?

The 1994 Marrakesh Decision limits least-developed countries’ commitments according to their financial and trade needs, and administrative capabilities. The Trade Facilitation Agreement, which addresses border procedures, allows developing and least-developed members to set implementation schedules. Its Category C provisions link implementation to acquiring capacity through assistance. These precedents show that obligations can reflect capacity through agreed procedures for reporting and review. Now, their scope is limited to a particular group or policy area. Afri-Multilateralism proposes extending this approach across WTO rules, matching obligations to specific constraints, flexibility, support, and review.

What Africa’s own trade agreement shows

The AfCFTA, intended to create a single African market, illustrates how commitments can accommodate different circumstances. Article 6 of its Protocol on Trade in Goods requires flexibility for countries at different development levels or with circumstances recognised by other members. Article 7 of its Protocol on Trade in Services permits transitional periods reflecting a country’s development, trade, and financial needs. Countries can therefore differ in the timing and burden of adjustment while sharing the goal of opening trade across the continent.

This offers a method, rather than rules to copy. The African Group should draw on how African countries accommodate differences within shared commitments, without transferring the AfCFTA’s institutions or treaty provisions to the WTO.

This suggests three reforms: tailor flexibility to each rule; review it against actual capacity; and assess development effects before adopting rules.

First, each proposed new WTO rule should explain its purpose, likely economic effects and what implementation requires. Flexibility should address a specific obstacle, such as weak administration, dependence on a few exports, food insecurity, limited technology, inadequate infrastructure or external shocks. The rule should specify the obstacle, permitted flexibility, required assistance and arrangements for reporting and review. This would extend the Trade Facilitation Agreement’s approach, making relevant needs central to each obligation.

Second, flexibility should change through agreed review. Countries should assume fuller obligations as they demonstrate capacity needed for the particular rule, rather than because income rises or their development label changes. Reviews should use agreed indicators and intervals, with consultation, notice and time to adjust. This would keep obligations predictable and prevent support being withdrawn prematurely or exemptions continuing without justification.

Third, members should assess rules’ development effects before adoption. Would they help countries diversify production, create jobs, strengthen public finances, build cross-border supply links, acquire technology, secure food supplies and withstand climate shocks? The findings should shape obligations, timetables and support from the outset. Development would influence how rules are written, before their effects become difficult to reverse.

Africa’s regional integration can also strengthen its participation in global trade. By enlarging markets, coordinating regulation, and building supply links across African countries, the AfCFTA can help states develop industries and institutions. These gains can improve their ability both to use WTO rights and to meet their obligations.

Africa should defend the need for flexibility through evidence, with criteria that reflect its economies. Afri-Multilateralism turns negotiating across differences into an approach to fairer rules. It asks who can comply, what compliance costs, what support is required and what evidence would justify fuller obligations. These questions make fairness something governments must demonstrate in the design of rules.

The WTO’s credibility depends on whether countries with unequal resources can participate on fair terms. Africa can contribute a method for making shared rules workable: recognise relevant differences, connect flexibility to development needs and use integration to strengthen economies. The wider lesson for global governance is that common commitments need institutions that take unequal capacity seriously.

Photo credit: Jeanne Menjoulet used with permission CC BY 2.0.

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On 29 September 2026, Fatima Ezzahra El Mansouri was appointed as Morocco’s first woman prime minister. The move has rightly drawn national and international attention. This breakthrough moment is significant for Morocco and shines as a beacon of possibility in a region where women are still underrepresented in high office.

Morocco stands out as a leader in advancing women’s participation in public life. Today, women make up around 24 per cent of Morocco’s House of Representatives, surpassing the averages for both the Arab world ( 18 per cent) and North Africa (17 per cent). Morocco was among the first in the region to introduce a parliamentary quota for women, and its landmark reforms to the Family Code (Moudawana) and Constitution have been internationally recognised as models for gender equality. These achievements not only reflect Morocco’s commitment to inclusion but also inspire hope for what is possible when doors are opened to women’s leadership. But to see this as the starting point of women’s leadership in Morocco would be to overlook a much longer, richer history.

In the eleventh century, Zaynab al-Nafzawiyya helped shape the rise of the Almoravid dynasty. Based in Aghmat, near Marrakesh, this Amazigh woman brought knowledge of local politics and diplomacy to its leaders. Historians describe her as an adviser to Abu Bakr ibn Umar and a partner in rule to Yusuf ibn Tashfin. Her authority demonstrates how women exercised authority beyond the recognised titles through which political history is usually told.

