“It’s the little things citizens do. That’s what will make the difference.” — Wangari Maathai

This week I was invited by a wonderful organisation called TrustAfrica to a session where they were thinking about Africa’s future and how we might reimagine it, which is my current pet subject, as anyone who reads these notes already knows. I could not go, and I am sorry about it because the questions they circulated beforehand were better than most of the questions at most convenings. The one set down for the afternoon was this: if anything were possible, what should Africa build between now and 2063? Since many of the people I would have been talking to in the corridors read these notes anyway, I want to put my answer here, where they and the rest of us can argue with it.

I began by writing a list

Corridors, deep-water ports, industrial parks, a working continental market, a research base, a few new cities. It is not a foolish list, and a continent that cannot move a tomato from Kilifi to Nairobi without losing a third of it does need roads and cold rooms. Agenda 2063 is largely written in that grammar for reasons that made sense at the time.

But I have written that list before, more than once, for more than one gathering, and I have watched what happens to it afterwards, which is mostly nothing. So I stopped and asked a different question. When African commerce has actually held together across centuries and across borders, without anybody in charge, what has held it together?

A trader in Gao did not have to trust a trader in Fez

The answer, when I went looking, was almost embarrassingly small.

Trans-Saharan trade under Mali was not an enterprise and had no plan. It was thousands of independent merchants, family firms and caravan operators, and what turned them into something that behaved like a system was three cheap shared things: gold of a known fineness, a body of commercial law in the Maliki tradition administered by qadis who sat in every trading town from Sijilmasa to Timbuktu, and a common working language of trade. A trader in Gao did not have to trust a trader in Fez. He had to trust that a judge in either town would rule the same way. On that footing, and with nobody in charge of any of it, the arrangement ran for six hundred years across a desert.

Each of those things spread because using it beat not using it, on the first day, for a merchant who did not have to believe anything about Mali.

That is the test I have started applying to everything we propose under the heading of African renewal, my own proposals included, and most of it fails. If a business must first be persuaded of our argument in order to adopt the thing — any thing, however good — it will not travel, and we will spend the next decade explaining why it did not catch on.

So the honest answer to the question of what Africa should build is not the list. There are five shared things we do not have that are legal and buildable now, and that no minister will ever want to announce.

One. A fair price for our own borrowing

The cost of money decides what can be built at all, and we hardly ever argue about it.

African governments borrow in dollars at roughly 9% while comparable countries in Asia borrow at under 5%. The International Energy Agency has found that financing an electricity access project here can cost up to four times as much as the same class of project in Europe. The same panel, in better sun, costs four times as much to finance. I should say that the 9% is an average across very different borrowers and that the exact figure moves with the market. The gap has been large and old for decades, and that is what the argument rests on.

At 15%, on a loan you have to repay within five years, you cannot build anything that takes longer than five years to start paying you back: no grid, no cold chain, no processing plant, no laboratory, no forest. Give the same person 5% and twenty years to repay, and every one of those becomes possible, without a single thing having changed about what is being built.

I have come to think this settles an argument we have been having badly for thirty years. When we talk about a stolen contract, we are talking about the sum stolen, and we are right to be angry about it. But the sum is the small part.

The large part is the premium added to every shilling every other borrower in that country will raise for the next decade, paid by people who never saw the money and mostly never hear about it.

Yuen Yuen Ang has done the most careful work I know on sorting corruption by what it does to an economy rather than by how it offends us. Reading her, I keep arriving at the same uncomfortable place. Our anti-corruption efforts have focused on the moral condition of officials rather than on the price the country pays for their reputation, and the second is where the money actually is.

Two. An underwriter for the money we already have

Our money is here, sitting perfectly still.

African pension funds and insurers hold hundreds of billions of dollars, and in several countries the great bulk of it sits in government paper. Ghana permits its pension funds to hold up to 25% of their assets in alternative investments, but they hold only 0.58%.

The ceiling has never been the problem. A trustee will not put members’ money into a Kenyan toll road because there is no appraisal file she can defend to her board on the morning it goes wrong, and a treasury bill has never cost anybody their job. Build the thing that produces that file, own it through the funds themselves, and a good deal of what we keep calling a financing gap turns out to be something far more ordinary.

Three. Money that holds its value

Africans have already voted on this while our sector was looking the other way.

This continent now leads the world in the use of dollar-pegged stablecoins, and Nigeria alone moved something in the order of twenty-two billion dollars of them in a single year. I do not read that as a vote for the dollar. I read it as a vote for money that holds its value from one week to the next, cast by traders, mama mbogas, and freelancers who have no view on monetary sovereignty and no patience for the question, at precisely the moment when we are laying African-currency settlement rails on the assumption that they do.

Afreximbank has the balance sheet and the treaty standing to issue a savings unit backed by African productive assets, redeemable, in denominations a hawker can hold. As far as I can tell, nobody has asked it to.

Four. A standard that we hold ourselves

Whoever certifies takes the margin, while whoever grows or digs carries the risk. This is an old arrangement in our economic history and very little about it has changed.

East Africa has had its own organic standard since 2007 — the first regional organic standard written anywhere outside Europe and North America — and the participatory guarantee model beneath it runs on exactly the chama’s logic: your neighbours inspect you, and being thrown out hurts. Twenty years on, it is still at pilot scale, because it has no recognition in the markets that pay and no African audit body with the standing to demand any.

What such a thing is worth was shown last year, and reported almost entirely in the trade press. The Democratic Republic of Congo suspended its cobalt exports for 8 months and then reopened them under a quota. The price of cobalt hydroxide more than doubled and stayed doubled. One African state, acting alone, on one mineral, moved a world price and held it.

Of the tonnage allowed out this year, a slice is held back — some 10% — for the regulator to allocate at its discretion.

That discretionary slice is where this one will be lost, and every producer body we build after it should be judged on whether it has one.

What happens when we hold no standard at all is also on the record. A company from Dubai called Blue Carbon has signed agreements over forest land in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Kenya, Liberia and Tanzania. In Zimbabwe, the agreement covers close to a fifth of the country. No old empire did this to us; our own ministers signed the papers.

Five. A legal shape that fits what people already do

This is the least glamorous of the five, and I have come to believe it binds most tightly, because a society can only pursue the futures it can incorporate.

In 2021, I spent several months sitting on the sidelines of women’s table banking groups in Kilifi and Kwale, with 900 women in all. The group meets under a tree it has claimed. The secretary writes each contribution into an exercise book, the kind children carry to school. The money goes into a metal box. One woman keeps the box, and another keeps the key, and the separation is the point, because no one person can open it. Loans are argued for and decided in the room. At the end of the year, the group breaks the box, which is their phrase, and every woman takes out her share dressed for the occasion.

Repayment discipline in these groups embarrasses the banks that will not lend to them. The same architecture operates across the continent under other names — stokvel in Johannesburg, esusu among the Yoruba, tontine across francophone West Africa — which suggests it is a design rather than a local habit.

And there is no legal form in which two hundred of those women can own a processing plant as themselves.

Kenya’s first Co-operative Societies Ordinance, in 1931, did not permit Africans to belong to a co-operative at all. The ordinance that replaced it in 1945 and the Act that replaced it in 1966 carried forward a registrar with approval over members' decisions. The alternative is a company, built for capital that is passive, sellable to strangers and in control in proportion to what it put in, which inverts every arrangement those women have made work for eleven years.

Thandika Mkandawire — who died in 2020, and whom we quote a great deal more often than we read — spent a career arguing that the sequence we were sold had been argued backwards.

“I am very interested in the development of nations. I am African so I don’t have a choice.” — Thandika Mkandawire

This is what his argument looks like on the ground. There is no shortage of enterprise. There is a shortage of legal shapes it is allowed to take.

What is actually for sale this year

None of this is theoretical. As I write, Anglo American is selling De Beers, with completion aimed at the end of 2026, after write-downs that would once have been unimaginable. Botswana holds 15% of the company and pre-emptive rights over the sale — Namibia and Angola are in and around the structure too.

What is being sold is not diamonds. It is a system for aggregating, grading, pricing, and selling a mineral, built over a century, valued at roughly the price of one mid-sized mine. The people who know how to hold a price on diamonds could hold one on lithium. Every report I have read treats it as a diamond story.

Where I have been standing

In 2011, I chaired the task force that delivered Kenya’s open data initiative, on the honest belief that if the government published its data, the quality of public decisions would improve. We meant it, and given what we then believed about where the world was tending, we were right to mean it. What we never touched was who gets to decide, and publishing the data did not change that. For a good many years afterwards I counted organisations, ours among them, and mistook the count for progress.

“Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories.” — Amílcar Cabral, party directive, 1965

I do not know how to make any of the five interesting enough to be funded. That is the part I have not solved, and I would have wanted the room’s help with it.

But the merchants of Gao had no 2063. They had a coin of a known fineness and a judge in the next town who would rule the same way as the judge behind them, and on those two things they ran a trading system across the Sahara for six centuries. Passing a statute, capitalising an underwriter and getting a standard recognised would take perhaps ten years. We have thirty-seven.

So I am sorry to have missed the session. The question I would have put to it is not the one on the programme. It is not what Africa should build by 2063. It is whether those women, still meeting under their tree next week and the week after, can own the factory as their own, be paid in money that holds its value, and be underwritten by someone they could vote out. None of that waits on anybody’s permission, and none of it waits on 2063.

I knew Njambi Koikai. Most Kenyans knew her as Fyah Mummah, the reggae MC with the enormous laugh; I knew her as a friend who spent her last years explaining, in public and in detail, what endometriosis had done to her body. Tissue like the lining of the uterus grew on her lungs, collapsing them month after month, and it took seventeen years to name what was happening. On 19 May 2024, from a hospital bed, she wrote to President William Ruto as he prepared for a state visit to the United States, asking him to visit the Centre for Endometriosis Care in Atlanta and to invest in at-home care. She died on 3 June 2024, aged 38.

On 18 August 2026, last week, the broadcaster Natalie Githinji came out of intensive care and told her followers she had been confirmed with stage-four endometriosis. She, too, appealed to have endometriosis and reproductive health covered under the Social Health Authority, and asked how to sign a petition to make it so. She has lived with the disease for seventeen years.

Two women, two hospital beds, two years apart, making the same request from the same kind of platform. That the appeal has to be made at all — by a famous patient, while she is acutely ill, to a president rather than to a coverage rule that exists whether or not anyone is currently watching — is the failure I want to write about.

The scale we refuse to measure

The World Health Organisation is precise: endometriosis “affects roughly 10% (190 million) of reproductive age women and girls worldwide.” It is a chronic disease of severe pelvic pain, heavy bleeding, fatigue and infertility, and it is diagnosed, on average, seven to ten years after symptoms begin. In Africa, the number is a guess dressed as a fact. A 2021 Nairobi study found endometriosis in 8.9 per cent of a sample of 224 women; Nigerian series have reported prevalence as high as 48.1 per cent. The problem is that endometriosis was long assumed to be rare in Black women, and that assumption quietly suppressed research, training and diagnosis across the continent. Kenyan scholars have a blunt phrase for the resulting evidence gap: data poverty.

Scarcity is also a workforce issue. The Ministry of Health told Parliament in 2024 that Kenya had roughly 700 gynaecologists and only five trained laparoscopic gynaecological surgeons, most of whom were based at national referral hospitals. Laparoscopic excision, the surgery Natalie Githinji needed, is quoted privately at between KSh 350,000 and over KSh 1.5 million. A country cannot, at scale, diagnose a disease that requires keyhole surgery to confirm when it has five surgeons who can perform it.

A women’s issue is a national issue, and here is the arithmetic.

The case for treating endometriosis as a national rather than a private issue is fiscal, not sentimental. The WERF EndoCost study of 909 women across European referral centres (Simoens and colleagues, Human Reproduction, 2012) found that “costs of productivity loss of €6298 per woman were double the health care costs of €3113 per woman,” for an average annual total of €9,579 each. Endometriosis UK, drawing on the same model, states that endometriosis “costs the UK economy £8.2bn a year in treatment, loss of work and healthcare costs.” These are the numbers a finance ministry understands: a condition affecting one in ten women of working age, with a multi-year diagnostic delay, is a labour-productivity question before it is anything else. And delay compounds the eventual bill, because early disease left untreated becomes the stage-four, frozen-pelvis, intensive-care disease that is far more expensive to treat.

Kenya has never costed the disease, so I have done the arithmetic myself. Around 14.1 million Kenyan women are of reproductive age; at the WHO’s ten per cent, some 1.4 million live with endometriosis, and at the 8.9 per cent found in Nairobi, 1.25 million. Applying the productivity loss measured by Nnoaham and colleagues to Kenya’s output per worker of KSh 813,800, and assuming roughly two-thirds of affected women are economically active, the country forfeits the equivalent of between 130,000 and 274,000 full-time workers a year, worth KSh 106 billion to KSh 223 billion, or between 0.6 and 1.3 per cent of GDP. Treating the disease would cost less than losing it. Seventy thousand laparoscopic excisions at KSh 500,000 each come to KSh 35 billion, and households are already paying that surgical bill privately, one bank loan and one fundraiser at a time. The Treasury’s saving is notional, since it has only moved the line item off the national budget and onto women’s balance sheets.

When a condition is coded as a women’s issue, it slips down the funding order. Ellis and colleagues, writing in npj Women’s Health in 2024, put it starkly: “In 2022, the total US funding for endometriosis was $16 million (0.038%), which translates to $2.00 per patient per year.” This is where male political leaders matter, not out of chivalry but out of arithmetic. When President Emmanuel Macron launched France’s national strategy on 11 January 2022, he said something no Kenyan president has yet said: “L’endométriose. Ce n’est pas un problème de femmes, c’est un problème de société” — it is not a women’s problem, it is society’s problem — of a disease affecting some 2.5 million French women. In Australia, it was a male health minister, Greg Hunt, who told Parliament in December 2017: “The time is long overdue to bring this condition out of the dark… On behalf of all of those in Parliament and all of those who have been responsible for our medical system, I apologise.” The point is not the gallantry. It is that a condition stops being ignorable the moment the people who control budgets stop treating it as somebody else’s file.

Media Personality, Janet Mbugua has also been very vocal on this issue

What Kenya has actually done, and what it already can do

The honest answer on policy is: very little specific to endometriosis. After Jahmby Koikai died, a nominated MP sought a ministerial statement on specialised facilities. After Natalie Githinji’s diagnosis, Senator Karen Nyamu called for a review of SHA coverage and submitted a Senate motion for a National Endometriosis Management Framework that covers data, diagnosis, referral pathways, specialist capacity, and insurance. That is valuable and overdue. But a motion asks the executive to consider; the executive already holds all the instruments it needs.

Under the Social Health Insurance Act of 2023, the Cabinet Secretary for Health, in consultation with the SHA Board, prescribes and amends the tariffs and benefit packages. This is not a theoretical power. In May 2026, the Cabinet Secretary, Aden Duale, gazetted an enhanced package that added oncology, haematology, and maternity benefits under the same section of the Act. The Benefits Package and Tariffs Advisory Panel that recommended those additions could list laparoscopic excision, diagnostic imaging and hormonal treatment for endometriosis in the same way. The ministry can issue a national clinical guideline, add treatments to the essential medicines list, and fund surgical training through the medium-term budget. None of this requires new legislation or a famous patient in the ICU. It requires a decision, and the decision has an owner.

The country that got it closest to right

If there is a model, it is Australia. It launched the world’s first National Action Plan for Endometriosis in July 2018, opened by that ministerial apology, and then did the unglamorous thing of paying for it year after year. It has committed 87.2 million dollars in endometriosis-specific funding, opened a national network of endometriosis and pelvic pain clinics — now 33, with at least one in every region — created Medicare items for longer specialist consultations, and listed new medicines for subsidy. The mechanism is the lesson: statutory coverage, a clinical pathway, a trained workforce and sustained money, all under ministerial sponsorship.

France supplies the political framing but a cautionary delivery record: years after Macron’s announcement, endometriosis is still not on the standard ALD 30 long-term illness list that guarantees full reimbursement, available only case by case, and its regional care pathways remain uneven — all regions engaged by March 2025, but only five with finalised organisation. A president’s words move a nation’s attention; only budgets and statute move its care. The United Kingdom, with its NICE guideline NG73 and a stubborn eight-year average diagnostic delay, shows that guidelines, when unfunded and unenforced, change very little.

What African countries should do

1. Include endometriosis in the national health insurance benefit package, with tariffs for imaging, excision surgery, and medication. Treasuries will resist the cost; the answer is that untreated delay is the more expensive line item.

2. Issue a national clinical guideline and referral pathway, so that a girl presenting with disabling period pain is investigated rather than sent home with paracetamol.

3. Train primary-care clinicians to suspect and refer. It is the cheapest intervention with the largest return, because most of the delay happens at the first, dismissive consultation.

4. Build laparoscopic capacity as regional centres of excellence, shared across counties and borders through the East African Community, rather than concentrated in a single private practice in Nairobi.

5. Add endometriosis to national health information systems, so the data that policy needs finally exists.

6. Teach menstrual health in schools as a form of clinical literacy, treating disabling pain as a signal rather than a rite of passage. Kenya removed tax on menstrual products in 2004 and distributes pads in schools; Nigeria launched Africa’s first national menstrual health policy in 2025. The rails are already laid.

The instruments are in the drawer, gazetted, funded elsewhere and proven to work. Whether they come out should not depend on which woman with a following is currently well enough to ask.

Last week, I was invited to speak and contribute to the strategic thinking of a philanthropic organisation whose entire reason for being is learning — the conviction that if you unlock how a person learns, you unlock almost everything else they might become.

They put real money behind education, and behind the pathways that carry young people from learning to earning, here on the continent and in a couple of other parts of the world. And they have spent the last few years quietly moving away from the old habit of funding one clever idea and scaling it everywhere, towards something humbler and more local. I liked them for that. It made the conversation easy.

I told them about the thing I have been chewing on for two years, which I have come to call the African Reconstruction.

Here is the heart of it.

For a hundred years, we have measured Africa against a future designed somewhere else. In my grandparents’ time, modernity and civilisation meant speaking the Queen’s English and holding a teacup just so, with a finger out. My daughter, watching the flyovers stack up over a city, calls them “first-floor roads” — and somewhere along the way we decided that a city with first-floor roads is developed and a city on the ground floor is not. We measure health by hospitals and pills, and hold a deep suspicion of the plant that heals us — while happily swallowing the pill made from that same plant, whose patent we do not own.

We measure development by GDP, which is a clever way of averaging one enormous factory across a million poor people and calling the result progress; put the DRC’s growth figures next to its poverty and see whether they describe the same country. We measure education by university degrees, so the old man who is a master of medicinal plants counts for nothing. We measure employment by contracts, so the young woman with a shop, an iPhone, and a following reports herself as unemployed — because we have taught her that her hustle is not “real” work.

Against all of that, I want to hold up the things we have stopped counting. When my family and I spent a month away last year, we did not tell our barber or our shopkeeper we were travelling. Two weeks in, my phone was full of calls: we haven’t seen you in town, is everything all right? Set that against the stories we now hear from big cities of people found in their flats weeks after they have died, and tell me which of us is developed. Ubuntu, mutual aid, belonging, the fact that a wedding and a funeral are communal affairs and not private ones — these are not soft sentiments. They are the operating system. “It takes a village” was never a proverb. It was a description of how the machine actually runs.

And here is what convinces me it is design, not an accident: we still live in both worlds at once. The same couple takes goats and honey to pay bridewealth, and then holds the white wedding. The same man runs with the bulls in western Kenya in full traditional regalia on Saturday, and stands in court as a senior advocate on Monday — same person, same week. We crush neem leaves into our tea, and we take the prescribed pill, and see no contradiction. If the old ways had been mistakes, they would have been replaced long ago. They were not mistakes. They were renamed. The medicine man was called a witch doctor; communal land was downgraded to individual title; a whole functioning system — with its own credit, its own insurance, its own succession law, its own courts — was stripped of official recognition without ever being disproved.

When they asked what that means for them, as funders — what they might actually do differently on Monday morning — I made five proposals.

One: build the form around the design.

There’s an old story about a university that put up all its buildings and then, instead of laying the footpaths, planted grass and waited. For a whole year the students cut their own tracks across the lawns, and only then did the builders come and pave exactly where the feet had already gone. That’s the whole idea, in one picture. Don’t force people down the path you wish they’d take. Pave the one they’re already walking.

For sixty years we’ve done the opposite. We import an institution whole — a court, a title deed, a bank, a school — and then we treat the people as the problem when they won’t use it. Building the form around the design means turning that around: look closely at what people are already doing, accept that it’s a design, not a defect, and build the institution to fit it instead of dropping it on top.

We’ve actually done it once, and it’s the reason the world now studies us. We didn’t bank the “unbanked” by building more branches. We built M-Pesa — and its designers asked nobody to change how they trusted or how they moved money. It just paved the path that was already there: money moving hand to hand, on somebody’s word, in the rhythm of ordinary life. The design was ours all along. We finally built a form to fit it.

And the same move is sitting there, unused, almost everywhere you look. Nine in ten disputes in this country never see a courtroom — they’re settled under a tree, by elders, on a logic of putting things right rather than punishing. We can keep calling that backwards, or we can give those gatherings real standing, a proper record, a light bridge to the formal courts, and suddenly we have a justice system that reaches the ninety per cent the courts never will. Most of our land is held not as individual title but as layered, inherited, shared right — and that’s not chaos, it’s a whole system with its own logic. Write it down as it actually is, instead of squeezing every family into a title deed drawn up to make a bank comfortable, and you protect people instead of throwing them off their land.

That’s the method. Take the way of doing that has refused to die, treat it as the plan, and build around it. Where a modern tool genuinely helps that practice, reach for it. Where it doesn’t, leave it alone. Not everything needs an app.

Two: broaden what we count as education. We have decided education means degrees, and that the person without one is not worth investing in — so the money flows to people like me, who speak fluent English and can hold a room, and away from the woman who left school at fourteen because she fell pregnant, or because there was simply no money to go on. She is not slow; the system merely assumed she was.

Learning lives well outside the classroom: in agriculture and value addition, in herbal medicine, in seed-keeping, in the artisanal trades we call jua kali. Teach a girl how a savings group actually works before she is a mother in crisis, not after. Teach a child which leaf outside the door settles a headache, so she does not reach for a pill first. And redefine the teacher — not the bearded figure who holds all the knowledge, but a facilitator — because my fourteen-year-old is already coding at a level his school cannot reach, and within a decade far fewer of our children will pass through a university to learn what the world will by then hand them freely.

Meanwhile, a whole generation sits unemployed on top of land they have been taught to see as beneath them. Imagine if we made it dignified to work it — if a young rabbit farmer were as respected as a young banker. That alone would change everything.

Three: fund exposure, not only education. Here’s something I’ve come to believe deeply: you cannot describe a thing into someone’s imagination. If a person has never seen a shower, you can explain the pipes and the pressure and the warm water all you like — they still won’t quite picture it until they’ve stood under one. Imagination doesn’t run on description. It runs on having seen.

And notice the quiet double standard in how we work. Those of us with a bit of money and a passport do this for ourselves all the time — we fly off to a conference in another country, we watch how people there run a hospital or a market or a school, and we come home lit up with ideas we saw with our own eyes. Then we take a woman in a village, sit her in a hall with a booklet and a facilitator, and wonder why nothing sticks. We give ourselves exposure. We give her instruction. And then we call the two the same thing.

They are not the same thing — and this is where so many good programmes quietly die. A person who has only been told how something works can’t keep it going when it starts to wobble. A person who has seen it, handled it, understood in her bones why it works, can fix it, adapt it, and teach the next person. That, far more than any manual, is what makes a thing last after the money has gone. We keep handing over the thing without ever handing over the sight of it working, and then we act surprised when it stops the moment we stop paying.

Exposure also does something bigger: it stretches your sense of what is even possible for you. The young man who has only ever watched his uncle scratch a living off the land will not dream of a farm that thrives — but take him to one, a real one, making real money, and something shifts behind his eyes. An expanded imagination feeds ambition, and ambition feeds action. So fund the bus. Fund the visit, the exchange, the week spent somewhere else watching someone do the thing well. It’s cheap, it’s unglamorous, it fits no logframe neatly — and it changes people far more than another workshop ever will.

Four: support disaggregated development, and be at peace with the fact that it will look untidy and chaotic. No two villages are alike — and any African will tell you that Nigerians and Kenyans are fantastically different people, so the thing that worked gloriously in Lagos may fail completely in Kilifi. The reflex to take a single success and stamp it everywhere — carried, let us be honest, on the soft power of the one holding the cheque — is where a great deal of good money quietly dies.

I have watched it happen in my own area: a programme arrives, a well is dug, the funder leaves, the well breaks, and no one knows how to fix it, so it sits there rusting — a monument to a good intention. Let different places go in different directions. It is more work to track. It is also the only development that outlives you.

Five: hold a flexible, agile posture — and make it safe to fail. Untested ideas need room to pivot; a straitjacketed programme cannot learn. One funder once had me rewrite a single proposal thirteen times and then report almost weekly on the money; another simply said, “we see what you are doing, we want to learn whether it works,” and stayed with us for years as we changed course again and again.

I will let you guess which one taught us more. And notice how many of the proposals that reach you are for trainings and workshops — it is because you cannot fail a workshop. You gather 58 people; they nod; you file a report; everyone is safe. We have made failure so expensive that people quietly fudge their results rather than admit a thing did not work, and retreat to the activities that cannot fail — which is to say, the activities that rarely matter.

Scale is what happens after a good experiment.

Remember that mobile money, the thing the whole world now studies, was never designed to scale; nobody knew that it would. Scale is what happens after a good experiment, when other people choose to take it up. So sow widely, make it safe to fail, and then publish everything you learn — in video, in audio, in our own languages, not only in reports nobody reads — and let the rest of us find it and make it our own. Do not tell me how to do it. Show me what you learned.

I am discovering all of this late. I keep thinking that if I had understood, at twenty-five, what productivity actually looks like in our own context, I might never have left the rural areas at all. But the reconstruction I am describing is not waiting for me or any funder to bless it.

The women in that county have been doing it all along — saving four dollars on two, settling their disputes under a tree, holding one another together without a regulator in sight. They never needed our permission. The only real question left is whether the rest of us — the ones with the money, the policies and the microphones — will finally recognise what we are looking at, and build around it rather than over it.

In Kibuyuni, on the Kwale coast, a cooperative of mostly women has been at this work since 2012. They are paid around thirty-five shillings for a kilo of dried seaweed. The international price for the same kilo is about seventy. And the carrageenan that kilo becomes — the thickener in toothpaste, face cream and processed food — sells for many multiples of that, in factories the farmers will never see. They have solved cultivation on flats the tide reclaims twice a day, they have solved drying, and they have solved the genuinely difficult problem of holding a cooperative together for fourteen years. The one thing they cannot touch is the price.

Across the water, the same crop tells a different story. In Zanzibar, seaweed is the third-largest foreign exchange earner after tourism and spices, employing about twenty-six thousand people, nearly eighty per cent of them women. The ocean between Kibuyuni and Zanzibar is the same ocean, the species are the same species, and the women are equally capable. The difference is everything that sits between the farmer and the final product — and that difference is built, not found.

The rest of my week on the road kept returning the same finding. In Masii, Carol Katio grows and processes mulberry, trains the farmers around her, and hunts for buyers in Asia herself — performing singlehandedly the work of an extension service, a standards bureau, and a trade mission, because none of the three exists for her crop.

In the hills above Kagwe Tea Factory, I stood in the middle of the oldest version of the problem: Kenya is the world’s largest exporter of black tea, and ninety-seven per cent of it leaves in bulk, unbranded, through the Mombasa auction, at an average of roughly two and a half dollars a kilo. The same kilo, blended and bagged and named in Europe, retails at ten times that. Six hundred thousand smallholders feed that system. The system was designed before independence, and on this one point we have proved remarkably faithful custodians.

And in Nairobi I sat with the exception. Flora Mutahi was the first person in Kenya to put spices into a teabag — she created the category rather than joining it — and Melvins Tea today exports more than it sells at home, to African markets first. Flora matters because she is the existence proof: the full distance from crop to brand to shelf can be travelled from here, and the value can be kept here. But she is also the measure of the problem, because she had to build every step of that road privately, over a career. A country that produces one Flora in a generation does not have a talent shortage. It has an architecture shortage.

The standard answer to all of this is consolidation, and it deserves to be taken seriously rather than mocked, because it promises real things: scale, consistent quality, access to finance, a single throat for the buyer to choke. Kenya took that offer. The result is visible in the tea numbers above — the aggregation succeeded magnificently at moving leaf and failed completely at moving farmers up the value chain, because the grower who feeds an aggregator she cannot steer is not a shareholder in her crop’s future; she is its cheapest input.

But honesty cuts the other way too, and this is where the argument usually goes soft. Cooperatives have also failed farmers in this country, catastrophically. Ask any coffee family of a certain generation what happened to their societies: farmers were assigned to them by geography, could not leave, waited months for payments that arrived skimmed, and eventually did the only rational thing, which was to uproot the bushes. Anyone proposing cooperative processing in Kenya has to answer for the coffee societies, or they are not proposing anything serious.

So the real question — the one I have been turning over since the coast — is why one cooperative architecture in Kenya failed farmers while another became the most successful financial system we have ever built. The chama-to-SACCO movement now holds over a trillion shillings, and it grew from the same cultural soil as the coffee societies.

We need many small processors — owned where they stand, branded in their own names

The difference, as far as I can work out, comes down to two design choices. In a chama, membership is chosen: you join people you trust, and you can leave. In a coffee society, membership was administrative: you belonged because of where your farm sat, and exit was impossible. And in a chama, the money at stake is your own savings, watched weekly, while the coffee farmer surrendered her crop and then waited, powerless, for someone else’s accounting. Ownership and exit — the ability to walk — turn out to be the discipline that keeps a collective honest. Everything else is detail.

That principle is what the small factories need. The women of Kibuyuni, Carol, and the tea growers of Kagwe do not need one big processor; they need many small ones — owned where they stand, branded in their own names — sharing a spine of the expensive, repeatable things: certification held at group level, laboratory testing done once, export logistics pooled, market intelligence held in common. And that spine must be built on the chama principle, not the coffee-society principle: the factories join it, own it, and can leave it. The moment it becomes something they feed but cannot steer, we will have rebuilt the auction with better branding. Who convenes such a spine — the factories themselves, a county, an industry body — is a question I do not yet have a complete answer to, and I would rather hold it open than pretend.

A national vision serious about them would be debated where they already deliberate

President William Ruto has just invited the country into a national conversation on the vision that will succeed Kenya’s Vision 2030, and I welcome it. But his address that opened it measured Kenya in multiples of other people’s journeys — South Korea at fifteen times our income, China at six, Vietnam at two — and a vision written in that grammar will reach, once again, for the big consolidated answer, because that is what Korea’s story appears to teach.

The women I met on the road suggest a different curriculum, and a different method: a national vision serious about them would be debated where they already deliberate — in the chama, the baraza, the market association — rather than in halls that faithfully record the views of the people who attend halls.

The thirty-five shillings a kilo at Kibuyuni looks like a price. It is not a price; it is a design — the measurable output of every institution we have not built between that beach and the shelf. Zanzibar, across the same water, built them. So the question the road left me with is not whether Kenyan farmers can grow. It is whether this generation will build the architecture that lets them eat.

Since I retired, I have received many calls from more than 30 chief executives, most of them leading non-profits, who begin by asking how I found the courage to step back from the helm of the Open Institute. That is rarely the question they stay with.

As each conversation deepens, they tell me they are exhausted. They tell me they are managing illnesses they believe the job has given them, and that they have no one to whom they can say any of this honestly. The question about courage, I have come to understand, is only the door they knock on before they say the thing they called to say.

I recognise these conversations, because I have sat where they sit. A chief executive cannot take their fears to their team, who need them steady. They cannot take them to their board, whose duty is to judge whether they remain the right person for the role. And they dare not open up to fellow chief executives, because in a sector with too few funders and too much work still undone, a moment of vulnerability can feed a rumour mill that harms the organisation they have given years of their life to protect. So the person carrying the heaviest load ends up with nowhere to set it down, and I remember how that feels.

We talk a great deal in this sector about the wellbeing of our staff, and almost never about the loneliness of the people who lead them. I have listened to leaders who smile through donor meetings while managing conditions they have disclosed to no one, who lie awake doing payroll arithmetic in the dark, and who have quietly concluded that their failing health must be evidence of failing leadership. It is not. Failing health is the predictable cost of carrying something heavy for a long time with no one to share the weight.

We have built a sector in which admitting to being human feels like a strategic risk, and in which the permanent fight for survival has made honesty unaffordable for the very people we ask to lead with heart. That is not a personal failing on the part of any one leader. It is something we have made together, and it can be unmade the same way.

There are already signs of what unmaking it might look like. One of the last gatherings I attended before I stepped back was convened by the SDG Kenya Forum, which brought non-profit chief executives together to think honestly about the sustainability of their organisations and to grapple, in the same room, with what they might do about it. Those who run businesses alongside their non-profits spoke about whether earned income could carry them, and the Kenya Community Development Foundation showed how it has built its endowment. It was useful, practical work, and there is a real appetite for more of it. This is what it looks like when leaders stop carrying the biggest challenges of our time alone and begin to share them.

The sector runs, quietly, on the unseen depletion of the people who lead it

Since then, I have had speaking engagements with other organisations to talk about how they might package themselves for stronger fundraising, how I think about philanthropy, and what each of them might do in their own particular circumstances.

What has moved me most is quieter and harder to put on an agenda. Non-profit leaders care about their causes in a way that has no clean stopping point. There is no profit line to tell them they have done enough. The work is never finished, and so they give until there is little of themselves left. Alongside the conversations about sustainability, endowments, and fundraising, what they need is a space to be plainly human with one another, to say what is heavy, and to discover that they are not the only one carrying it.

If we are serious, the biggest change is not a programme added to the side of the work. It is in how we fund the work at all. A leader who is one last grant away from letting people go cannot afford to look tired, and so the precariousness makes honesty unaffordable.

What this means is the sector runs, quietly, on the unseen depletion of the people who lead it; we have treated their endurance as a free and inexhaustible resource, and it is neither. Funders who move to long-term, unrestricted support, and who help build the reserves and endowments that steady an organisation, are not only protecting the mission. They are buying its leaders the room to be human.

There is practical work in this for all of us. Funders can fund the leader and not only the programme, with a coaching or wellbeing line that no one is required to justify, sabbaticals that come with proper cover, and grants long enough to end the quarter-to-quarter fear. Those of us who convene leaders can turn what keeps happening on those calls into something the sector builds on purpose, a standing and confidential circle of chief executives rather than something that depends on a particular person’s phone happening to ring.

Boards can design leadership so that its whole weight no longer rests on one body, through real deputies, shared leadership and funded succession, so that stepping back, or simply being unwell for a week, no longer puts the mission at risk. And every board can say plainly to its chief executive that its care for them is not the same thing as its judgement of them. We made a sector in which honesty is expensive. We can, deliberately, make one in which it is not.

None of this asks a struggling leader to be braver. It asks the rest of us to make bravery unnecessary.

Many of our leaders are struggling alone and in silence today, and they are not weak. If you are one of them, you are in far larger company than you know.

One: the madness is organised

It is tempting, watching the news, to conclude that the world has simply lost its mind. I want to persuade you of something more unsettling. Strip away the bluster and the statements engineered to shock, and you find the new right — together with its kindred movements around the world — placing deliberate bets with remarkable discipline. The chaos is the surface. Underneath it, the moves are precise and so are the investments.

Consider how their infrastructure came to exist. None of it was improvised. It is what you get when money that is both patient and ideologically convinced spends decades building capacity — think tanks, judicial pipelines, media ecosystems, talent networks — on horizons of twenty years and more, and keeps writing the cheques through the lean seasons when there is nothing to show for it. The Powell memo was written in 1971. The Federalist Society was founded in 1982. What is being harvested now was planted long ago, and the planters were never asked to submit annual results frameworks along the way.

Consider, too, what they chose to say. Their ideas are simple, and deliberately so: fear, an enemy, the promise of belonging — these compress neatly into a WhatsApp forward. Fairness does not compress. Neither do diversity, universality, or the slow virtues of institutions. To borrow from Rory Sutherland for a moment: human beings latch on to simple ideas quickly, and simplicity is a feature, not an accident. When embracing diversity asks ordinary people to hold in their heads an ever-expanding catalogue of identities, ways of living and sexualities, there is genuine relief on offer from anyone who shrinks the world back down to a gender or two and a handful of recognisable roles. And candour requires us to admit that the identity conversation did, in places, run ahead of what many imaginations could follow — and every step too far handed the simplifiers another exhibit for their case.

So the question I put to the room was this: the other side is financing twenty-year infrastructure and speaking in ideas that fit in a text message. What are you financing, and in what language?

Two: trust travels through people, not institutions

Ask yourself who people actually believe. Not, for the most part, institutions. Not experts flown in for a workshop, and not the elites who gather in conference rooms in capital cities — including, I said gently, rooms rather like this one. Belief moves along human channels: the neighbour whose word carries weight because her life is visible to everyone around her, because she has been present through funerals and harvests and hard years.

Kenya’s politicians, I pointed out, have turned this insight into a business model. They campaign the whole year round — through church harambees, funeral committees, the support networks of women’s groups — and they pour staggering sums into “bringing development” in forms that can be seen. Roads get built while the local clinic limps along understaffed, because a ribbon can be cut on tarmac and nobody launches a nurse. In Ol Kalou we watched crowds showered with gas cylinders, mattresses and shoes, and a train service resurrected after forty-five years in its grave. This is how trust is manufactured — trust the politician then converts, once in office, into corrupt deals and shadowy rents. Say what you like about them: they know exactly where trust lives, and they know it better than the development sector does.

Development endures when it is carried by such people, precisely because their roots run into the grassroots. But there is a distinction here that the sector keeps collapsing. Crafting a vision is work that elites do around conference tables; building trust is weaving — done strand by strand, in a thousand places at once, by people no convening will ever assemble. These are different crafts, practised by different hands, on different clocks, and they need different kinds of money. Treat them as one activity — fund a convening and call it trust, or fund a community champion and demand a strategy paper — and you end up financing neither well.

Three: the Global South holds the asset the North is losing

Here is a reversal worth sitting with. In its chamas and churches, its savings circles and market associations, its informal clubs and WhatsApp networks, the Global South still possesses a dense, living social fabric — the everyday web of association through which trust, money and obligation actually circulate. The North had this once and has spent decades watching it unravel, and it will find it very hard to recover, because fabric of this kind is grown, not installed.