In the sixteenth century, Sayyida al-Hurra governed Tetouan. Of Andalusian origin, she exercised political and military leadership in northern Morocco during a period of conflict involving Spanish and Portuguese powers. Her governorship provides another example of women’s public authority within Morocco’s history. These personal accomplishments did not mean that women generally enjoyed equal rights, but they challenge the idea that women’s political leadership is new to the country.

From milestones to meaningful participation

Modern Morocco’s political history however, reveals a gap between formal rights and representation. The Inter-Parliamentary Union records universal voting and candidacy rights for women from 1959, following independence in 1956. Yet women did not enter the House of Representatives until 1993, when Badia Skalli and Latifa Bennani Smires became its first elected women members. The legal opening therefore preceded women’s parliamentary representation by more than three decades.

The 2004 overhaul of the Moudawana expanded women’s autonomy in family life. It established 18 as the standard marriage age for both sexes, allowed adult women to conclude their own marriage contracts without a male guardian, recognised shared responsibility for handling family affairs, and expanded women’s routes to judicial “shikak” divorce. Article 19 of the 2011 Constitution subsequently recognised equal civil, political, economic, social, cultural, and environmental rights and committed the state to work towards parity between women and men.

Economic inequality also limits the conditions for participation. Morocco’s High Commission for Planning reported labour-force participation rates of 19 per cent for women and 68.5 per cent for men in 2025. These figures do not measure political participation directly, but they illustrate the economic disparities that can restrict access to income, independence and professional networks. Opportunities to exercise rights also differ by geography and language. In its 2022 review of Morocco, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women raised concerns about limited rights information in Amazigh-speaking rural communities and obstacles faced by women seeking justice for gender-based violence.

Women have long influenced public decisions in Morocco, through elected office, civic organising, and legal advocacy. The task is to extend those opportunities more widely and ensure that women can exercise influence across differences of income, language, and geography. Representation is one measure of progress; access to leadership roles, resources and decision-making authority is another.

The power and limits of law

The law has real power to change societies. It sets standards and raises expectations. Constitutional recognition of equality gives citizens a way to hold institutions to account. But laws alone are not enough; they must be matched by implementation and public engagement.

Morocco’s legal advances also reflect sustained civic mobilisation. In 1992, the Union de l’Action Féminine launched the One Million Signatures campaign to demand changes to the Moudawana. Limited reforms followed in 1993, and the campaign helped bring women’s status within the family into public debate and demonstrated that organised civic action could challenge provisions previously treated as beyond reform. This collective leadership deserves recognition alongside individual appointments to high office.

Governments and parliaments can pass laws, but it is civil society and citizens themselves who ensure that rights become reality. Each woman who breaks new ground deserves recognition, but the goal must be to make women’s authority ordinary, not exceptional.

Closing the gap

Morocco’s history shows that women’s leadership is not a novelty. However, the real achievement will come when a woman’s presence in high office is unremarkable, not because it isn’t significant, but because it has become routine. That will mark the shift from representation to participation, from individual breakthroughs to institutional transformation.

Closing the gap requires stronger implementation alongside continued legal reform. In its 2022 review, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women recognised the protections introduced by Morocco’s 2018 law on violence against women, but highlighted obstacles to accessing them, including limited police awareness of women’s rights, evidentiary burdens on survivors and inadequate access to legal information. The Committee also recommended repealing Article 20 of the Family Code, which allows judges to authorise marriage below the minimum age of 18. Making equality effective in everyday life therefore requires institutions that uphold existing protections and legislation that closes remaining gaps.

Morocco does not need to discover women’s leadership. Its history already contains it. The deeper achievement will come when the promise of equality is measured not only by who occupies Morocco’s highest offices, but by the ability of women across the country to participate in public decisions, pursue economic opportunity, and obtain justice. Closing that gap will be Morocco’s next milestone.

Photo credit: Pilecka used with permission CC BY-SA 3.0

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An African infrastructure project with a viable plan may still struggle to get a loan from a commercial bank. Lenders may judge its country too risky or want their money back before the project generates enough revenue to repay the loan. Government-backed development finance institutions provide loans and investment for such projects. They can offer longer repayment periods or take on risks that would deter a commercial lender.

By taking on some of the risk, these institutions can encourage commercial lenders and other investors to participate. They are facing increasing pressure to attract this private finance alongside their own investment, a process known as ‘mobilisation’. They track the amount raised, the number of private dollars attracted for each public dollar invested, and the proportion of their investments that supports climate goals. But an institution can attract more private finance by focusing on countries where commercial investors are already willing to lend. Its mobilisation total can rise even if projects in poorer countries still cannot get a loan.

A £30 million transaction in a least-developed country took two years to arrange. Government-backed institutions took on 80 per cent of the deal’s financial risk, reducing the risk of losses for private investors.