That reverses the customary direction of expertise. On what I take to be the defining strategic question of this decade — how societies hold together — the teaching ought to run from South to North. And notice who has already grasped this: the new right understands the power of thick community perfectly well, which is why so much of its programme amounts to herding people back into the pews, back into familiar household arrangements, inherited roles and settled ideologies. They are labouring to reconstruct, on their own terms, precisely what the South never let go of. Philanthropy still tends to treat the South as a landscape of deficits awaiting correction. On this question, it is where the asset lives.

Four: performed belief is the sector’s quiet crisis

This was the point I suspected would sting most, so I told it plainly. A great deal of philanthropic funding proceeds from ideologies that are themselves muddled, and these get handed down to civil societies that have grown fluent in a vocabulary they do not own — and, in some cases, do not fully grasp.

I have sat many times with civil society leaders in Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia who privately consider the world to have drifted too far in a liberal direction, and whose instincts run closer to conservatism than anything in their own proposals. They will never say so in public, because their funders are committed liberals who would answer the heresy by closing their chequebooks. So they perform. And the performance is excellent, because their organisations’ survival depends on its quality.

Over the years I have developed a rough field test for whether an idea has genuinely taken root in a community: does it survive translation into people’s own language, or must it stay in the donor’s? “Mainstreaming” has never settled into most African languages; it remains in English even in the middle of a Kiswahili sentence. So does “empowerment.” You will hear, “tumekuja ku-empower wamama,” or “tumekuja ku-sensitize youth” — the verbs of the project economy, imported whole and undigested. A concept that cannot cross into the language people dream and argue and pray in has not crossed into their convictions either.

Why does this matter so much? Because how far any development effort travels is, in the end, a question of belief. Where people remain unpersuaded by the direction being set for them, they will deliver a flawless performance for exactly as long as the money flows — and nothing they performed will outlast it. I carry a thesis that is still half-formed, and I offered it to the room with that caveat: this, I suspect, sits at the root of why the MDGs and now the SDGs keep disappointing — not the ambition itself, but an architecture of goals and funding that rewards a fluent performance of conviction over conviction itself.

Five: the scarce role is not the one we celebrate

The sector celebrates advocates, founders and commentators, and I have been all three. But I have come to think none of these is in short supply. The genuinely rare figure — the one no grant line names and no fellowship cultivates — is the person whom people who agree on nothing all happen to trust, and who can keep them in one room long enough to imagine some futures together.

Every polarised society has advocates to spare. What it lacks is this weaver-convener: someone whose credibility straddles the divide, who can persuade the bishop, the activist and the county official to stay at the table past the first insult. If the previous four points hold — if the real contest is over belief, belonging and social fabric — then this role is no luxury. It is the strategic bottleneck. I asked the room: could you name the five people in any country you fund who answer this description? And if you can, do any of them appear in your grants?

Six: philanthropy must change its own model, not just its grantees’

Finally, I turned to the funders themselves. The prevailing model is tuned to avoid ever being wrong: get every fact watertight, route the statement through many slow rounds of approvals and notes verbales, sand down its edges, and release it long after it is relevant or useful. We manage for the risk of being wrong; our opponents manage for the risk of being irrelevant. Only one of those is currently fatal.

Nor can philanthropy go on setting the direction of other people’s development from the outside — point four should be evidence enough of where that road leads. The alternative is not mysterious; it is merely difficult: money that is supple and anchored in trust, quick to learn, willing to adjust, and honest in how it engages — the kind of thing MacKenzie Scott has gestured at with unrestricted giving. It is difficult because this is unfamiliar ground for most northern funders. It means surrendering the comfort of the logframe, and it means trusting people whose convictions you have not vetted line by line.

And there is urgency in it. An organiser boxed in by restricted grants has no slack with which to respond inventively when oppressive policy arrives. At a moment when such policies are multiplying, restricted funding is not merely inefficient. It is a strategic gift to the other side, who — as I said at the beginning — patiently, flexibly, and for decades at a stretch back their own people.

That is what I told them. The room was gracious, as such rooms are. Whether anything changes will depend on whether the people in it are willing to be as patient, as trusting and as ideologically honest with their money as their opponents have been with theirs.

Thank you!

A word before I begin. Every day, I see new subscribers to this Substack, and it always humbles me. To everyone who has subscribed and who keeps returning to read — thank you. Your attention is a scarce thing, and that you spend some of it on these questions of who we are and what we might build means a great deal to me. The thinking here is sharpened by the notes you send back and the disagreements you press. What follows was written in that company and is the better for it.

My views on African Reconstruction

For most of my working life I assumed, without quite naming it, that Africa was on its way somewhere, toward a development and a modernity that the people who drew the destination would one day certify, and I no longer believe that destination exists. The task in front of my generation is not to complete a journey to someone else’s endpoint. It is the slower and more serious work of fitting institutional form to the African ways of organising life that have survived five centuries of deliberate attempts to erase them, and of building the credit, the law, the insurance and the governance that those practices have always implied.

What colonisation overran was not a blank space or a failed experiment. It was a working civilisation with its own credit and insurance, its own succession and dispute resolution, its own medicine, metallurgy, philosophy and music, each of these adequate to the lives it served. The institutions we inherited at independence were designed for other societies and other assumptions, and where they failed to fit, we were trained to locate the fault in ourselves rather than in the borrowed design. Sixty years of that misreading have cost us enormous sums in policies that were sound on paper and useless in practice.

The evidence that our own forms still work is everywhere and not sentimental. All over Africa, families will still spend weeks negotiating the terms that bind two lineages before holding a white wedding. A woman belongs to a merry-go-round that lends against a social record no bank can read, and recovers at repayment rates most formal lenders would envy. A trader moves goods between Lagos and Cotonou on reputation that carries real economic weight and appears on no ledger. These are not way stations on the road to a formal economy that will one day resemble someone else’s. They are the economy, moving enormous volumes of value and holding hundreds of millions of households through shocks that would break a comparable middle class elsewhere. M-Pesa did not replace the chama; it reached the scale it did precisely because the chama was already there, and the most successful African technologies of the past twenty years are the ones that read that existing architecture correctly rather than trying to overwrite it.

If these institutions are the form rather than a stage on the way to it, then the implication for policy is direct, and we have been slow to draw it. The next generation of African design, on credit and insurance, on pensions and social protection, on health financing and housing and tax, should begin with the institutions our people already use and trust and build outwards from them, instead of importing a template and then searching for ways to make the fit. That means pension systems that work through rotating savings groups rather than mandatory schemes most people cannot afford to join, credit that recognises the histories already held in chamas and trader networks rather than demanding paper credentials that will never exist, and apprenticeship economies that are resourced and regulated rather than formalised out of existence. None of this is nostalgia; it is the more accurate and the more affordable way to build.

I am pressing this now rather than treating it as the patient labour of another century, because the order whose forms were pressed on us is coming apart at the very moment we are ready to build our own. Aid fell by nearly a quarter in a single year and is still falling, and the more important story is what has quietly been built in its place. The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System now links more than 160 banks, so that an African no longer needs a dollar to pay another African. The Continental Free Trade Area has been ratified by forty-nine of fifty-four states. The rewriting of the global tax rules, the most consequential in sixty years, is being negotiated under African insistence and an African chair. Remittances now run at close to seven hundred billion dollars a year, roughly four times what official aid now provides, built without anyone’s permission. This is what infrastructure sovereignty looks like while it is under construction, and the window for it is open because the powers that set the old terms are absorbed in troubles of their own.

None of this is the work of the state alone, or of the few who pass through leadership academies. It belongs to whoever will take responsibility for what lies within their reach. On my own land in Magarini, I am painstakingly planting a 100-acre forest, and I intend the water I draw there to reach the families around me who agree to plant trees in return, water offered as a contract rather than as charity. That is small beside the scale of the continent, and it is exactly the kind of act the whole thing is made of, no different in kind from the woman running the savings group, the founder building health tools in the languages people speak at home, or the negotiator who walks into the tax room carrying an offer rather than a request. The reconstruction is the sum of those acts, each within its own reach, and it does not wait to be commanded.

And I will not flatter us. The most stubborn obstacle to everything I have described is not external. Africa loses somewhere between fifty and ninety billion dollars a year to illicit financial flows, and a large share of that is not foreign firms shifting profits but wealth that originates here and leaves for London, Geneva and Dubai, often moved by the same elites who call loudest for reparation. We cannot build a fiscal contract between our states and our citizens on revenue that is being carried offshore by the very people negotiating the contract. This is uncomfortable to say, because the language of African misrule has so often been borrowed to justify somebody else’s intervention, but a case that puts every fault beyond our borders will not survive contact with the evidence. The young Kenyans who filled the streets in 2024 understood it precisely: their demand was not aimed at the world order but at a government that would stop stealing from the people it governs.

So this is what I hold. Africa is not preparing to take its place in the world; the work of making us ready and the work of taking that place are the same work, done by the same people in the same years. The savings group meeting in Kilifi tonight has outlasted the promises of a long line of governments and will outlast a good many more. My own part is clear enough, and smaller than the whole: to help build, around what our people are already doing, the formal architecture that lets it carry the weight the coming decades will place on it.

DISCOVERY

The rural boy who built a castle

I have watched Tafaria Castle grow for the better part of a decade, and what George Tafaria has built there still stops me in my tracks. When I first came to know it, it was a young thing, an artists’ residency he had started in 2013 with the likes of Cyrus Kabiru and Kevin Oduor, working before the studios and living quarters had even been raised.

The lastborn of nine, a boy who once walked to school barefoot, George set out to turn the village he grew up in into a place the whole country would travel to see, and he has done exactly that. The single residency has grown into a full centre for the arts, with workshops, recording and performance spaces, an evolution museum, and a herbarium, all wrapped inside the first castle a Kenyan has ever built for himself. To hold a vision patiently and to keep enlarging it year after year, rather than settling once the doors open, is a rare kind of discipline.

What impresses me most is where the value lands. Tafaria was never designed as a pretty retreat sealed off from the people around it. Every artist who takes up a residency is asked to create work with the local community, drawing schoolchildren and adults into the making rather than leaving them to admire it from a distance, and the goDream programme now guides young people through life skills, leadership and the arts, and sends them home with something to keep. A rural county the tourism maps once skipped now holds a cultural institution that employs local people, trains local talent, and has given the whole area a genuine sense of pride. That is the kind of value I most admire, because it was built inside the community rather than delivered to it: form-fitted to a place, wealth kept close to where it is made, and a dream large enough to lift a whole village along with it.

Africa holds 19% of the world’s population and produces, by the conventional count, 3% of the world’s education research — a statistic that is usually read as a verdict on African scholarship when it is more accurately a verdict on the instruments doing the counting. The indexes that define what “counts” as research — Scopus, Web of Science, the machinery behind every league table and funding decision — barely register African journals, and so the work published in them, along with the government studies, the evaluations, and the grey literature where a great deal of African education research actually lives, simply does not appear in the ledger. We produce considerably more knowledge than the world’s measurement systems are built to see, and we have never built the shelf on which that knowledge could sit, visible and retrievable, on our own terms.

Consider what happens to our own doctorates. Thousands of Africans have written dissertations at universities in America and Europe — work about African economies, African law, African soil — that now sits bound in libraries in California and Oxfordshire, catalogued but never digitised, because it was submitted a few years before those universities began putting theses online, and because nobody may scan and publish a dissertation without its author’s consent. The knowledge is not sealed; it is stranded, legally the author’s own and physically an ocean away. Meanwhile, the repositories of our own universities, where they exist, operate as islands — underfunded, inconsistently maintained, invisible to Google Scholar — so that a thesis written in Eldoret can be as hard to find as one written in Palo Alto.

The remedy is within our competence to build: a continental commons where any African scholar deposits their dissertation directly — whether it was earned at Makerere or MIT — verified against their identity, indexed to the global standards that make work discoverable everywhere, issued a permanent citation identifier, and readable from a phone on a slow connection in Kisumu or Kaolack. Not another institutional database that waits politely for universities to act, but a platform where the scholar walks in through the front door, and where the diaspora can bring three decades of stranded theses home with a signature and a scan. The deeper prize is legibility rather than storage: a citation map showing, for the first time, who is building on whose work across the continent, so that African funders, universities and governments can see our intellectual output directly instead of through the keyhole of northern indexes.

And if we are building our own instrument, we should widen what it recognises as scholarship. There is a farmer in Nyeri who has spent forty years refining methods to thicken the foliage on his crops, a herbalist in Kilifi whose pharmacological knowledge runs generations deep, an oral historian in Lamu carrying an archive entirely in memory — people who never entered a university but who have done precisely what universities exist to do, which is to observe, test, refine and transmit knowledge across time. We have inherited a hierarchy in which the farmer is a curiosity and the foreign researcher writing about biofermentation is an authority, though they often describe the same knowledge, and the difference between them is that one has a citation and the other has a funeral at which his library burns down. A serious African knowledge platform would send students to record this informal school — with consent and attribution, not extraction — and place its holdings beside the dissertations, formally citable, so the next agronomy doctorate builds on the farmer as readily as on the journal.

The colonial library was assembled about us and without us. The digital one is still being assembled, and this time the architecture is ours to author.

My Discovery

The people who tend the sea

This past week, I spent time with the team at Coastal and Marine Resource Development (COMRED). They are a Kenyan-founded, Mombasa-based organisation that has worked the coast since 2006, concentrating on the Shimoni-Vanga seascape in the south and Malindi-Ungwana Bay in the north, places where nearly eight in ten families depend on the ocean for their living and where poverty runs deeper than the national average.

What they do, in essence, is walk alongside fishing communities as those communities learn to farm the sea rather than merely hunt it — cultivating seaweed, raising fish in pens along the shore, keeping bees in restored mangroves, and running the octopus closures in which a community agrees to rest a reef for months so that it returns heavier and more generous than before. Around this sits quieter, patient work: eco-credit groups through which more than 950 members, most of them women, save and borrow against the promise of conservation, and fishers who now record every catch so that decisions about their waters rest on evidence rather than impression, which has begun to make their Beach Management Units credible to investors and to government alike.

What moved me most is their posture. COMRED does not arrive with answers; it arrives with respect, mapping the indigenous knowledge that these communities have carried for generations and folding it into the science rather than replacing it. The fisher in Vanga and the marine biologist from Mombasa sit at the same table as colleagues, and the sea is better managed for it. They now steward, with their communities, over 126,000 hectares of seascape. It is careful, unglamorous, deeply Kenyan work, and it deserves to be far better known than it is.

My New Website

In the early 2000s, I taught myself how to build websites using WordPress and some light coding. Over the years, as I built a really powerful tech team at the Open Institute, I never needed to code, and I became rusty to the point of becoming a beginner.

Now, since stepping back from OI’s leadership, I have found I need to rebuild my website, alkags.me, because I write here now. I don't have a team, so I have to learn how to build websites again. I am excited to tell you that I have rebuilt my new website. It’s not perfect, I don’t think, but I tend to improve things as I go. If you find a bug, please tell me.

Please visit and let me know what you think. It is also an invitation to engage. So please engage.

Two documents arrived in June, two days apart, and I have not been able to stop turning over the accident of their timing.

On the seventeenth, Beijing published its Global Governance Initiative — a long, careful, genuinely impressive account of how the world ought to be run, with China holding the pen and inviting the rest of us to admire the handwriting. On the nineteenth, the OECD’s development committee published its projections for foreign aid, and if the Chinese paper reads like a prospectus, the OECD’s reads like a diagnosis delivered in a lowered voice: official development assistance falling for a third year running, down another 6.9 per cent in 2026, with aid to sub-Saharan Africa specifically projected to drop 11.6 per cent this year — back to a level it last occupied at the dawn of the Millennium Development Goals, which is to say back roughly to where we started, before two decades of being assured we were on a journey.

My first reaction, I will admit, was the familiar one: a low anxiety, the trained reflex of a continent that has been taught to read the departure of donors as the arrival of catastrophe. And then I sat with it, and the anxiety curdled into something closer to opportunity, because the longer I held the two documents side by side, the less they looked like two pieces of bad news and the more they looked like a single, rather clarifying, invitation. The aid that shaped us is withdrawing, and a new suitor bearing a new rulebook has arrived to take its place at precisely the same moment — and that coincidence, which we are being encouraged to read as a threat, is in fact the clearest chance Africa has had in a hundred years to stop being written about and start writing.

We face neither East nor West; we face forward. — Kwame Nkrumah

The pantry was always full

Africa is not poor in capital. Africa exports capital — quietly, continuously, and faster than almost anyone troubles to measure — and has done so for as long as I have been alive. We do not much like to say this aloud, because it embarrasses the story we have agreed to tell about ourselves.

Consider the money that is already here. The continent’s pension funds hold something in the order of 700 billion dollars, a figure large enough to build a great deal of what we insist we cannot afford, and a great share of it sits in government paper and other people’s safe, low-yielding instruments while our own roads go unbuilt and our own grids flicker. The diaspora sends home somewhere near 90 billion dollars a year, more than aid and foreign investment combined, and it arrives with no logframe stapled to it, no theory of change, no quarterly report owed to a capital in the North.

And out of the back door, every year, more money leaves the continent through mispriced trade and profit-shifting and the quiet, legal flight of well-off Africans who keep their savings abroad, than ever came in through the front door of aid — the most-quoted figure is around 89 billion dollars a year, a number old enough and contested enough that I cite it with a raised eyebrow, though not one that anybody serious pretends is small.

I did not learn what this means in a conference room. I learned it on the coast, in the table-banking groups I have spent time with in Kilifi and Kwale — rooms full mostly of women who pool what little they have each week, lend it to one another, and hold each other to repayment with a discipline that would embarrass a commercial bank. There is no donor in that room. There is no capacity-building consultant with a lanyard and a framework. There is African capital, mobilised by Africans, put to work on African problems — and it works, not because someone from outside designed a programme for it, but because it was built from the material of how those women already live. The pantry, it turns out, was never bare. We had simply been taught to sit at the table and wait for someone else to arrive with the food.

So the honest framing of this June is not "the aid is drying up, who will save us." It is that the smallest and most conditional of our sources of finance is leaving, and it is leaving behind the three much larger ones we have never quite learned to use.

Also read:

The wall was facing the wrong way

Whenever anyone proposes that Africa protect its own economies, two camps form within seconds. One recoils at the word protectionism as though naming it were the same as refuting it. The other nods vigorously and reaches for the national tariff schedule. They are both wrong, and they are wrong in precisely the same place, because both have quietly assumed that the wall goes around the country.

National protection is the very thing that has strangled us for sixty years. It is why a trader in Nairobi finds it simpler to bring in a container from Guangzhou than from Kampala next door; it is why we trade with one another less than any region on the planet — fifty-four little walls, each guarding a market too small to frighten anyone, each built, in the end, to keep out the neighbour rather than the multinational.

The move is to take the wall down from around Kenya, Ghana, and Nigeria, build it once around the continent, and then throw open everything inside it — a move so simple that its difficulty is entirely political and not at all intellectual. Do that, and protection stops being a defensive crouch and becomes an act of construction: you are assembling a single market of 1.4 billion people, large enough that the terms of trade begin, for once, to bend towards you rather than away. The wall faces outward — at Washington and Brussels and Beijing, without favour — and the inside is opened wide.

This is not my idea. It is the African Continental Free Trade Area, the most ambitious thing the African Union has ever attempted, and on paper it is a marvel: the World Bank reckons it could lift 30 million people out of extreme poverty by 2035. On paper.

In practice, it is being assembled at the pace of a committee that breaks for lunch, and we owe ourselves the honesty of saying so plainly. Five years after AfCFTA began trading, the rules of origin — the unglamorous plumbing that decides what actually counts as “made in Africa” — are still not fully agreed; the tariff schedules remain incomplete; the pilot meant to prove the thing works moves a rounding error of the continent’s commerce; and the non-tariff barriers that are the real tax on African trade, the roadblock and the bribe and the three-day queue at the border, sit exactly where they have always sat, undissolved by any treaty. There is, though, one piece quietly working, and it matters more than all the speeches around it: the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System, which lets a Kenyan business pay a Ghanaian one in shillings and cedis without first buying dollars from a bank in New York — and that final clause is the whole revolution, because every transaction we route through the dollar is a small tax paid to somebody else’s monetary system.

We have promised all this before (ask Ghana)

I would love to tell you this is a new idea. It is one of the oldest we have, and its history is a long, well-attended funeral procession of magnificent declarations that went nowhere.

Read down that last column, and a pattern rises off the page that ought to frighten and instruct us in equal measure. The grand continental declarations — the ones that asked fifty-four sovereign governments to salute a single vision and surrender a little of themselves to it — stalled every time. The narrow, unglamorous, mechanical things — a payment rail, a modest trading pilot — moved. Ambition written as a communiqué dies in committee; ambition written as plumbing quietly starts to work.

Which brings me to the newest entry, too fresh for the table above: the Accra Reset, the doctrine President John Mahama has been building since he returned to office in Ghana last year, and whose instinct is exactly, bracingly right — that Africa must stop arranging its economies around the expectation of rescue and start treating its debt, its trade and its resources as matters of sovereignty rather than supplication. I want it to succeed more than I can easily say. And it is precisely because I want it to succeed that I have to point at the warning buried inside its own postcode, which is that Ghana has stood on this spot before: the previous government’s flagship was called, without a flicker of irony, “Ghana Beyond Aid,” launched around 2019 with real conviction — and by 2022 Ghana had defaulted on its debt and gone, cap in hand, to the IMF. The slogan of self-reliance collapsed into a bailout in under four years.

I raise this not to score a point off Accra, whose diagnosis is brave and which I share, but because a doctrine is not a mechanism, and the graveyard we have just walked through is full of people who meant every word. Sincerity was never the thing that separated the initiatives that lived from the ones that died. A budget was. An institution with a payroll was. A payment system, a fund, a coalition of the genuinely willing, a Monday-morning to-do list that somebody could be fired for not completing — that was.

Three arrows, turned around

So what does turning the arrows around actually look like on a Tuesday morning, in an African finance ministry, once the speeches have been applauded and everyone has gone back to their desk? It is not one heroic act. It is three unglamorous ones, and they hold each other up.

The first is to stop selling the continent for parts. The Democratic Republic of Congo digs the majority of the world’s cobalt — the metal sitting in the very phone on which you are most likely reading this — and captures a heartbreaking sliver of what that cobalt is finally worth, because a rock is worth a fraction of a refined cathode, and the refining, along with the profit, happens in China. Zambia and the DRC have begun, and I stress begun, to talk about building a battery value chain between them. That ought to be the most exciting sentence in African economics; that it remains mostly a sentence tells you how much work is still to be done.

The second is to turn our own money inward — to point the 700 billion in pension assets and the 90 billion in remittances and the patient savings of the diaspora at African infrastructure and African industry, through vehicles built deliberately for the purpose, rather than leaving it in foreign bonds and idle reserves while we go abroad asking strangers to fund us. The women in that Kwale table-banking group already grasp this entirely. The only question is whether a pension fund manager in Lagos can be persuaded to grasp it at scale.

The third is to finish AfCFTA in earnest — the boring, decisive plumbing of rules of origin, payment rails, and border posts that actually function — and to hold the two halves of the discipline together at once: protect the continental market and liberalise viciously within it. Trade with one another before we trade with everyone else.

The risks are real, and I have no patience for the essay that pretends the road ahead is clear. Ban raw exports too crudely, and you frighten off the very capital and skill you need to add the value — Indonesia’s aggressive nickel policy is both the promise and the warning of that road, and we would do well to study both halves rather than only the flattering one. Hand the new “processing rents” to a well-connected cousin of the minister, and you have merely changed which pocket the money skips through on its way out of the country. Raise the continental wall carelessly, and you will tax your own poor and shelter your own monopolists behind it. And there is a genuine, uncomfortable paradox sitting at the centre of the whole design: the capital and the technology to add that value may, for now, still have to come partly from China — from the very dependency we are trying to grow out of.

These are real, and I will not wave them away. But look closely at what kind of problems they are. They are the problems of a continent that has decided to build something — which are an altogether better class of problem than the one we have now, which is the problem of a continent waiting patiently to be built by someone else.

What reconstruction actually means

I have spent a few years now working on an idea I call African Reconstruction, and people sometimes hear it as philosophy — the sort of thing one says from a stage at a festival of ideas and has forgotten by dinner. This June is what I mean by it, made concrete. The argument was always that Africa’s institutions and its economics and even its categories of thought have too often been imported from elsewhere and retrofitted onto us, and that the work of this century is to author them from within rather than to borrow them ready-made from a catalogue someone else prints.

Because reconstruction, in the end, is not really about buildings, or even about money. It is about authorship — about whose hand is on the pen when the plan is written. For a hundred years, the aid told us what to measure and the lender told us what to build, and even our objections had to be lodged in a vocabulary we had first imported in order to make them. The aid retreating and China advancing changes none of that on its own; left to itself, it simply swaps one author for another, Washington’s script for Beijing’s, and asks us to mistake the exchange for a liberation. Reconstruction is the refusal of that trade. It is the insistence on the third option — the one nobody is offering us, because nobody else profits from our writing it — that Africa holds the pen itself.

The arrows have always pointed outward. Reconstruction is the decision to turn them around — and then to build the machine that keeps them turned.

None of these on its own is the answer: not the Accra Reset, not AfCFTA, not the pension billions, not the cobalt refinery that does not yet exist. But laid beside one another, they describe a posture the continent has not held in a century — hands turned inward, wall turned outward, pen held in our own fist. The aid is leaving. I say let it go, and thank it on the way out for the roads it did build, and remember that it was always the smallest of the arrows, and the only one that ever pointed the wrong way.

The money is here. The market is here. The pen is here. What we have been short of was never the capital or the capability; it was the nerve to believe that the authorship was ours to take. It is. We should take it.

Now.

<Small>
A note on the numbers. I have drawn these figures from the OECD's June 2026 aid projections, the World Bank and KNOMAD on remittances, UNCTAD on illicit flows, industry estimates on pension assets, and UNECA, Afreximbank and tralac on intra-African trade. Some of them are firmer than others: the illicit-flows figure is ageing and contested, and the intra-African trade share shifts depending on who is counting and whether the informal cross-border trade that keeps our borders alive is counted at all. I have flagged the shaky ones as shaky rather than dress them up as precise. None of the argument turns on any single figure being exact; it turns on the direction of the arrows, and about that there is no real argument to be had.</small>

A Kenyan needs something done. A bed in a good hospital, a file moved at the Lands office, a place for a child in a school that filled up months ago. Before any form is filled, one question settles the matter: who do you know there? We reach for a cousin, an old classmate, the neighbour’s son who works in the right building. Every formal system in this country keeps a front door for the public and a second door that opens to a name, and the second door is the one that moves. That is the real thesis here: we have organised our public life around the quiet knowledge that a relationship travels faster than a procedure.

That second door is the informal economy, and it runs through every ministry, every bank, every institution we built to operate on rules. The International Labour Organisation estimates that around 85 per cent of employment in Africa is informal. The AUDA-NEPAD white paper on AI and the future of work puts it at 85.8 per cent, with as many as 95 per cent of young people aged 15 to 24 earning their living this way. These numbers describe the ground we stand on. In other words, the informal economy is the African economy, and the salaried few live inside it with everyone else.

Watch a civil servant with a government payslip. She sells plots on WhatsApp in the evenings, keeps a few cows back in shags, and pays into a chama with eleven other women every month. That chama is her real pension. When her father dies, a harambee raises the cost of the funeral over a single weekend, recorded in a school exercise book and settled in cash. The contract and the chama sit in the same life, and she crosses between them all day with the border invisible beneath her feet.

This way of working is its own architecture, with its own rules of evidence. A young man learns to be a fundi at the elbow of an older one, earning as he learns. A trader’s credit is her name in the market, remembered and enforced by everyone who buys and sells there. Money moves through groups that pool, witness, and lend on the strength of people knowing one another — the chama in Kenya, the stokvel in South Africa, the esusu among the Yoruba, the tontine across the Sahel, one continental design wearing a dozen names. It is quick, it is cheap, it runs on trust, and it has carried this continent for longer than any bank has stood on it. So when formal systems fail to explain daily life, these networks do the work.

Artificial intelligence now walks into this life, and its value depends on how well it fits into the life already here.

To be of use to the mama mboga or the boda rider, it has to speak the way they speak — Kiswahili and Sheng, Giriama and Luo, the cadence of a Gikomba haggle, the shorthand of a WhatsApp group, the who-knows-whom logic that closes real deals. Our two thousand languages are the richest raw material we hold for this work; they are to artificial intelligence what cobalt is to a battery, and the model that learns them serves a billion people who think in them. The same model has to read our institutions as the working things they are: the chama as a lender, the harambee as insurance, the apprenticeship as a qualification, a good name in the market as a credit score.

Then comes the real prize. AI earns its keep here by raising the value of what people already make. A cashew farmer in Kilifi sells raw nuts to a broker who carries the real money downstream, to whoever grades, roasts, packages and brands them. An AI that knows his trees, his rainfall and his market helps him grade his crop, price it, reach the buyer three counties over, and sell roasted and salted nuts in a bag that carries his own name. The women down the road who process coconuts make the same climb, and so do the jua kali welder and the weaver. The payoff is more value kept by the producer. In this way, the technology turns production into a path upward.

This is the oldest African story told at a new scale. We dig cobalt and ship it raw, and it comes back to us as a battery sold at the finished price. We let our data be scraped for nothing, and it comes back as software we rent by the month. The farmer selling raw nuts to a broker is the same arrangement drawn small, in one village, around one crop. The work at every scale is to take the value chain apart node by node and keep more of each node in African hands — the roasting, the packaging, the brand, the price. The continent does it with its minerals and its mother tongues; the farmer does it with his trees. AI that understands the chain is how the small producer finally climbs it and keeps more of the return.

The growth this builds comes from the many. It is millions of small producers, each capturing one more rung of their own value chain — the roasting, the packaging, the price — all at once, in every market, roadside, and workshop on the continent. Add those small climbs together, and the figure is enormous, and it stays at home. The scale is already proven. Kenya’s SACCOs hold over a trillion shillings among roughly seven million members. Chamas move close to a third of the country’s economy through savings and lending that no ministry designed and no bank built. South Africa’s stokvels turn over tens of billions of rand each year. Taken together, a disaggregated economy of this kind compounds from a million decisions and steadies itself, because its strength is spread across the many and held by no single hand that can drop it.

AI built in our languages, fluent in our relationships, and pointed at the price the farmer gets is the tool that lets a million of those climbs happen at once. We already do the work. With that tool, the work accelerates.

There is a pattern in development work so consistent that we have largely stopped noticing it: the intervention works for exactly as long as it is present, and then the productivity it produced packs up and leaves with the project vehicle. Water arrives, capital arrives, training arrives; yields rise; reports are written; the funding cycle closes; and within a season or two, the ground is much as it was.

We tend to explain this as a failure of sustainability, by which we usually mean a failure of financing, and so we design the next programme to be a little longer or a little better resourced than the last. But the explanation has always struck me as a description of the symptom dressed up as a diagnosis of the cause, because it leaves untouched the more uncomfortable question of why the inputs did not take root in the first place — why a person handed every component of an enterprise so often declines, quietly and without drama, to build it.

The answer I have come to is that each of those inputs assumes something it does not provide. Water, capital and training all assume that the person receiving them can picture the enterprise they are being equipped to build — that somewhere behind their eyes there is an image of the processing shed, the ledger, the woman who owns the thing and signs for it, towards which the inputs are merely the means. Provide the means to someone who holds that picture, and they will move towards it with a force no programme could manufacture. Provide the same means to someone for whom that picture has never existed, and the inputs sit there as inputs, useful for a while because someone is watching, inert the moment no one is.

It is tempting, and dangerous, to hear this as a claim about the interior life of the poor — as though the thing they lacked were a quantity of ambition, and the work were one of encouragement. That is the oldest and laziest move in the development canon, the one that locates the deficit inside African heads and lets every structure that shaped those heads off the hook, and it is precisely the move this argument has to refuse.

Aspiration is not willpower and imagination is not innate talent; both are manufactured, and what manufactures them is the field of references a person has been allowed to stand inside. The anthropologist Arjun Appadurai put this more carefully than I can when he described the capacity to aspire not as an individual trait but as a navigational capacity, a cultural one, unequally distributed across a society — a metacapacity that the powerful possess in abundance precisely because their lives are thick with examples of futures arriving, and which the poor are starved of not because they want less but because they have fewer maps.

The economist Debraj Ray gave the same idea a sharper edge with what he called the aspirations window: the set of futures a person can see as genuinely possible for someone like themselves, assembled almost entirely from the lives of those near enough to observe. Widen the window and aspiration follows; leave it narrow and no quantity of input will be aspired towards, because the thing the input was meant to build was never inside the frame.

So the deficit, where it exists, is not a deficit of character. It is a deficit of references, and a deficit of references is something done to a people, not something they are.

How it was done is one of the more thoroughly documented facts of the last five centuries, even if it rarely enters the development conversation, which prefers its problems to begin on the morning the programme starts. The Congolese philosopher V.Y. Mudimbe — who died last year, and whose work deserves to be read far outside the seminar rooms that have kept it — spent a career showing how Africa was assembled, in what he called the colonial library, as an idea before it was ever governed as a territory: not merely misrepresented but invented, and invented specifically as a void, a blank slate, a place defined by what it lacked and therefore by what others would have to bring.

Once a continent has been imagined as empty, the people in it can be imagined as empty too — as figures waiting to be filled by someone else’s water, someone else’s capital, someone else’s idea of a future. The blank picture I described a moment ago is not a natural fact about a rural woman’s mind. It is the downstream residue of a long project to render her and the place she stands in as lack.

And here is the detail that ought to change the entire shape of the argument, because it does not merely explain the missing reference but reveals that the reference was taken rather than simply absent. We speak as though the woman who has never seen another woman own the building, run the floor and sign the cheques is missing something that was never there to see. The historical record says otherwise. In her study of the Igbo town of Nnobi, the scholar Ifi Amadiume documented a precolonial society in which women held titles, controlled markets, accumulated wealth in their own right and exercised formal political authority — in which the most senior titled woman held a veto in the town assembly, and the marketplace itself was understood as the domain of women under the authority of a goddess.

Across the continent, the pattern repeats, in the market queens of West Africa and in the female office-holders quietly written out of the colonial record because the administrators could not see them, having arrived with a single template of what a woman was for. What colonialism did was not only to extract material and impose borrowed institutions; it reorganised the field of the imaginable, narrowing the range of futures a woman could observe being lived by women, until the owner, the office-holder, and the one who signs were recoded as belonging to other kinds of people. The reference did not fail to exist. It disappeared, and the disappearance was inherited, and the inheritance is now mistaken for the natural condition of the poor.

This is why the work cannot be done with statistics or exhortation, both of which leave the field of references exactly where colonialism left it. Achille Mbembe has described the colonial relation as one that governed not only bodies and labour but the very boundary of the representable — what could be pictured, by whom, as available to whom.

Chimamanda Adichie made the same point in a register anyone can feel: repeat a single story about a people often enough and exclusively enough, and that story hardens into the only thing they are permitted to be, including in their own eyes. She has said, almost in passing, that her own release came not from encouragement but from the moment she encountered African writers and understood for the first time that people like her could exist on the page. That is the whole mechanism in miniature — not a pep talk but a reference; not someone telling her she could, but someone like her having already done so, witnessed.

If the diagnosis is right, then a great deal of what we call capacity-building has been quietly building the wrong thing, supplying inputs to a picture that was never restored and then expressing surprise when the inputs evaporate. The reconstruction I am interested in does the opposite: it treats the field of the imaginable as the first thing to be rebuilt rather than the thing we hope will somehow follow. And it is careful about what it restocks that field with, because there is a version of this work that simply swaps one set of borrowed references for another — that hands a young African the Silicon Valley founder or the visiting philanthropist as the new image of the possible, which is dispossession again, only in an aspirational register, the colonial library reissued in a friendlier font.

The Senegalese economist Felwine Sarr has spent a book and more arguing for the alternative: that Africa must think itself, represent itself and project itself from its own metaphors and its own archive — an active utopia, in his phrase, built from what is already here rather than from a model imported wholesale and worn like a borrowed coat.

Joseph Ki-Zerbo, the Burkinabè historian, compressed the whole programme into five words that have never been improved upon — on ne développe pas, on se développe, one is not developed, one develops oneself — and warned, in a line that belongs over the door of every ministry on the continent, that without identity we are an object of history, a utensil used by others. The reference that is reconstructed is the one drawn from a society’s own refused-to-be-erased history, unhidden and set back in front of the people it was taken from.

Placed against the architecture of reconstruction — the domains of culture, science, education, trade, governance and the stewardship of natural resources through which the work actually proceeds — imagination is easy to leave off the list, because it looks too soft to sit beside trade policy and resource governance.

I have come to think this is exactly backwards.

Imagination is not a seventh item to be added to the six; it is the ground beneath all of them, because each of those domains is, in the end, an answer to a future that somebody first had to be able to picture.

Fund every domain and leave the field of the imaginable pruned to its colonial dimensions, and you are building, with great care and considerable money, on blank ground — which is, I suspect, a fair description of a good deal of the last thirty years.

The objection to all of this is that imagination cannot be funded the way a borehole can — that it is too internal, too diffuse, too unmeasurable to count as infrastructure, and so it slips to the bottom of every budget and falls off. But this gets the nature of a reference precisely wrong.

A reference is not a feeling; it is an event, and events can be built. Standing inside a working enterprise owned by someone like you is as concrete as standing inside a building, and it does something a building does not: it cannot be withdrawn. You can repossess a tractor, reclaim a grant and end a programme, but you cannot reach into a person and remove the afternoon they spent watching someone like them run the place. A reference, once seen, is not unseeable — which makes it the rare development output that does not depreciate, and the rarer one still that reproduces itself, because the person who has seen it becomes, without further funding, the reference for the next person who has not.

That is what makes the field of the imaginable infrastructure in the strict sense rather than the sentimental one: it is buildable, it compounds, and it is measurable in precisely the way the sceptic demands, since the people who were never exposed are sitting right there as the comparison, and the rate at which exposure turns into enterprise, and enterprise into the next exposure, is a number you can watch climb.