That the same public subsidy could have attracted ten times as much private money in a middle-income country within six months. Judged solely by the private money attracted, the quicker deal would score better. Yet the first deal might not have gone ahead without government-backed institutions taking on most of the risk.

Climate targets can encourage a similar choice. Large renewable-energy projects in established markets can attract private investors and help a development finance institution meet its climate target. Smaller investments in poorer countries can take longer to prepare. Staff who spend months arranging one of these investments may attract less private finance than colleagues working on a large power project.

Estimates for 2015–24 show that upper-middle-income countries, the relatively wealthier developing economies, received 62 per cent of the private climate finance attracted by these institutions. Their share of private finance attracted for other purposes was 49 per cent.

Governments funding these institutions should ask whether higher totals come from financing businesses that struggled to borrow, or from doing more deals in markets where credit is easier to obtain.

Development finance institutions should explain why a borrower needed their help. Did the business need a longer loan than commercial lenders would offer? Would private investors participate only if the institution took on some of the risk? The amount invested does not answer those questions. Nor does the difficulty of arranging an investment establish that it deserves government support. Its expected benefits still need to justify the cost and risk.

Attracting private investment to a country where firms have few commercial lenders can take more work than attracting one to a country with an established commercial banking sector. Government-backed institutions may also need to take on a larger share of the financial risk. Reports should explain the borrowing problem and how the development finance institution dealt with it, alongside the amount of private money raised.

Some institutions already have targets to keep investment flowing to poorer countries. Swedfund, Sweden’s development finance institution, had set a target for one-third of its investments to be in least-developed countries. It counts investments rather than monetary value, so each deal has the same weight in the calculation, whatever its size. Several small investments in poorer countries therefore count for more than one large investment elsewhere. That gives staff a reason to keep pursuing smaller deals even when the sums involved do little for the overall investment total.

FMO, the Dutch development bank, has also introduced a minimum target for new investment in least-developed countries. A country target gives governments a way to judge whether the institution is continuing to work in places that commercial investors tend to avoid.

Development finance institutions should also report promising investments they could not finance. A small-business loan may have been judged too costly to arrange; a project to protect against drought may have failed to attract investors. These cases can show where existing lending terms or investment criteria need to change. They are easily overlooked in an annual report focused on completed deals.

African policymakers and business organisations should ask these institutions which borrowers they are turning away and why. More money raised is welcome, but it is a poor measure of success if viable businesses still cannot get loans they can afford to repay.

This blog is based on a working paper by the authors.

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Africa has spent decades asking how much of a commodity can be transformed before it leaves the continent. But the deeper question is what that transformation leaves behind. Development depends not only on the productive assets an economy accumulates, but on whether those assets generate capabilities that can be retained, recombined, and applied beyond the investment that created them.

A factory doesn’t only matter because of what it produces, but because of the capabilities and economic relationships it sets in motion. When knowledge, skills, and technology travel beyond its walls and become available for other forms of production, the initial investment generates a multiplier effect: not simply more output, employment or income, but more productive possibilities.

There is a simple experiment to test this. Suppose a nation successfully attracts a large foreign company. Now remove the investor from the picture. What would remain? Jobs vanish, suppliers lose their contracts, management and technological capabilities leave with the investor. Even a sophisticated factory can become little more than an ageing installation once the business model that sustained it is gone.

Of course, some things would remain: infrastructure, trained workers, accumulated skills, perhaps a still-functioning plant and the tax revenues the investment had generated. The questions become: Can workers carry their skills elsewhere? Can local suppliers enter new industries and firms recombine acquired capabilities into new configurations of production? Can technologies and managerial knowledge become the seed of enterprises the original investor never contemplated?

Beyond the factory walls

When an investment generates capabilities that can be reused beyond the original activities, its effects multiply. What is learned in one activity can become available to another, allowing production to become cumulative rather than self-contained. One form of production creates the conditions for another. Conversely, production may increase without substantially expanding the economy’s capacity to produce beyond the original activity. The factory has created output, but the industrial system has not necessarily become more capable.

Such effects do not emerge automatically. They depend on whether the surrounding economic system allows capabilities acquired inside an investment to circulate beyond it: into suppliers, workers, firms, technologies and new markets. The policy challenge is to turn the investment from a self-contained production unit into a platform for capability diffusion. This requires policies that deliberately connect the investment to the wider productive economy: supplier-development programmes that help local firms meet technical and quality requirements; training partnerships that allow workers to acquire skills that remain transferable beyond the original employer; technology-extension and adaptation mechanisms that enable firms to apply imported technologies to local uses; financing instruments that help capable suppliers and employees move into new activities; and structured links between firms, research institutions and markets through which knowledge generated in one activity can be applied to another. The purpose is to maximise the transmission and reuse of the capabilities it generates. The mechanism is cumulative: investment creates capabilities; policy enables those capabilities to diffuse; finance and markets allow them to be recombined in new activities; and each new activity can become a source of capabilities for the next.