None of this is an argument against water, capital or training, all of which Africa needs and most of which it is owed. It is an argument about sequence and about substrate — that the inputs we have been delivering presuppose a picture we have not been restoring, that the picture was not missing by nature but emptied by history, and that the emptying can be reversed by the most concrete intervention imaginable, which is to let a person stand inside the proof that the future they were told was not for them has been built, and is being run, by someone exactly like them. Reconstruction, in the end, is not only a matter of what we put into people’s hands. It is a matter of what we put in front of their eyes.

When the funding starts to disappear, the first question in every development organisation is the same, and it is the wrong one. The instinct is to ask where the replacement money will come from — which private capital, which blended instrument, which new donor or investor can be talked into filling the hole the old donor left. I understand the instinct, because I have had it, and because budgets are real and salaries fall due at the end of every month. But it is the wrong first question, and answering it well is precisely how you reproduce the failure you are trying to escape.

Look at what actually moves through African economies, and the panic loses its grip. Diaspora remittances to the continent reached around ninety-five billion dollars in 2024, up from some fifty-three billion a decade earlier, comfortably more than the continent received in official aid and a great deal steadier — they held through the pandemic when both aid and investment fell, and they arrive, crucially, straight in the hands of households, spent on food and school fees and medicine without passing through a single logframe on the way. Domestic tax revenue dwarfs all of it, running to several hundred billion a year. The money, in other words, was never the scarce thing. What was scarce — what remains scarce — is the willingness to recognise the resources that already work and to build with them rather than around them.

This is also why the favoured escape route — leveraging private finance, the blended instrument, the pivot from donor to investor — will not do the work being asked of it. Set the principle aside and look only at the record: blended finance has not mobilised anything close to the trillions promised, it chases bankable returns that do not exist in the sectors where the need is greatest, and after years of enthusiasm, it remains thinly evidenced. As a mechanism, it underperforms. A practitioner judges a mechanism by what it delivers, and on delivery, this one has not earned the faith placed in it.

To see why so much of the apparatus underperforms, it helps to remember what it was built to do. The development complex was assembled in the middle of the last century as a reconfiguration of collapsing colonial rule — built, from the first, to make a relationship of saviour and supposed chaos speakable again once empire could no longer say it aloud. That origin matters for an entirely practical reason: a mechanism designed to confer legitimacy is not the same as a mechanism designed to deliver, and we should not be surprised when it delivers poorly. Its KPI was never your KPI. The logframe, the theory of change, the indicator framework — these are instruments optimised for accountability upward to a funder, not for results owned downward by the people who must live with them. They measure compliance beautifully and outcomes badly, because compliance was the point.

I should be plain that I helped carry one of the largest versions of this. I was among those who pushed the Sustainable Development Goals and believed in them — the universality moved me, the measurability felt like rigour after decades of vagueness. And by the only test that finally matters, the results are in: most of the way to the 2030 deadline, the UN’s own assessment finds that only about a third of the targets are on track or even moving moderately, that nearly half are too slow, and that almost a fifth have gone backwards below where they stood in 2015. The lesson I draw from that is not that the will was weak, though it was. It is that the mechanism could not generate durable will, because a future authored elsewhere and handed down as indicators is owned by no one obliged to deliver it, and unowned things do not get delivered. That is not a moral complaint. It is an engineering one.

So the practical move is to stop treating the complex as a single thing to defend or to mourn, and to take it apart into its functions, deciding for each one what a results-minded organisation actually needs. The money it once supplied you can assemble from what already flows: remittances organised and pointed at productive use, domestic revenue collected better and spent closer to the ground, diaspora and continental capital that waits for no committee’s permission. The legitimacy it conferred means you can simply stop outsourcing, because you no longer need anyone’s certification to know whether a clinic is staffed or a harvest has improved. The technical capacity it carried — the genuine engineering, epidemiology, logistics — is worth keeping, and you keep it the honest way, by contracting for it as a buyer rather than receiving it as a ward: you the principal, the specialist your supplier, the design yours. Each of those is a decision an organisation can take this quarter.

The one function you cannot buy, source, or contract for is the one that matters most, and it is the work almost nobody is funding: replacing the categories. Here is the trap, stated as plainly as I can manage it. The money is collapsing fast and visibly this year. The categories collapse slowly, or not at all, because they live inside our own institutions long after the donor has gone — in the procedure manual, the university syllabus, the board structure, the monitoring framework, the grant template that a Kenyan organisation still completes out of habit when there is no longer anyone at the far end to read it. It is entirely possible to win the funding argument and lose everything that mattered, arriving at a fully Africa-financed development sector that still thinks in the borrowed grammar of the landlord who left. So the highest-leverage work in front of us is not fundraising. It is re-authoring the instruments: redesigning what you measure so that it tracks what a community values rather than what a donor wanted, and rebuilding the institution in the shape of what already works rather than the shape the template prescribes.

And the thing that already works is not hypothetical. When I spent time with table-banking groups in Kilifi and Kwale, I was looking at indigenous financial institutions that mobilise savings, allocate credit, enforce repayment, and absorb shocks — that do, in short, the whole job of a development finance intervention — and that sustain precisely because they were never designed in anyone’s headquarters. They are owned, and so they endure. The task of reconstruction is not to study them as charming local custom; it is to take their logic seriously as institutional design, and to build the larger forms — the lending vehicle, the cooperative, the service organisation — in that grammar rather than the imported one. That is what fitting the form to what works actually means once you move it from the essay to the operation.

The cost of getting this wrong is written plainly in our own flagship plan. Agenda 2063 is built faithfully in the imported form — the fifty-year horizon, the sequence of ten-year plans, the seven moonshots, the dashboards and the biennial reports rising through a continental machine — and by the African Union’s own accounting it reached only about half of its first-decade targets, with barely ten member states clearing even fifty per cent of the goals. Most tellingly of all, among the very worst-performing goals was the one named “capable institutions and transformative leadership”, and the plan’s own evaluators concede that most Africans do not know it exists. A plan owned by the apparatus and not the citizen does not get delivered, however ambitious its targets; built in borrowed form, it failed first at the very thing reconstruction must succeed at. That is the warning, and it is ours, not the North’s.

None of this is finished as an argument until it ships, and that is the discipline I would hold all of us to, myself first. The test of everything above is not whether it makes a sharper essay; it is whether it changes a procedure manual, the design of a savings group, or the terms on which someone hires a foreign specialist next Tuesday — whether it produces an institution still standing and still owned in 2060. The professional in the North can do the honourable and genuinely useful thing that the new arrangement allows: bring real skill to the table as a contractor and stop reaching for the next costume each time the last one frays. The professional in the South, and I count myself among them, has the harder and more interesting job: to stop waiting for the money or the policy to arrive, and to build the proof. Wangari Maathai did not publish a critique of ecological dispossession; she planted trees and let them be the argument. That, in the end, is the whole of it. The pretence ends not when a summit declares a new era, but when we build something that works in a form that is ours — and then point to it. So let us go and build the thing we can point to.

Addendum: Today’s news - Kenya Government intends to sell eCitizen Data to boost revenues

For most of the last century, the men who carved up the continent chased things you could weigh. Oil fields and copper belts, fertile valleys and the rivers that watered them. Citizens were extras in someone else’s development story, useful mainly as labour and occasionally as a photograph. The wealth left by ship. The title deeds, somehow, never quite made it back to the village.

The cliché says data is the new oil, a line the marketer Clive Humby coined back in 2006, and like most clichés, it is half true and dangerously soothing. Oil sits in the earth, indifferent to who owns it. Your data is you. It is the shape of your fears, your illnesses, the names of the people you called at three in the morning.

You can see this new politics of extraction most clearly in the rush to digitise health. In Kenya, our digital health laws present themselves as guardians of privacy. They classify sensitive health data, invoke constitutional rights, and promise services that are secure, efficient and modern. Health data is described, approvingly, as a strategic national asset, a phrase that reassures right up until you notice what it actually says: this is something the state believes it owns, not something the citizen can control.

A deal signed far above our heads

On 4 December 2025, in a signing ceremony at the State Department in Washington, Kenya’s Prime Cabinet Secretary Musalia Mudavadi and the American Secretary of State Marco Rubio put their names to a Health Cooperation Framework, with President Ruto looking on. The arithmetic was the headline: up to $ 1.6 billion over five years for HIV, tuberculosis, malaria, maternal and child health, polio, and disease surveillance. It was the first agreement of its kind under Washington’s reworked America First approach to global health, and Rwanda and Uganda have since signed their own versions of the same template.

Many Kenyans recognised the choreography instantly. Once again, something valuable was being negotiated above our heads, the terms settled before the public was told a route, let alone a destination. The framework was put together without its text being disclosed, without civil society or affected communities being asked what they thought, on a matter that touched the most intimate records a person owns. It took the Consumers Federation of Kenya, and separately Senator Okiya Omtatah alongside the Katiba Institute, to drag the thing into a courtroom. In December, the High Court agreed there were credible constitutional questions and paused implementation, specifically the parts that moved medical and epidemiological data.

Here is the detail you should sit with, because it arrived after most of the commentary had moved on. In May 2026, the Court of Appeal lifted that pause and allowed the government to proceed, with the substantive ruling parked until the end of October. So a court can recognise that your rights are arguably being breached, and an executive that wants the money can appeal its way back to business as usual while the question of whether you were wronged waits, politely, for another season. That is the real texture of data sovereignty in practice. Not a right denied outright, which would at least be honest, but a right suspended, deferred, out-argued by the better-resourced party in the room.

President Ruto offered the standard reassurance, telling the country that the Attorney General had gone through the agreement “with a tooth comb” to ensure Kenyan law would prevail over Kenyan data. It is a fine sentence. The trouble with fine sentences is that the power of any agreement lives in its mechanisms, not its adjectives. If the same text opens long-term channels for access, gives a foreign agency generous room to operate, and leaves an ordinary patient in Kakamega with no realistic way to object or seek redress, then ownership becomes a slogan.

We were not treated as rights-holders negotiating over our own histories. We were treated, once more, as raw material.

That phrase is not mine. The scholar Shoshana Zuboff built an entire account of the digital economy around the idea that our lives are claimed as “free raw material” to be rendered into behavioural data and sold. What she described for advertising, a state can do for governance. The barrel in the ground is your blood sample, your viral load, the record of a birth and the record of a death.

The magic word is “anonymised”

When you spread those billions over the years and across the population, the per-person figure is strikingly small for what is on the table. Medical records and diagnostic histories, genetic data and biological samples, the digital traces of HIV treatment and maternal care, all converted into line items on a balance sheet. You may call it a partnership. But if people cannot meaningfully consent, cannot practically refuse, and cannot easily opt out, it looks less like solidarity and more like extraction with a better communications budget.

The incantation that calms the anxious official is always the same: only aggregated, anonymised data will be shared. Aggregation has become the magic word of innocence, the assurance that once the names are stripped away, the numbers cannot hurt anyone.

They can. In 2000, a young computer scientist named Latanya Sweeney showed that roughly 87 per cent of Americans could be uniquely identified by nothing more than their postal code, date of birth and sex. To prove the point, she took a supposedly anonymous set of hospital records, picked out the governor of Massachusetts, and posted his own medical file back to him. Years later, researchers re-identified people inside an anonymised film-rating dataset simply by cross-referencing it against a public website.

Anonymisation, in a world this connected, is less a guarantee than a kind of laundering. The data goes in personal and comes out clean, ready to travel.

To insist that aggregate data is harmless is to ask citizens to bet that no future government, and no foreign partner, will ever be curious enough or clever enough to reverse the trick. That is not a privacy strategy. It is a wish.

And lest this be read as a story about a virtuous global North and a careless South, look at the counterparty. American health privacy still lives in the shadow of HIPAA, a law written in 1996, before the smartphone, before the period-tracking app, before the wellness platform that knows your resting heart rate and your sadness. It guards data inside hospitals and insurers and a defined club of covered entities, and waves goodbye to everything that leaks out the side. When the framework supposedly anchoring your medical privacy predates the device in your pocket, data protection starts to sound like branding rather than a living promise. Neither party to this deal is arriving with clean hands. One has a strong law it cannot fully enforce abroad; the other has strong words it cannot enforce at home.

Ownership without power

Beneath the legal language lies the real imbalance: not ownership but power. Governments love to announce that they own national data and that their sovereignty is intact.

If the regulator is starved of money, the oversight body lacks independence, and the citizen has no straightforward path to challenge an abuse, especially once the data has crossed a border, then the proud talk of ownership is ceremonial. It is being told you own a house while someone else holds the keys, controls the alarm and signs the tenancy agreements. On paper, it is yours. In practice, you live at their mercy.

Pressed on this, states reach for the broadest justification of all. National security. The public interest. Mass identity systems, mandatory SIM registration, biometric voter rolls, and integrated health records are sold as measures of safety, inclusion, and efficiency. Then a protest movement gathers, or a government grows nervous about who is organising whom, and the very same infrastructure becomes a ready-made map of who was where and who met whom. A state that claims exclusive rights over such data, yet refuses to bind itself to simple, enforceable duties when things go wrong, is not protecting its citizens. It is protecting its own access.

This is also a question of who gets to author the story. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has warned about the danger of a single story and about how power decides not only which stories are told but which become definitive. A health database is a story told about you in your absence, and you are not invited to edit it. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o went further in Decolonising the Mind, naming the deepest weapon of empire not the bullet but what he called the cultural bomb, the conquest of a people’s sense of themselves. The old extraction took the copper and left the colonised unsure of their own worth. The new extraction leaves the citizen unsure whether the record even belongs to them.

The courage that is missing

Here is where the analysis usually goes quiet, so let me not. The asymmetry in these deals is not only structural. It is also a nerve failure at the top.

The negotiating table is laughably uneven. On one side, ministers and their aides, flown business class to Washington or Silicon Valley, feted at summits, photographed beside cabinet secretaries and chief executives, returning home with a number to announce and a ribbon to cut. On the other hand, a data commissioner’s office that cannot fill its posts, a parliamentary committee with neither the technical staff nor the appetite to read the annexes, and a public told the terms only after the ink is dry. The incentives all run one way. A signing ceremony is a domestic political asset. A robust clawback clause is not. Marietje Schaake, the former European lawmaker, describes in The Tech Coup how technological power has quietly assumed functions that once belonged to states, while accountability has failed to follow it across the border. African capitals are not the authors of that drift, but they are proving to be its softest market, because the leader who drives a hard bargain gets no headline, and the leader who signs gets a motorcade.

Confronting that power requires a courage that lobbying, hospitality and the gentle gravity of a foreign junket are designed to dissolve. It is far easier to declare data a national asset and bank the funding than to build the unglamorous machinery, the funded regulator, the enforceable consent, the citizen redress, that would let an ordinary Kenyan say no. Courage here would look boring. It would look like a budget line for the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner that nobody applauds.

Three futures

So where does this go? I see three plausible roads, and only one of them is worth wanting.

In the first, the logo simply stays on the gate. States keep declaring ownership, keep signing frameworks over citizens' heads, courts occasionally pause the worst of it, executives appeal and proceed, and the data flows regardless. Sovereignty, on this road, is a word performed at signing ceremonies. The measure of it is theatrical: how confidently a minister can say “Kenyan law applies” while the mechanisms to make that true quietly fail to exist.

In the second, the continent overcorrects into data nationalism. Localisation mandates, walls, and servers that must sit on home soil. It sounds like control, and in one sense it is, but it mistakes the threat. The keys are still held by the state, merely not shared abroad, and the same integrated records that were a gift to a foreign partner become a gift to a domestic security apparatus. Here, the measure of sovereignty is who the wall faces. A wall that protects the citizen from the foreigner but exposes him to his own government has not advanced his freedom. It has changed his jailer.

The third road is the one I would argue for, and it reframes the whole share-or-hoard binary.

Treat sovereignty not as a possession the state holds but as a duty the state owes.

If a government claims exclusive rights over my data, it must accept onerous obligations to me: the right to know who holds my information and why, the right to refuse without losing essential care, the right to have it deleted, the right to a remedy that is timely and affordable when something goes wrong. Build regulators that are independent and properly funded, capable of standing up to a domestic ministry and a foreign agency alike.

Experiment with data trusts and health-data cooperatives that put a patient representative, not only the treasury, in the room where processing decisions are made. And negotiate as a bloc. The reason Rwanda, Uganda and Kenya each signed their own near-identical versions of the same template is that they negotiated one by one, with the leverage always favouring the party with one text and forty counterparties.

Under the African Continental Free Trade Area, we already have the institutional excuse to set common data standards and bargain collectively. The measure of sovereignty on this road is not what a leader can declare, but what an ordinary citizen in Magarini or Migori can actually do when her record is misused, and how fast.

Kenya’s framework will not be the last of its kind. Lower- and middle-income countries are being told repeatedly that their data is an asset they can leverage for investment and prestige. There is truth in that. But if the terms are wrong, the leverage runs the other way, and the asset becomes a liability dressed as a windfall.

The real test was never whether a state could brand health data as a national resource, or even squeeze some funding from it. The test is whether the woman whose viral load, whose pregnancy, whose grief fills those databases can look at the arrangement and find her own interest in it. If she cannot, if she is kept in the dark, locked out of the decision and left without recourse, then nothing has ended.

The well is the same. The flag flying over it is new.

Today, hundreds of colleagues and many friends have arrived in Nairobi for the Global Data Festival. I am told that people from over sixty countries have confirmed their attendance, and it is genuinely exciting to imagine the conversations beginning to unfold. We have been planning this gathering for two years, and I am sorry I will not be there in person to welcome them.

I have had the unusual privilege, though, of stepping off the field for the past month and reflecting on this work without the rush of doing it. It occurs to me that some of what has been clarifying for me in that quieter time might be useful to share — especially since many of the people I would otherwise be speaking to in the corridors of the Festival are reading these notes anyway, and can pass them on to others who should be in the conversation.

I have been working on the premise that data is power when it is in the hands of citizens who can wield it to drive government priorities — especially in development — since 2011. At that time, the wave was to get governments to be proactively transparent through open data. We had, in those years, a generation of relatively progressive administrations around the world, and the agenda moved forward, slowly and painstakingly, but unmistakably.

By the early 2020s, government departments in dozens of countries were publishing data in machine-readable formats, and it had become common to see serious newspapers running data-driven stories, poring over budgets and surfacing patterns that earlier generations of journalism could not have reached. We at the Open Institute had by then moved into the more nuanced edges of openness — subnational transparency, citizen-generated data — and we found there a richness that the national-level conversation had been missing for years.

In many places across that journey — from village social halls and borrowed church compounds where we met with community leaders, to county government offices, to retreats in hotels by the beach where senior officials would let their guard down for a few days, to international conference podiums such as the Festival itself, which began in Bristol in 2018 and met in Punta del Este in 2023 before finding its way home to Nairobi this week — I too uttered the words “data is power,” or some variant of them. We meant it. We were right to mean it, given what we then believed about how the world was tending.

I want to think aloud, here, about why I have come to think it is no longer enough to say so, and what would be more honest to say in its place.

The shorter version is this: data is not power. Power is power.

Data is a tool that the powerful use, and a tool that the rest of us must learn to wield against, or alongside, or in spite of them. The distinction is not academic. It is, I think, the central thing the global data community has been slow to confront, and confronting it changes what the next ten years of this work should look like.

Consider where we are. Over the past several years, in country after country, we have been watching the open-government agenda quietly reverse — and the regression has not come from the places we would have predicted. India, which seemed for a long time to be on a steady trajectory toward greater statistical openness, has slipped into a pattern its own analysts are now documenting carefully: a long-delayed national census, sixteen major datasets missing or delayed across health, education, economy and demography by the close of 2024, and a Union government that has repeatedly told its Parliament that information requested by Members is “not maintained,” “not compiled,” or “not available centrally.”

And the most visible case of all is the one few of us would have predicted a decade ago: the United States, which gave us the language of open government data and helped launch the Open Government Partnership, has since January 2025 removed something in the order of eight thousand web pages and three thousand datasets across its federal agencies, and Data.gov — which once held more than three hundred thousand — has been quietly thinned, while librarians and archivists organise a continental rescue operation to preserve what they can before more disappears.

The pattern is wider than these two cases. It is happening in Europe, in Latin America, in parts of Asia, in different shapes and at different speeds. That two countries which trained a generation of us in this work are now among those leading the regression is remarkable, and it is also instructive. It has shown us — generously, if unintentionally — that open data without the political will to keep it open is a brittle thing. The infrastructure can be undone in months. It is not the data that holds it in place. It is the power that chose, for a season, to keep it open.

This is the first piece of what I have been turning over.

We have produced, across fifteen years of careful and often thankless work, a global generation of citizens, journalists, and civic technologists who can read a budget and interrogate a procurement record and find the line item where the road money disappeared — in Bogotá and in Nairobi, in Manila and in Kathmandu, in Kinshasa and in Sydney, in countless cities and villages where this craft has been quietly transmitted from one cohort to the next.

That capacity is precious, and the people who built it deserve to be celebrated. But the deeper question — the one we have been polite about for too long — is what happens after the citizen reads the budget. If the politician feels no consequence for ignoring what the data shows, the data has not moved power. It has produced a more articulate frustration. We have to be honest about that and design the next phase of this work around it.

The second thing I have been thinking about begins with an African specificity but reaches further. The artificial-intelligence conversation, as it is being conducted across much of the global South, has tilted heavily toward ethics and governance — important work, and I do not want to diminish it. But the harder truth, looked at honestly from where I sit, is that very few Africans are yet using these tools productively, that very little of the AI deployed in our markets understands the languages we actually live and work in, and that almost none of what is being built is being built by people who share our context.

The risk we are walking into is one we should be able to recognise from earlier waves: that we will produce beautifully drafted legislation that constrains our own ability to build, while doing nothing to slow the flood of foreign models designed for someone else’s life.

A young African child today, when they prompt a popular image generator for “a well-dressed man” or “a well-dressed woman,” will, by default, see a white person — until they learn to describe themselves in such elaborate detail that the system has no choice but to render them.

That is a small thing, and it is also an enormous one. It is exactly the cultural displacement that more than a century of work has been trying to undo, arriving now in a new medium. And the pattern, of course, does not stop at the African coastline. Colleagues in India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Colombia, Peru and Nepal are watching the same dynamic play out in their own languages, visual cultures, and legal codes. Governance is necessary. The building is more necessary, and they must move together.

The third thing, and the one I want to leave with this audience in particular, is about the kind of data the world’s emerging economies actually need to compete. The international data community has been, understandably, focused for years on government data — budgets, procurement, services, the apparatus of accountability. That work has mattered, and it must continue. But while we have been studying the state, the data that would enable citizens and small enterprises to compete in the global economy have remained largely hidden.

The data exists. It is expensive, it sits behind bureaucratic gatekeeping, and it is locked behind paywalls priced for foreign consultancies rather than for the African enterprise that might want to use it. Hidden behind the abundance of GDP statistics and SDG dashboards, the data that would actually let an African producer understand the value of their cashews, cobalt, or lithium has been kept far from them.

This is not a uniquely African condition. Colleagues across Latin America have been making the same observation about extractive-industry data for years; Indian and Indonesian small producers face their own versions of the same issue. The pattern is consistent. It is no oversight that the data that would let people compete is the data hardest for those people to access. It is a design.

The same is true of the value chains in which African farmers and small manufacturers — and Peruvian, Bangladeshi, and Vietnamese ones — actually operate. The processed-food market, the textile market, the fertiliser market, the agro-chemical market — at every link in these chains, there is data that, if it were in the hands of the producer, would shift the terms of the negotiation. Most of it is not.

So when I think about what we should be talking about, frankly, in the corridors of the Festival this week, I find myself returning again and again to the same idea. Data is a tool, and for at least a hundred and fifty years, that tool has been wielded disproportionately by those who already hold the power, particularly against the part of the world we now call the global South.

The colonial statistical project — the censuses, the classifications, the cadastres — was the original data infrastructure of empire, and the present arrangements are its descendants in ways we have been slow to acknowledge. The open-data movement, at its best, has been an attempt to redistribute that tool. It has done real good, and we should not be embarrassed to say so.

But the next phase has to be more honest. It has to be designed for power and not only for transparency. It has to give people not only the right to see, but the capability to act — the natural-resource data they need to negotiate, the value-chain data they need to add value, the AI tools built in their own languages and contexts so that the technology of the next decade does not arrive, again, as someone else’s gift on someone else’s terms.

I do not think any of this is a counsel of despair. If anything, the past month has left me more, not less, hopeful about what is possible. The community gathered in Nairobi this week is one of the most thoughtful and capable I have ever known, and the conversations happening in those rooms — frank, honest, willing to revisit the assumptions of the last fifteen years — are the conversations from which the next phase of this work will be built.

Power is power. We can name that clearly now, after a decade and a half of pretending the data alone would do the work. And once we name it, we can begin to deliberately build the kind of data infrastructure that helps people exercise it.

I hope this week's conversations are the beginning of that. I hope they are franker than we have allowed ourselves to be in years past. And I hope, when the delegates leave Nairobi and return to their sixty countries, that they carry not only the warmth of the welcome we have prepared for them, but the harder and more useful gift — the willingness to say what is true.

I am sorry I cannot be there in person. I will be reading everything I can find from the sessions. And to the friends, the colleagues, and the strangers who will become both — welcome to Nairobi, and thank you in advance for the work.

Every year, the African diaspora sends home a sum of money that ought to embarrass everyone who still speaks of the continent as a place that needs saving. The figure is now closing on a hundred billion dollars a year, climbing at roughly ten per cent annually, and it is already about twice what the continent receives in official aid from every government and agency in the world combined. The entire architecture of international development — the agencies, the country offices, the conditionalities, the conferences in Geneva, the consultants in business class — moves less money into Africa than ordinary Africans abroad move themselves, quietly, through their phones, on a Sunday afternoon, to their mothers.

I want to honour that money before I say the harder thing about it. Those remittances pay school fees, settle hospital bills, put roofs on houses, and carry small businesses through bad seasons. They are not trivial, and they are not going away. But if we let the remittance figure define the diaspora, we will have made, against our own people, the very mistake the world has spent five centuries making against Africa. We will have looked at something enormously valuable and seen only the raw flow. We will have counted the cashew and missed the orchard.

Here is what I mean, and it is the centre of this essay.

I have been writing in this newsletter about what I call the African Reconstruction — the proposition that Africa is not a place to be developed toward someone else’s finish line, but a place that has to build, deliberately and on its own terms, the social, political and economic infrastructure that lets it reposition itself in a world that is, right now, visibly reorganising. The old certainties are loosening; trade routes are being redrawn, alliances rearranged, and the development industry itself is in open crisis about whether its model ever worked. That kind of opening does not come often, and it does not wait. The diaspora has a genuine and outsized role to play in seizing it — and yet the diaspora’s role keeps getting stuck on a single, circular, paralysing question.

The question is one of sequence. Does the diaspora move first — organising itself, pooling its capital, building its institutions — or does it wait for African governments to create the policy environment that makes all of that safe and easy? Put the question that way, and you can feel the trap closing, because each side is reasonable and each side is waiting for the other. The diaspora says, understandably, give us the frameworks, the protections, the diaspora-bond legislation, and then we will commit.” The policymakers say, understandably, show us serious diaspora capital organising itself, and then we will build the frameworks around it. And so everybody lands exactly where they started, the hundred billion keeps arriving one household at a time, and the repositioning that the moment makes possible quietly does not happen.

I want to argue, plainly, for breaking the deadlock from one side. The diaspora should move first.

It should move first because waiting for policy to lead has never been how anything consequential in Africa actually got built. Consider mobile money. If the pioneers of M-Pesa had waited for a mature regulatory framework for branchless banking before launching, there would have been no M-Pesa, because the framework did not exist and could not have existed — you cannot regulate something the world has not yet seen. They built it first. They let a few million Kenyans demonstrate, through their own daily transactions, that the thing worked, was wanted, and was not going away. And then the regulation came, running hard to catch up with a reality that ordinary people had already created and that no policymaker could now afford to ignore. That is the sequence. Reality first, made by the people closest to the need; policy second, arriving to organise what the people have already proven. Safaricom did not wait for permission to become Safaricom, and the diaspora should not wait for permission to become what it could be.

So let me say concretely what moving first looks like, because the diaspora is not one undifferentiated mass — it is several million people already gathered into thousands of associations, hometown unions, professional networks, alumni groups, church and mosque communities, county and clan and national bodies. The organising infrastructure already exists. What it has not yet done is turn itself to building. It can.

Patient Capital

It can build the investment vehicles itself — and I want to be concrete about this rather than wave at the abstraction of “diaspora venture funds.”

I recently discovered a small Kenyan venture that, for me, shows exactly what is at stake. It is called Nualocal. It began modestly, as an online shop selling Made-in-Kenya goods — olive-wood bowls, hand-carved jewellery, shirts — and it sold its first couple of hundred shirts organically, through nothing but search, shipping to Kenyans at home and abroad.

Then the small factory that made those shirts collapsed, and the founders found themselves taking WhatsApp messages from customers asking for a product that no longer existed. They could have waited — for a textile-sector incentive, for a development programme, for an investor. Instead, they decided to build the factory themselves, and the way they chose to finance it is the whole argument of this essay in miniature.

“No government,” in their own words, “no foreigners, just us.”

Kenyans with an idle industrial sewing machine can lease it to the factory at a monthly rate, with a buy-back after a year. Kenyans with some savings being quietly eaten by inflation can become Founding Partners, putting in operating capital — for local-mill fabric, for wages, for rent — and sharing the profit and the loss, quarterly, fifty-fifty. The garments themselves are sewn by Kenyan youth, who are paid per piece and learn a trade.

It is value addition rather than raw export, ownership spread across a crowd rather than concentrated in one pair of hands, a single shared factory instead of a thousand struggling one-machine workshops. It is, almost line for line, the African way of building that I have been describing in this newsletter.

And it has a ceiling. The leasing model is ingenious precisely because it mobilises idle machines rather than scarce cash, but the number of idle industrial sewing machines in Kenyan homes is finite, and the operating capital that domestic partners can inject is bounded by Kenyan incomes under inflationary pressure.

Nualocal can grow to a certain size on domestic distributed capital and then it will press hard against that ceiling — at which point its only conventional options are the two it has explicitly refused, the government cheque or the foreign investor who wants control.

This is the precise gap diaspora capital is shaped to fill, and to fill without violating anything Nualocal stands for — because a Kenyan in Manchester or Minneapolis is not a foreign investor. A Kenyan abroad buying a Founding Partner stake is the Kenyan nation, in its dispersed form, owning its own factory.

Picture a diaspora fund that does not have an idle machine in Nairobi but buys industrial sewing machines outright and leases them to Nualocal on the terms the founders have already designed and proven.

And then picture the second-order effect, which is larger than the capital — the diaspora that owns a piece of Nualocal becomes its market, its distribution network in London, Toronto, and Atlanta, the diaspora-resident shelf space for branded African goods that the reconstruction has been reaching for all along. One organised constituency, supplying at once the patient capital, the equipment, and the export market — the three things a young African manufacturer struggles hardest to find.

Nobody needs to grant permission for a diaspora association to become an investment collective. It needs only to decide to.

Knowledge Collaboratives

It can build the knowledge collaboratives itself. An African who has spent fifteen years as a clinician in Toronto, an engineer in Rotterdam, a regulator in Washington, a researcher in Manchester, has been doing more than earning a salary — they have been standing inside systems that work, learning how a functioning hospital is run, how a real research university generates research, how an institution is governed when governance is taken seriously. That knowledge does not require relocation to be useful. Diaspora professionals can organise themselves into standing collaboratives that work directly alongside the intellectuals and the builders at home, not as visiting experts flown in for a workshop, but as a permanent, structured partnership between the Africans who left and the Africans who stayed. A diaspora supply-chain manager giving two hours a month to help a venture like Nualocal design its production flow is worth more than most consultancy reports, and costs nothing but the will to organise it.

Diaspora Philanthropy

And the successful ones can build the philanthropic institutions themselves — and point them at the people, reconstruction actually depends on. I mean the rural innovator who has rigged a rudimentary system to generate electricity for her community and needs backing to make it more than rudimentary. I mean the fashion designer in Brazzaville boldly building a local brand against the assumption that style must be imported. I mean the women’s group investing in food processing, branding what they produce, and finding a market for those processed, branded goods on the shelves of the very countries the diaspora lives in. Diaspora philanthropy can be patient where institutional aid cannot, can tolerate the risk of the unproven innovator, can fund the slow restructuring of practice and the rebuilding of belief that no grant cycle is built to reach. That is culture-shaping work, and it does not wait on anyone’s policy.

There is a discipline to all of this, and it has to be said plainly, because diaspora capital can also do harm if it arrives badly. If it comes in large, impatient blocks demanding control, it would break the distributed ownership that is the whole point — a Nualocal rescued by one big diaspora cheque, on terms that hand one person the factory, would no longer be the thing worth backing. The diaspora has to enter in the same form as the domestic crowd it joins: many partners holding modest stakes, on the founders’ own published terms, accepting the patient horizon and the shared profit and loss. The diaspora must come in the African distributed way, as one more set of many hands, not as a concentrated foreign-style investor who merely happens to hold an African passport.

So let me state the argument without softening it.

The diaspora should stop waiting for the environment to be made hospitable before it acts, because that environment has never, anywhere, been built in advance of the people who forced it into being. The instruments already exist — Nualocal designed its own, and it is one small venture among thousands of Africans improvising the architecture of distributed ownership in real time. Let the diaspora organise itself through the thousands of institutions it already has. Let it lease the machines, buy the Founding Partner stakes, and build the knowledge collaboratives and the philanthropies. Let it create, on the ground and in the open, a new African reality — and let policy do what policy has always actually done, which is to arrive afterwards and catch up with what the people have already made true.

Reconstruction will not be handed down. It will be built up — and the diaspora, with its capital, its knowledge, and its hard-won institutional skill, is not waiting at the edge of that work. It is one of the few forces with everything required to begin it now.

In 2021, I spent some months visiting women’s table banking groups in Kilifi and Kwale counties, on the Kenyan coast. Nine hundred women in total, across many groups. I would arrive at the meeting place, usually under a particular tree the group had claimed as its own, and I would sit on the sidelines while the women did their work.

The shape of the meeting was always the same. Each woman brought her weekly savings. The secretary recorded each contribution in an exercise book — the same kind of exercise book children use at school, the cover bent, the pages filled with careful handwriting. The money went into a metal box. The box was kept by one woman. The key to the padlock was held by another. The separation was deliberate. No single person could open the box.

Then the lending happened. A woman who needed money would make her case. The group would discuss it. They would decide. The loan would come out of the same box that had just been locked. Interest rates were agreed in the room and held to. Defaults were rare, and when they did occur, the social consequences within the group did more work than any formal collection process ever could.

At the end of the year, they would break the box. The phrase is theirs. Everyone would arrive in matching deras or kitenges, dressed for the occasion. The accumulated savings, with the interest the lending had generated, were shared out in proportion to each woman's contribution. Each woman would take her share and spend it on the thing she had been working toward all year. A new roof. A full year’s school fees for her children. A small piece of land. A capital injection into her own little business. The investment was substantial, deliberate, and entirely hers.

I watched this same pattern unfold across nine hundred women. It was unfailing.

In the same period, in the same counties, sometimes with overlapping membership, another set of activities was taking place. Development organisations were running programmes to bring “income-generating activities” to the same women. They would arrive, distribute goats or chickens, set up a common farming plot, train the women in the rudiments of small business, and run the programme for six months. At the end of the six months, the organisation would close the programme, write up the success — every woman has a goat, every woman has been trained, the farm is green and producing — and move on to the next intervention.

A week or two after the organisation left, you could go back and find that the goats had been sold, the chickens slaughtered or sold, and the farm sitting unused. The women had taken what was given and converted it into something they could use, on their own terms, through the channels they already had. The metal box, you might say, was waiting.

A Tale of Two Systems

I have been thinking about this contrast for several years now. The two systems were operating in the same villages at the same time. One of them has been running for as long as anyone in the village can remember. The other had a six-month timeline and a closing ceremony. One system did not need to be supported, defended, or explained — it simply continued, because it was built on a logic that fit the women’s lives. The other needed to be brought in from outside, propped up with donor money, monitored for compliance, and reported on for the benefit of audiences that lived very far away. As soon as the propping stopped, the second system stopped.

I do not think this is a story about the two counties on the Kenyan coast. I think it is the story of what has happened across most of this continent for the better part of a century.

Colonialism, when it arrived, found systems already in place — for moving wealth, for resolving disputes, for organising land, for governing communities, for transmitting knowledge across generations.

It overlaid imported alternatives on top of those systems and called the imports the formal layer of African life. The original systems were pushed underground, renamed informal or traditional, and treated as residues that modernity would clean up in due course. This was the colonial wager. It has been carried forward by the development sector to the present day, in projects very like the goats-and-chickens programmes in Kilifi.

The wager has not paid off. The formal layer that was supposed to do the work has, in domain after domain, failed to do it. The hospitals that were supposed to deliver universal care depend on donor funding that can be turned off at the whim of a foreign administration. The universities produce graduates whose training fits no labour market that exists here. The constitutional frameworks have delivered election cycles but rarely the stable, accountable governance they were supposed to produce.

Look most closely at agriculture, because the failure is most visible there. The formal system has it that, to make real money, the African farmer should export raw produce to Europe, using standards the Europeans define, within the quotas the multilateral trade agreements allow. Local products have been positioned as lower-quality than imported ones, within a hierarchy that places European goods first, Asian goods second, and African goods last. Some of this is branding and packaging. Most of it is narrative, cost structure, and distribution networks. The African consumer has been socialised across generations to reach for imported tin and look past what the farmer down the road has grown.

So the African farmer grows for export. She tears out the food crops her grandmother kept and plants what the European buyer wants. She organises her year, her labour, her family budget, her debts around the next shipment to Rotterdam or Hamburg. And then the European buyer stops coming.

In Kilifi, when the foreign investor stopped buying cashew nuts from the mega factory, the farmers cut down their cashew trees and sold them for charcoal and timber. The trees had taken years to mature. They were gone in the afternoon. The farms now sit bare. In Kiambu, when tea and coffee stopped being profitable, the farmers tore out the bushes and built rental apartment blocks on some of the most fertile red soil in East Africa. The soil that fed a country for a century is now under concrete. These are not the worst stories. They are simply the ones nearest to where I live.

The cashew farmer in Kilifi is in a worse position than the women under the tree. The women always had the metal box. The cashew farmer was brought fully inside the imported system, organised her life around it, and now has nothing underneath when the system turns away. The African food economy that her grandmother knew how to operate has been suppressed for so long that she cannot quickly switch back to it. The narrative trapped the trees. The trees became charcoal.