This is why the African debate over mineral beneficiation and local value addition needs to be reframed. The recent case of Tata Chemicals Magadi in Kenya is instructive. A presidential order initially required the company to leave the country over concerns that more than 95 per cent of its soda ash production was exported. The government subsequently changed course, saying the Magadi concession would instead be reopened to competitive bidding. The rationale is to capture more value from the resource by developing glass and chemical industries around it.

This objective is understandable. But replacing the investor, or redirecting production towards a different product, does not by itself alter the productive capabilities of the economy. A different factory does not necessarily mean a different productive structure. A new production model depends on engineers who can develop and operate it, suppliers capable of serving it, technologies that can be adapted, entrepreneurs able to build around it, and markets large enough to sustain the resulting industries. Without these conditions, the new factory may look different, but the productive structure around it may remain much the same.

A more ambitious question is therefore not whether African countries should move beyond exporting commodities in raw form, but whether their resource base can be leveraged to generate a widening circle of capabilities around it. Building a glass factory where there was once a mineral export may be significant progress. The real industrial transformation, however, would be to develop the capabilities, firms and productive relationships through which one investment can become the foundation for the next, and eventually, for forms of production that do not yet exist.

Such a transition requires more than an endowment of natural resources and political will. It requires capital, reliable energy, technology, infrastructure and markets large enough to sustain investment in increasingly specialised forms of production, often beyond the scale of a single domestic market. Regional integration can provide that scale, allowing emerging capabilities to be tested, expanded and sustained across borders. A supplier serving one factory can serve firms in neighbouring countries; specialised skills can move across regional production networks; and technologies, standards and business models developed in one market or sector can be adapted to different productive environments. The regional market therefore becomes not simply a larger pool of consumers, but a larger field for the circulation and recombination of productive capabilities.

What matters is not merely what African economies produce today, but whether their productive capabilities continue to deepen, adapt and generate new possibilities. Industrialisation should be understood not simply as the accumulation of productive assets, but as the accumulation, circulation and recombination of capabilities. A factory transforms a commodity. Industrial capacity transforms the possibilities of an economy.

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Ethiopia acquired its present territorial configuration in the late nineteenth century through the expansionist campaigns of Emperor Menelik II, who was Amhara. The expansion incorporated vast territories and diverse ethnic groups into the imperial core and has since been subject to divergent interpretations.

Some argue that the campaigns reunified Ethiopia after the fragmentation that characterised the Era of the Princes (1769-1855). Others depict the campaigns as an Amhara-led colonial expansion that brought non-Amhara groups under political domination, economic subjugation, and cultural stigmatisation.  

The latter perspective constitutes what can be described as the Amhara-oppressor narrative, which casts the Amhara as a dominant group until the institutionalisation of the ethnic federal arrangement in 1991. It has become influential in contemporary Ethiopian political discourse and shapes how Amhara identity is understood, but it is one fuelled by Fascist Italy.

The construction of the Amhara oppressor

In 1935, Italy invaded Ethiopia to avenge their defeat at the Battle of Adwa in 1896 and establish a colonial administration. The Fascists understood Ethiopian unity as an important factor in the Adwa victory and sought to create ethnic divisions as part of their strategy of divide et impera. The Amhara were singled out as a primary target of Fascist propaganda. This propaganda extended the Shoa-Tigray dichotomy that the Italians had attempted to exploit to divide the ruling houses of the two provinces during the Battle of Adwa.

Shoa is one of the historic Amhara provinces from which several emperors, including Menelik II, emerged. Against this backdrop, Fascist propaganda portrayed the Amhara collectively as neftegna (gun-holder), chequagn (oppressor), and feudal. It contrasted this portrayal with an image of non-Amhara groups as oppressed, dehumanised, and dispossessed of their land by Amhara settlers. To win the support of groups such as the Oromo, the Fascists presented themselves as agents of liberation from alleged Amhara tyranny.

Throughout the Italian occupation of Ethiopia (1936-1941), the Fascists took measures to marginalise the Amhara. For example, Amharic was displaced as a working language in non-Amhara areas, where Arabic and Afaan Oromo were promoted in its place. Land owned by Amhara peasants was confiscated and redistributed to Oromo and Somali populations to secure their support. Estimates suggest that between 600,000 and 800,000 Amhara were evicted during the five years of Fascist rule. The anti-Amhara narrative constructed by Fascist Italy continued to influence Ethiopian politics after the occupation when it was appropriated by domestic actors.