Beneath the formal layer that keeps breaking down, the other system continues operating where it has been allowed to. Quietly. Without much help. With remarkable durability. The metal box, the exercise book, the key held by a different woman, multiplied across the continent in forms whose details vary but whose underlying logic does not.

Most Africans live in both systems at once, and we have learned not to mention the fact in the rooms where serious decisions are made. We register our businesses with the Companies Office, and we run them on relationships the Companies Office cannot see. We bank with KCB, and we belong to a chama. We use M-Pesa, and we keep the metal box. The double life is the actual texture of African modernity. It is not a transitional condition. It is the condition itself.

The trouble is that only one of the two systems has been allowed to count. The formal system gets the budgets, the buildings, the policy attention, and the international recognition. The other gets called informal, traditional, or anomalous. But the vocabulary is wrong. What we have been calling informal is the actual working economy of most African societies. What we have been calling traditional is the actual working modernity of how Africans live. The categories that made these systems invisible to us came from elsewhere, designed to describe a different kind of society, and we have spent a hundred years trying to make our reality match the categories rather than the other way round.

The Question of Scale

There is a particular foreign argument I want to take on directly because it lies beneath everything else, and until we name it, we cannot move past it. The argument is that scale is the source of profitability. For a business to succeed, it must grow, dominate its market, and capture the value across the chain. We have absorbed this argument so thoroughly that we now design our economic policy around it. We measure progress by the size of the firms we produce. We treat the absence of African billionaires as a sign of our failure rather than as a sign that we have organised ourselves differently.

But look at where that logic has led, in the societies that have followed it most rigorously. A handful of billionaires. Millions of poor. Inequality that is now politically destabilising the countries that pioneered the model. The scale argument has not been a description of how economies work. It has been a particular kind of economic life, optimised for a particular kind of outcome, exported as a universal truth.

I think the African scale is different. The African scale is characterised by many small enterprises, owned by many people, employing many more people, and distributing wealth widely rather than concentrating it narrowly. The chama is an African scale. The cross-border trader moving goods between Busia and Kampala is on an African scale. The aloe vera producer in coastal Kenya is African scale. None of these will produce a billionaire. All of them will produce hundreds of thousands of people, operating at scale. That is not a less ambitious economy. It is a different kind of ambition, organised around a different question: not who can become the largest, but how many of us can become well.

The Work of Finding The African Way

This is the work of finding the African way. It is not to fix the formal layer again. It is to lean fully into the systems we already have, build the institutional architecture that lets them operate at the scale they actually want — distributed, cooperative, ubuntu-rooted — and stop apologising for the fact that they do not look like what someone else built somewhere else.

The change of posture is what matters. We stop trying to bring the women under the tree into the formal financial system and start asking how the table banking logic can be made the foundation of a financial system that the African majority actually uses. We stop forcing the traders who move goods between Kenya and Uganda, Nigeria and Niger, and South Africa and Mozambique to operate as smugglers, carrying their merchandise in the boots of long-distance buses, and start creating the regimes that let them move freely. We formalise the one-sky policy that the African Union has been promising for thirty years, so that a flight from Nairobi to Dakar costs what it should cost rather than three times what it costs to fly to London. We build bilateral arrangements that enable a group of cashew farmers in Kilifi to brand their nuts and sell them in Banjul. We back the aloe vera producers in coastal Kenya to make soap and sell it in Brazzaville and Conakry.

This is not a rejection of foreign direct investment. The continent will continue to welcome serious capital that arrives on serious terms. But we stop organising our economies around the assumption that the mega-investor from elsewhere is what will employ our people and grow our wealth. The evidence of the last century is in. The mega-investor cannot do this at the required scale and cannot be relied upon when conditions shift. Cottage industries can. Many small producers, working together, processing the natural resources this continent has in abundance, and moving goods across borders that should never have existed in the first place — this is what an African economy that fits African societies actually looks like. The policy work is to create the markets and regulatory environments that enable them to thrive. The intellectual work is to stop treating them as a stage on the way to something more sophisticated, and start treating them as the thing itself.

Why The Time Is Now

The window is open now in a way it has not been open for most of our lives. The arrangement that imposed the imported categories is coming apart. The Americans, the Europeans, the French in the Sahel, the multilateral institutions and the consultancy class that lived on their grants — all are preoccupied, weakened, or in retreat. Either we use the moment to build institutional architecture that fits how our societies actually work, or the next reorganisation of the global order will arrive with new categories from elsewhere, and we will spend the rest of this century trying to make them fit, too.

It is time, in the simplest possible language, to put ourselves first. Not against the rest of the world. Not in retreat from it. But in the recognition that for sixty years our economic life has been organised around someone else’s first interest, and that the cost of that arrangement is visible in the cashew trees that became charcoal, in the coffee bushes that became rental flats, in the goats that were sold a week after the development programme closed, in the brittle formal layer that breaks the moment external support is withdrawn.

The women in Kilifi are still meeting under the tree. The box will be locked next week, and the week after, and the week after that. The cashew farmers down the road are still selling their trees as charcoal. The question for the rest of us is which of the two scenes we choose to build from.

I.

This is a busy week in global development. Today, Presidents William Ruto of Kenya and Emmanuel Macron of France will preside over the Heads of State day of the Africa Forward Summit at the Kenyatta International Conference Centre in Nairobi — a summit intended to showcase the growing partnership between the two countries, with a focus on security cooperation, economic investment, and green energy. Attending are thirty heads of state and government leaders, as well as four thousand delegates, including two and a half thousand business leaders, and by the close of today’s deliberations, the phrase “renewed partnership” will have been repeated many times, a diplomatically worded communiqué will have been drafted promising stronger collaboration, and the usual powerful photographs will have been taken.

At the same time, here in Paris, the OECD is in the second day of its conference on The Future of International Development Co-operation, where senior political leaders and policy makers, development cooperation diplomats, thought leaders, private sector players, and civil society actors from across the world have been gathering to discuss what comes next. Across the city, ODI Global has been convening the fifth and final round of its Donors in a Post-Aid World dialogues under the title What Now? Moving from Dialogue to Decisions — the closed-door session was on Sunday at the UK Embassy and the breakfast with the OECD’s Development Co-operation Directorate was yesterday morning, and I am writing this from in among those conversations. In March, Foreign Affairs published Landry Signé’s Africa After Aid, in which he argues that the cuts have revealed the continent’s economic resilience rather than its fragility, and Devex opened the year with a long piece by Raj Kumar titled The old aid model is dead. Now comes the fight over what replaces it. The whole sector, it seems, is in the same conversation at the same time.

The numbers that frame this conversation came in from the OECD in April. Aid fell by 23.1 per cent in 2025 — the largest single-year drop ever recorded — taking total ODA back to its 2015 level of $174.3 billion, and aid to sub-Saharan Africa fell by 26.3 per cent. The United States cut its aid by 56.9 per cent in twelve months and on its own accounted for three-quarters of the global decline, while Germany has now become the largest donor in the world at $29.1 billion, for the first time in history. A further fall of 5.8 per cent is forecast for 2026, which is to say that the contraction is real, and it is not yet finished.

The phrase everyone keeps reaching for is “post-aid era,” and I want to suggest that it is not quite the right phrase, because an era is not best defined by the absence of someone else’s money, and what we are actually entering, it seems to me, is a post-pretence era. The pretence was that aid was the substance of the relationship between the North and the rest of us; the substance, as it turns out, was always the people doing the work.

II. What the North can let go of.

The first thing is the civilising posture in its modern dress, by which I mean the underlying geometry that has held across every successive vocabulary of cooperation — the colonial era spoke of bringing light, the development era spoke of bringing institutions, the impact era spoke of bringing results, and so the vocabulary keeps changing while the geometry, in which the North arrives with the design, we provide the site, and any failure of fit is read as a failure of the site, does not. That geometry is what needs to change, and the moment to change it is now, while the instruments that held it in place are being rebuilt anyway.

The second is the conditionality reflex, by which I mean the habit of arriving with conditions arranged in tidy packages — fiscal discipline, market liberalisation, anti-corruption, gender targets, climate safeguards — each of which is defensible on its own terms but which, stacked together, amount to a foreign policy template that recipient countries did not arrive at through their own democratic processes. There is a more honest version of this conversation available, one in which values are advanced through persuasion, partnership, and example rather than through financial leverage, and that version is where I would like to see the sector move.

The third is the legibility demand, which is to say the architecture’s insistence that African institutions become legible — through legible budgets, legible logframes, legible indicators, legible procurement, legible beneficiaries — before they are permitted to participate. While legibility has a real purpose, it also carries a real cost, because whole African ministries now bend their calendars around donor reporting cycles and whole categories of African organisations exist primarily to be legible to people in Berne and The Hague, which is to say that the cost has become disproportionate to the purpose, and the system is overdue for a renegotiation of that balance.

And then there is the larger point, which is that aid was never really separate from the rules, because the same governments now scaling back ODA also shape the global tax architecture, the intellectual property regimes, the sovereign debt processes, and the trade rules under which the rest of us operate. Writing in AfricaBrief in March, Lyla Latif set out a careful line-by-line comparison between the October 2025 and January 2026 drafts of the UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation, and her summary of what she found was that “strong language gets weaker, binding commitments become aspirational suggestions, and specific obligations dissolve into vague processes.” She gives the example of Article 8 on harmful tax practices, where the October draft required tax incentives to be “substance-based, linked to investment or performance, and not merely profit-based” — language that simply vanished from the January draft and was replaced with softer references to “developing, enhancing and implementing effective tools” and “monitoring and identifying emerging harmful tax practices” — and she notes that on Article 6, on the taxation of high-net-worth individuals, the obligation shifted from “shall adopt coordinated approaches” to “shall explore coordinated approaches,” which she describes as “the difference between enforceable commitment and political theatre.” This is happening now, in the same season as the conferences about the future of cooperation, and a post-aid era that leaves the rules untouched leaves the harder work undone. The opportunity, for the partners in this conversation who are serious, is to do that harder work alongside the conversation about aid itself.

III. What we can let go of.

The first thing is the performance of grievance, and I want to be careful here because the historical case is overwhelming and does not need to be relitigated in this essay — conquest happened, extraction happened, structural adjustment happened, the asymmetry persists — and these are the diagnosis, not the prescription. The trouble is that grievance, when it is performed and re-performed without being converted into work, produces nothing on its own, and it has become, in some quarters of our intellectual life, the African thinker’s principal export, which is to say that we quote Fanon at conferences without doing the work he would have recognised as work, and we invoke Sankara on stage in three-piece suits before flying out on diplomatic passports, and the next chapter of this story has to ask more of us than that.

The second is the theatre of dependence, by which I mean that quiet, well-rehearsed performance, repeated in capital after capital, in which we arrive at international tables ready to recite our limitations before our offers, our deficits before our designs, and our gratitude before our positions. It is a posture inherited from a relationship in which our role in the room was to be supplicants, and it has now outlived the relationship that produced it, persisting in the way we open speeches, in the way we draft communiqués, and in the way our negotiators are briefed to manage rather than to lead. The cost of the theatre is not just dignity but also leverage, because people who arrive at a table appearing to need it cannot negotiate its terms, and the next chapter of African engagement with the world needs negotiators, ministers, and presidents who walk in carrying offers rather than asks.

The third is what I have come to think of as the Davos posture, by which I mean the deference to external credentialism among too many of our elites that has become, I think, one of the most expensive psychological infrastructures we still maintain — a Harvard fellowship, a Munich invitation, a TED stage, a Brookings paper, which we treat in too many of our rooms as the validation that confirms an African is finally serious. The result is that some of the most consequential builders on this continent in the last thirty years have done their work without any of those credentials, while some of the most decorated African experts on Africa have built less than the work would suggest, and the deference, which is colonial residue, is something we can begin to let go of by hiring, funding, board-seating, and quoting our own theorists, our own builders, and our own institutions, without apology and with confidence.

The fourth is what we might call the local NGO subcontracting question, because many of our civil society organisations are not, in any structural sense, African — they are nationally registered subcontractors to Northern funders, with mission statements, theories of change, and reporting calendars dictated by the funder’s logframe, and when USAID was dismantled at the start of last year, the panic that followed across this sector was itself the diagnosis. Ten years after the Grand Bargain pledged twenty-five per cent of humanitarian funding to local and national groups, the figure sits at around 4.5 per cent, which is to say that the redistribution that was promised did not happen on its own and is unlikely to happen in the next architecture without us building it ourselves. A serious African civil society needs financing that survives the loss of any single funder, and the architecture for that financing — diaspora capital, faith institutions, professional associations, cooperatives, member dues, social enterprise revenue, and domestic philanthropy — is local, and while none of those sources is easy, all of them are real.

The fifth is the leak that rarely gets named from the main stage at these summits, and that I want to name here. Africa loses somewhere between fifty and ninety billion dollars a year to illicit financial flows — the African Union’s own figure sits at around fifty billion — and a meaningful share of that is not foreign multinationals shifting profits but wealth that originates on the continent and exits it, into London, Geneva, Dubai, and the offshore archipelago, often through legal vehicles and intermediaries to which the same African voices calling for reparations are themselves personally connected. We cannot build a fiscal contract between our states and our citizens on revenues that are being moved offshore by the very people negotiating that contract, and we have to begin to apply the standards we have asked of Northern donors to ourselves.

And the sixth is the conference habit itself, the irony of which is not lost on me as I write this from Paris on the day of a summit in Nairobi and an OECD gathering happening here in this same city. We have arrived at a place where Africans, having grown weary of being summoned to summits in Paris and Brussels and London to discuss our continent, now convene our own summits in Nairobi and Kigali and Addis and invite the Europeans, and this is progress — but it is not yet sufficient, because the family meeting still needs to happen before the neighbourhood meeting, and the deeper question is whether we are using these gatherings to coordinate the work among ourselves or to perform the existence of the work for audiences whose attention is, in any case, drifting. There is a version of a summit that produces decisions, deadlines, and money, and there is a version that produces a communiqué — and the first is the one worth our time.

IV. What we should lean into.

Before I come to what is being built, I want to make the case for what we should be designing around, because much of what comes next depends on whether we are willing to take our own cultural and economic practices seriously enough to architect public policy around them rather than around their imagined Northern replacements.

The chama, the iddir, the tontine, the boda-boda network, the trader association, the apprenticeship system, the rotating savings group, the church welfare fund, the WhatsApp lending circle and the dozens of other institutions through which African economic life actually functions are not way stations on the road to a more “formal” economy that one day resembles a Northern one — they are the form, and they move enormous volumes of value while holding hundreds of millions of households through volatility that would crush a comparable Northern middle class. M-Pesa was not invented to replace the chama; it scaled precisely because the chama was already there, and the most successful African financial technologies of the last twenty years have been those that read the existing architecture correctly rather than those that tried to overwrite it.

The implication of this, which I think we have been slow to draw, is that the next generation of African economic policy — on credit, on insurance, on social protection, on pensions, on health financing, on tax, on housing — should begin not with imported templates and then look for ways to make them fit, but with the institutions our people already use, trust, and operate, and should then design outwards from there. That means pension systems that integrate with rotating savings groups rather than displace them with mandatory schemes that millions cannot afford to participate in, health financing systems that work with the welfare funds attached to churches, mosques, and burial societies rather than pretend those institutions do not exist, credit systems that recognise the credit histories embedded in chamas and trader networks rather than require borrowers to invent paper credentials they will never possess, and apprenticeship economies that are regulated and resourced rather than formalised out of existence. The opportunity, which we have not yet seized at the scale it deserves, is to architect African modernity outwards from African practice rather than to keep apologising for the gap between the two.

V. What is being built.

While the world has been preparing communiqués, things have quietly been built, and it is worth spending a moment with them.

The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System now connects more than 160 commercial banks across twelve African countries, and in February of this year, Pesalink linked another eighty Kenyan banks, fintechs, SACCOs, and telcos into the network, which means that payments that used to take a week and cost seven per cent now take two minutes and cost a fraction of that, and that an African no longer needs a dollar to pay another African. That is what infrastructure sovereignty looks like in practice.

The African Continental Free Trade Area has now been ratified by 49 of 54 signatories, and in February, at the AU Assembly in Accra, heads of state inaugurated a continental implementation committee chaired by President Ruto, along with 8 new annexes to the Intellectual Property Rights Protocol. The architecture is largely in place, and what remains is the work of making it function — which is, finally, the work our political class was elected to do.

The UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation entered its fourth substantive negotiating round in New York in February, chaired by Egypt’s Ramy Youssef, and the most consequential rewriting of the global tax architecture since the 1960s is now being negotiated under African insistence. The question of our fiscal sovereignty for the next generation will be settled in that room as much as anywhere else, and we have both the chair and the Africa Group, which means the work, for now, is to hold the position while much of the rest of the sector is absorbed in its own transition.

Remittances to low- and middle-income countries reached nearly seven hundred billion dollars in 2024, growing by ten per cent, roughly four times the total of DAC ODA in 2025 — making this the largest people-funded support flow in the modern world. We built it without permission, without a logframe, and without a Geneva committee; we built it because we had to. We still do not own the rails, however, and we pay around seven per cent of every transaction to a handful of Northern remittance companies, which means that the rails are the next thing to build.

The African Development Bank, under new leadership, has raised billions in new capital from Gulf states and is, for the first time, issuing bonds to fund its concessional lending, and in January it held its first joint sit-down with the Arab Coordination Group in Abidjan, which means that Arab capital is now being deliberately positioned as a central pillar of our development financing and the diversification is happening — though the question is whether we will negotiate the same terms from Gulf, Asian, and BRICS partners that we were not always able to negotiate from Northern ones, and the answer to that question depends on whether post-pretence is also post-deference.

And then, in Accra, a doctrine has formed, which I would like to spend a little time with. The Accra Reset, anchored by President Mahama and convened with a Guardians’ Circle that includes Olusegun Obasanjo, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, John Kufuor, and Helen Clark — with Sidi Ould Tah of the African Development Bank representing the continent’s multilateral financial institutions — was unveiled at UNGA in September, took shape at Davos in January, and scaled at the February AU Summit with three formal launches: a sovereign financing facility, a Global Digital Skills Passport roadmap, and a Sovereign Negotiators Network. Its proposition is short and worth quoting in full: Sovereignty is not a slogan. It is a discipline of delivery. The Reset names three burdens — geopolitical vulnerability, donor dependence, and geostrategic marginalisation — and treats them as one design problem, and it runs a public Action Ledger so that commitments made in convening rooms are tracked against delivery milestones. The dialogue this week in Paris asks What Now? — and there is, in fact, an answer forming, and it is being built in Accra.

VI.

To the policymakers, business leaders, and development professionals who are in Nairobi today, and to those of us in Paris this week, at the OECD and at the dPAW:

The communiqué is not the point, and neither are the handshake photographs or the keynote applause — the point, as it has always been, is the work, by which I mean the fiscal, the technical, and the deeply political work of building the contracts and the rails and the institutions that will hold us when the next external assurance changes. And it will change, because the composition of Northern political support has always been a function of Northern politics, and Northern politics, like all politics, shifts. We have, finally, learned this, and we should not have to learn it again.

The development industry’s mistake, like that of many institutions in transition, has been to confuse the end of its instruments with the end of the work — but the work has always been done by the people in whose name the instruments existed, and so the instruments are changing while the work continues.

The aid is dead. We can talk now.