Domestication of the Amhara oppressor narrative

Fascist Italy withdrew from Ethiopia in 1941 following the combined efforts of Ethiopian patriotic resistance forces and Great Britain, which intervened against Italy during the Second World War. However, the anti-Amhara narratives the fascists had planted continued to grow and were appropriated by ethnic-focused parties such as the Eritrean Liberal Progressive Party (ELPP), the Somali Youth League (SYL), the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), and other political actors.

These political groups adopted derogatory terms constructed by the Fascists, such as neftegna, chequagn, and feudal, to stigmatise the Amhara. For example, the ELPP, formed in 1946, portrayed the Amhara as having contributed to the Italian colonisation of Eritrea and the impoverishment of Tigreans. Viewing the Amhara as the ‘worst enemy’ of Eritreans and Tigreans, the ELPP advocated the establishment of an independent state of Greater Tigray. The SYL, established in 1943, claimed that Amhara-led forces had taken control of the resource-rich Ogaden in the late nineteenth century. It sought to unify the Ogaden and other Somali-inhabited territories of eastern Ethiopia with the Somali state. Beyond rhetorical attacks, the SYL was also associated with violence against Amhara residents in the Ogaden, including killings and expulsions.

The most conspicuous political appropriation of the anti-Amhara narrative emerged within the Ethiopian Student Movement during the 1960s. Influenced by Marxism-Leninism and its conception of oppressed and oppressor nations, activists interpreted Ethiopia’s political and social relations through this binary framework. In this interpretation, the Amhara were broadly labelled as the oppressor, while other groups were cast as the oppressed. The movement therefore advocated the right to self-determination, including secession, as a means through which the alleged oppressed groups could free themselves from Amhara domination.

The TPLF, established in 1975, explicitly described its political goal as liberating Tigreans from Amhara national oppression. It waged an armed struggle against the Derg (1974-1991), a Marxist military regime that is erroneously portrayed as Amhara-dominated. After seizing power in alliance with other political groups in May 1991, the TPLF institutionalised anti-Amhara narratives within the political and constitutional order of the Ethiopian state.

The institutionalisation of a narrative

Three administrative and institutional mechanisms were used to institutionalise anti-Amhara narratives in post-1991 Ethiopia. The first was the restructuring of the Ethiopian state along ethnic lines. This system granted ethnic groups their own territories as a means of ensuring the right to self-determination. Administrative boundaries came to be understood as defining exclusive ownership of territory. This conception of territorial ownership marginalised the Amhara economically and politically by treating them as non-indigenous to areas outside the Amhara region, including Addis Ababa.

The second was the 1995 Constitution. Its preamble states that ‘our common destiny can best be served by rectifying historically unjust relationships’. Given that the dominant political narrative of the period portrayed the Amhara as having benefited from historical political arrangements, this provision was interpreted as a basis for correcting that alleged injustice. For example, Amhara civil servants were dismissed from their positions as part of an effort to address their alleged overrepresentation in the civil service.

The third was media framing. Government officials used party-affiliated media, including Ethiopian Television and the Abiyotawi Democracy newspaper, to promote narratives portraying the Amhara as historical beneficiaries and perpetrators of domination. Terms such as neftegna, timkhtegna (chauvinist), feudal, and ahadawi (unitarist) were frequently used by officials to stigmatise Amhara identity and intimidate Amhara opposition.

Contemporary conceptions of Amhara identity

Currently, understandings of Amhara identity are divided between two competing claims. One is the colonial-produced anti-Amhara narrative, which views the Amhara as historical oppressors. The ruling party, armed groups, and some opposition political parties have used this rhetoric to mobilise their ethnic constituencies.

The other is the view propagated by Amhara nationalists, who challenge the oppressor narrative. They argue that the Amhara were not oppressors but instead helped save Ethiopia from Italian colonisation and, in doing so, protected non-Amhara groups from the assimilation of Italian culture. They also argue that the use of Amharic as a common language enabled communication across Ethiopia and helped prevent the fragmentation of the country.

These competing understandings of Amhara identity are a reality of contemporary Ethiopian politics. They have contributed to ethnic tensions and the insurgent movements that have afflicted the country. An inclusive understanding of Ethiopia’s past and a shared vision of its future may therefore offer a more constructive path than continued contestation over colonially produced narratives.

Photo credit: delso.photo used with permission CC BY-SA

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