And when the speeches end — in Nairobi, in Paris, in whichever city the calendar throws up next — the question is no longer what now, but how fast.

Today, we have made the announcement that I am stepping back from my role as Executive Director of the Open Institute. Jay Bhalla, who founded the Institute with me, will lead it through the transition and into its next chapter. The team is steady, the programmes continue, the partnerships hold.

What I want to write about here, on my own page rather than in the formal announcement, is the part that does not belong in an institution’s press release. I am stepping back because I have been managing a health condition for some time, and it has finally insisted on the kind of attention it cannot get between flights and board meetings. There is also a longer story behind that fact, about what twelve years in the office of an executive director does to a body, and what it takes, sometimes more than once, for us to listen.

In October 2019, I wrote a piece on my blog called I came this close to dying. Some of you read it then. Some of you wrote to me afterwards with your own quieter versions of the same story. The Open Institute was barely seven years old. We had not yet built the team and the foundations the organisation has now. I came out of that hospital with a list of promises in my hand, and I published them, the way one does. I kept some. I broke others. The work was urgent. The work was meaningful. The work was, I told myself, what mattered. And so I went back to the desk, and the calendar, and the planes, and the late nights of finishing the proposal, and the early mornings of the next country’s meetings, and the body filed its slow accounts and waited.

I want to say something about the office of an executive director, because I think we under-discuss it, and because the version of this story that places all the responsibility on the individual leader is the version that often lets us off the hook. The role, particularly of a small or mid-sized organisation working on hard problems with under-resourced teams, is not really one role. It is several, layered on top of each other, none of which fully release you when the day ends. You are the chief fundraiser, which means you carry, alone or nearly alone, the financial survival of the people who depend on the organisation for their livelihoods. You are the chief storyteller, and so every conversation, every panel, every speech, every social post is being measured for whether it will move the next tranche of money or partnership. You are the chief diplomat with the government, the chief listener with communities, the chief therapist for staff in difficult moments, the chief writer of strategy documents, and the chief signer of cheques. You are the person whose name appears at the bottom of the long emails that have to be sent on a Sunday because Monday has already filled up. You travel. You are away from your family. You eat in airports. You sleep in time zones that do not belong to you. You convince yourself that the price is bearable because the cause is worth it, and you are not entirely wrong, but you are not entirely right either.

The body, meanwhile, keeps its own ledger. It does not care about the cause. It does not care about the funding cycle. It does not care that you have a board meeting in Kigali on Thursday. It records what you ate, how you slept, how often your shoulders were locked at your ears, and, at some point, it presents the bill. In 2019, it presented one version of that bill in a high dependency unit, with machines and saline drips and a blood sugar reading that registered only as HHH because the meter could not name a figure that high. The condition I am attending to now is not the same one, but it is part of the same conversation. The body is not the enemy of the work. It is the witness. It has been keeping the most accurate minutes of the meeting all along, and it would be foolish, the second time around, not to read them.

The decision to step back, when I finally made it, did not arrive as a revelation. It arrived as a calculation. I sat with the numbers, the medical ones, the institutional ones, the personal ones, and I noticed something that took me longer than it should have to notice. The Open Institute does not need me to keep going. It needs me to have built something that does not need me, and I think we have. The team is exceptional. The work is well held. Jay, the same friend who drove me to the Mater Hospital seven years ago, will steward what comes next. The next chapter belongs to people who will write it better than I would by carrying on past the point where carrying on is wise. The thing I had treated as indispensable, my continuing presence at the helm, was, on closer inspection, the thing I most needed to release.

I want to be careful here, because there is a version of this argument that becomes self-congratulatory, and that is not what I am reaching for. The truth is more uncomfortable. I stayed in the daily running of things longer than I should have. Not by years, but by months, perhaps by quarters. I knew it before my body did. I knew it the way one knows the milk has turned but pours it into the tea anyway. The body was just the one that finally insisted. I am not sure I would have moved without it. That is a thing I am still sitting with.

What I have learned, in the weeks since the decision, is that stopping is its own discipline. It is not the absence of doing; it is a different kind of doing. There is the doing of rest, which is harder than it sounds for anyone who has built an identity around motion. There is the doing of attention to food, to sleep, to the slow walking that the body has been asking for and that I have been deferring with the practised grace of a man who believed himself essential. There is the doing of presence with the people who have carried the cost of my absences. My wife and children. The friends I forgot to call. I postponed the conversations because the work was urgent and the conversations were merely important.

There is also the doing of grief. Twelve years is a long time to give to anything, and giving it well leaves a shape in the soul that does not refill quickly. I am proud of what we built at the Open Institute. The pride does not cancel the grief; it sits next to it. Both are true, and both will be true for a while. I have decided to let them.

If there is one thing I want to leave with anyone reading this who is in the middle of their own version of this calculation, it is something I am only now properly understanding. The leaders we most admire, looking back, are rarely the ones who pushed through. They are the ones who knew when to stop, and stopped, and let the institution they had built prove that they had built it properly. The measure of what we have made is what continues without us. If the work cannot proceed without you, you have not yet finished building it. If it can, then to step back is not an act of withdrawal. It is the last and most honest thing the founder gets to do.

In 2019, Dr Macharia told me, over and over, you are going to live. I wrote that line at the bottom of the piece I published then. I am writing it again now, with a steadier hand and a wiser body. I am going to live. The work continues, in the hands of the people best placed to carry it. The memo, this time, is being answered.

I was walking through the Grand Place in Brussels yesterday, the sort of square that makes you forget which century you are standing in, when I caught a thread of song moving against the cold air. It was an old Swahili Christian hymn, the kind my mother’s generation knew without having to remember.

Vumilia roho yangu, majaribu ni kama moto, yanayo choma imani yangu, bwana naomba unisaidie.

Endure, my soul. The trials are like fire, burning at my faith. Lord, I ask you, help me.

I followed the voice. It belonged to a man, perhaps thirty-five, scrubbing the pavement in front of a restaurant that had not yet opened for the day. We greeted each other in Kiswahili, with that small electric joy that two Africans always seem to find in each other when they meet far from home, the recognition that says, ah, you too, here.

Let us call him Omosh. He is from Kaloleni in Nairobi, a self-described ghetto child who became a medic and worked the wards before love and a passport pulled him to Europe fifteen years ago. The love turned, as some loves do, and a vindictive ex made sure his papers never came. Since then, he has been moving through Europe in the underground way that millions move, taking what work the cities give to people who are not officially there. He landed in Belgium some years back. He shares a flat with several other undocumented men, paying rent that would buy a respectable house in Kilifi over a few years. He works three jobs. He sleeps three or four hours. A third of what he earns goes home each month, and the rest, what little there is, he saves towards the day he can return with something to show.

I asked him, gently, why not come home now.

He looked at me with the particular tiredness of a man who has been asked this before by people who do not understand. “I do not know home any more. What would I go back there to do? And what would I tell people, that I went to Europe and came back with nothing?” He kept scrubbing. “Better to stay and try to save.”

I did try, in the way one does, to suggest that Kenya has its rhythms, its possibilities, its returning sons and daughters making lives. He listened politely. But the news he sees and the WhatsApp forwards he reads have already done their work. Kenya, in his Brussels flat at three in the morning, looks like a place where people drown slowly. He does not believe me, and to be fair to him, I am not sure I would believe me either if I were standing where he is standing.

I am in Belgium this week with a circle of social entrepreneurs, gathered to think together about the power of narrative, about the strange and underestimated way the stories a society tells itself shape what becomes possible within it. One quote from the room has not left me since I heard it.

“You cannot dream when you have to work to eat.”

I keep turning it over. It is not a metaphor. It is a description. Dreaming is metabolic. It needs slack in the day, sleep in the night, and calories that the body is not already spending. Omosh, with his three jobs and his four hours, has nothing left over to dream with. He is surviving in the present tense.

Two weeks ago, on the other side of the world that is the same world, I sat with a young man in Tana River who calls himself Kalulu, after the cartoon hare, the small clever animal of the folktales. He is twenty-one. He is a member of the Wozawoza, that amorphous network of young men along the Kenyan coast who have decided that what the country will not give them, they will take. Muggings. Robberies. The grim economy of the panga and the dark corner.

I asked him why. Was there not a better future he could be working towards?

He told me his story without flinching. He had finished high school with an A minus. The University of Nairobi had offered him a place to read law. His family could not raise the bus fare to Nairobi, never mind the small sums he would need to feed himself once there. He went everywhere. The MCA. The MP. The County Commissioner. The pastors and the imams and the rich uncles of the rich uncles. From every door, he received the same currency of platitudes, the same theatre of concerned faces and empty hands. Then his father fell ill and died. His mother is now living with hypertension that the household cannot properly manage. His younger siblings need to eat tomorrow and the day after. There is no work.

“What do you want me to do?” he asked, and his voice was not pleading. It was clear. “If the rich will not help me, let me go to them and force them to share.”

I have been carrying that sentence around for two weeks now. It has lodged itself the way certain sentences do, the ones that refuse to be argued with because they are not really arguments. They are descriptions of a country that has run out of the soft mechanisms by which young men with A minuses are supposed to be absorbed into a future. The lawyer Kenya was supposed to make for Kalulu is gone. He has been replaced by something the country will spend the next decade fearing, hunting and writing op-eds about, while declining to ask the question of how he was made.

Omosh and Kalulu are the same young man, separated by a single fork in the road that neither of them got to draw. Omosh took the boat or the plane or whatever quiet route was offered to him, and the boat became a vindictive ex and a flat in Brussels and a hymn at six in the morning on a square full of tourists. Kalulu stayed and walked around his county, knocking on doors until his fist became something else. Both of them are working. Both of them are sending money home in their different currencies. Both of them are saving towards a day that recedes the closer they get to it. Neither of them is dreaming.

The story we tell ourselves about young men like these is that they made choices. Omosh chose Europe. Kalulu chose the panga. We say it with the particular smugness of people who know we are lying, because we know what the choice set actually looked like. A boy with no fare to Nairobi did not choose the Wozawoza any more than a medic with a bad ex chose to scrub a Brussels pavement at dawn. They walked into rooms whose doors had been quietly shut years before they arrived, by people who were busy doing other things.

The other story we tell ourselves, the one I keep hearing in many places, is that Africa’s problem is a deficit of opportunity. I am no longer sure that is the most useful frame. The continent does not lack opportunity in any abstract sense. It lacks the connective tissue between the boy in Tana River and the desk in Nairobi that was waiting for him. It lacks the small civic decencies, the bus fare from a county fund, the bursary that actually arrives, the church that does more than pray, the rich uncle who treats his nephew’s letter as a real letter rather than a nuisance. Those are not opportunities. Those are bridges. Without them, the opportunity exists only on paper, and paper is not a thing a hungry boy can eat.

What Omosh sends home each month, and what Kalulu takes from someone else’s pocket on a coastal road at night, are the same act in two registers. They are both attempts to build the bridge that society refused to build. The remittance and the robbery are cousins, and we who have made it know this even when we will not say it.

I left Omosh standing at his bucket. He had a long day ahead of him. I did not have anything useful to give him, no number to call, no scheme to enrol him in, no clever plan that could undo fifteen years of furtive geography. I told him I would write about him, and he laughed in the way men laugh when they do not believe writing will do anything, but they appreciate the gesture.

When I got back to my hotel, I played the hymn on my phone. Vumilia roho yangu. Endure, my soul. It is the song of a people who have decided that endurance is itself a form of faith, because the alternative is to stop. I understand the song. My grandmother sang it. But I find myself wanting, this week, a different verse. One that does not ask the soul to endure quite so much. One that asks instead who keeps lighting the fire.

Last week, I was told that Kenya is a leading destination for In Vitro Fertilization (IVF), a point that was met with some disbelief by some people I was with

When Raila Odinga died in October last year, the detail that caught me was not the grief, which was enormous, nor the eulogies, which were predictable. It was the dateline. Devamatha Hospital, Kochi, Kerala. A man who gave his life to Kenya, who shaped its democracy across four decades, who argued for the dignity of African institutions in every room he entered, spent his final hours in a private ward several thousand kilometres from the country he loved. He is not unusual. Muhammadu Buhari ruled Nigeria from London clinics. Edgar Lungu went to South Africa. Paul Biya, now in his nineties, governs Cameroon from Geneva suites whenever his body complains. The list is long enough that the pattern is no longer anecdote. It is policy, by omission.

The easy story is that our hospitals are broken. It is partly true. Africa carries roughly a quarter of the global disease burden with something closer to three per cent of the world’s health spend, and Nigerians alone sent an estimated 2.39 billion dollars abroad on medical tourism in 2024. The continent’s public systems are understaffed, underfunded, and in many places physically decaying. I have sat in waiting rooms in Mombasa and Garissa where the fluorescent tubes flickered like a bad metaphor, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

But the easy story misses what is actually happening. Because if you walk into the Aga Khan University Hospital in Nairobi, or MP Shah, or the Nairobi Hospital on a weekday morning, you will find cardiology suites, neurosurgery theatres, oncology units, and consultants whose CVs include Johns Hopkins, Great Ormond Street, the Karolinska. You will find equipment that is newer than what is installed in some district hospitals in the English Midlands. You will find Kenyans, Nigerians, Rwandans, Ugandans who were born in these countries, trained partly here and partly abroad, and who chose to come home. The clinical capability is present. What is absent is belief.

This is where the honest conversation starts. Africa’s elite medical exodus is not, in the main, driven by what is missing in Nairobi or Lagos or Accra. It is driven by what is missing in the elite imagination about Nairobi, Lagos, and Accra. The same Permanent Secretary who will not trust a Kenyan cardiologist in Upper Hill to read his echocardiogram will happily trust a Kenyan cardiologist at Cleveland Clinic’s Abu Dhabi branch, even though it may be the same man who trained at the same university and examined the same heart in a different postcode. The geography does the reassuring, not the medicine. And this is a branding problem before it is a clinical one. A functioning MRI in Kisumu reads, in the elite mind, as a rumour. The same machine in Heidelberg reads as a fact. Until that reading changes, no amount of equipment procurement will keep the Cabinet out of Gulfstreams.

I want to sit with that observation for a moment, because it flips the usual development narrative on its head. We have spent two decades writing papers about brain drain, about the 65,000-plus African-born physicians working in developed countries, about the Ghanaian nurses in the NHS and the Nigerian consultants in Houston. These are real losses. But we should also admit something uncomfortable. If all of them came home tomorrow, with their fellowships and their board certifications intact, our elites would still fly out. Because the problem is not that the talent is absent. The problem is that the talent is not legible to the people who govern the country. Our doctors are visible to us only once foreigners have validated them. We are a continent that reads its own reflection through other people’s mirrors.

There is a second dimension, and this is the one that interests me most, because it is rarely said out loud. The habit of flying abroad for care is a political performance. It signals membership in a class that has exit options. It is how our elites communicate, without saying so, that they do not share a common fate with the rest of us. The President lands in Hamburg for a prostate procedure, and the message reaches every young doctor in Kenyatta National Hospital by the end of that shift. The message is: I do not trust what you are doing here, and I will not stake my body on it. What follows is entirely predictable. The doctor emigrates, because if the patient whose taxes pay her salary does not believe in her work, why should she stay. The emigration is then cited, by the same class, as a reason the next generation of elites must also fly abroad. The loop closes. And the young mother in Siaya whose child needs a paediatric surgeon inherits a system hollowed out by a self-fulfilling prophecy that began in State House.

So how do we break the loop. There is a developmental instinct, well meaning, that says the answer is to build flagship hospitals designed to attract the elite, the so-called medical tourism hubs. Afreximbank’s African Medical Centre of Excellence in Abuja is moving in this direction. Rwanda has pursued it with King Faisal. Ethiopia has built a hospital near Bole airport explicitly to capture patients who would otherwise fly to Dubai. I am not against these projects. But I want to suggest that trying to make African healthcare attractive to elites, as a primary strategy, has the logic backwards.

Singapore did not become a medical destination by courting wealthy Singaporeans. It became one by building a system so competent for the ordinary citizen that eventually the minister, the banker, and the visiting diplomat were all equally embarrassed to leave. The quality was pulled up from beneath, not parachuted in from above. This is the inverted path I think Africa needs to take. Build the dispensary in Magarini that works, the sub-county hospital in Kakamega that has oxygen and staff and clean sheets, the primary care clinic in Jos that does not run out of amoxicillin in week two. When the bottom 80 per cent of the system is functional, something happens to the top 5 per cent. Flying to India for a knee replacement starts to feel less like status and more like inconvenience. The elite follows the system once the system becomes real. Trying the other way round, building cathedrals for the rich while the parish crumbles, produces beautiful private hospitals in a country that still has no public trust.

The branding work is equally unglamorous, and equally necessary. I think of what Mo Ibrahim did for African governance indices, or what Aliko Dangote has done for the idea that cement, sugar, and urea can be made on African soil and be world class. The job is to make the ordinary fact visible. To insist, repeatedly and with evidence, that the consultant at Nairobi Hospital is as qualified as the one at Guy’s and St Thomas’. That Ghana’s Komfo Anokye does cardiac work that would be respected anywhere. That the surgeons Al Kags would never have heard of, in Eldoret and Ibadan and Kigali, are quietly doing cases that would be written up in journals if they happened in Boston. This is marketing in the deepest sense. It is the correction of a story the continent tells itself about itself. Chimamanda warned us about the danger of a single story, and we nodded. Then we went and adopted the single story about our own hospitals.

There is a political piece to this that I cannot pretend away. At some point, the courage has to come from the top, because the bottom is watching. Ghana’s John Mahama, when he was in opposition, promised he would seek medical care at home. Whether that promise holds once he sits in the Castle again is another matter, but the signal mattered. I would go further. Every Cabinet Secretary, every Permanent Secretary, every Governor, and every MP should be covered by a medical insurance scheme that pays only for treatment received in Kenya, with narrow exceptions certified by an independent medical board. Not as punishment, but as a forcing function. If the people who write the health budget are obliged to use the system they write, the system will improve with a speed that no Hewlett grant can purchase. What we fund is what we fear, and our leaders have outsourced their fear.

The diaspora question then becomes more interesting, because it stops being about repatriation and becomes about validation. The Kenyan cardiologist at Cedars-Sinai does not need to come home permanently. She needs to be visible in the Kenyan medical ecosystem. Quarterly clinics in Nairobi, joint fellowship programmes with Kenyatta University, peer review of local research, investment in local practices. The diaspora’s most valuable export is not its labour. It is its seal of approval. When a Kenyan patient hears that the Nairobi surgeon he is being referred to trained alongside the famous professor in Baltimore, that is the rumour becoming fact. The Ghana Physicians and Surgeons Foundation of North America does some of this. So does the Nigerian-American Medical Foundation. It is patchy, underfunded, and too reliant on individual initiative. It ought to be institutional.

I want to close with the image that started me writing this. Raila in that Kochi ward, attended by excellent doctors who were, in the aggregate statistical sense, no more excellent than the ones in Nairobi who admired him from afar. The flight itself was the tragedy, not the destination. It was a decision that all of us, in our various ways, have endorsed by accepting a story about what African medicine can and cannot do. The hospitals will not change until the story changes, and the story will not change until the class that governs the story is willing to stake its own body on the change. Somewhere in Magarini, where I have been planting trees, a dispensary needs three things it does not have. Somewhere in Karen, a consultant is wondering if her daughter will also leave. These are the same conversation.