Search Results (303)

This study develops a novel composite index of women’s empowerment for 54 African economies over the period 1996–2024 (unbalanced), addressing the limitations of existing fragmented measures. The index is constructed using principal component factor loadings and captures multiple dimensions of empowerment, including economic, socio-demographic, cultural, political, physical, and cognitive aspects, particularly for groups historically exposed to structural marginalization. We investigate the structural, distributional, and conditional effects of women’s empowerment on environmental sustainability. Structural heterogeneity is addressed using heterogeneous panel estimators that allow coefficients to vary across countries. Distributional properties are examined through novel panel unit root tests that incorporate quantile-based approaches, enabling assessment of persistence and stationarity across different points of the conditional distribution rather than only the mean. Conditional effects are further explored by introducing renewable energy consumption as a moderating factor in the empowerment–environment nexus. The analysis is supported by a comprehensive set of second-generation econometric techniques that account for cross-sectional dependence and slope heterogeneity. In addition, panel causality tests incorporating Fourier smooth-transition specifications are employed to capture structural breaks and gradual regime shifts, ensuring that causal relationships are not assumed to be time-invariant but are allowed to evolve in response to structural change. The results reveal strong structural heterogeneity across African economies. While static estimators occasionally suggest a carbon-increasing effect of women’s empowerment, heterogeneous and dynamic models consistently show that empowerment reduces carbon emissions in the long run. Renewable energy consumption independently exerts a significant mitigating effect on emissions across all specifications. However, the interaction between women’s empowerment and renewable energy is positive and statistically significant, indicating that greater renewable energy adoption enhances the environmental effectiveness of women’s empowerment, suggesting that gender-inclusive policies are more effective when accompanied by a cleaner energy transition. The study concludes that sustainable development in Africa requires integrated, context-specific policies that jointly promote women’s empowerment, renewable energy expansion, and institutional strengthening. Full article

This article examines the artisanal fisheries of the Basse Casamance region in southern Senegal and investigates how changing governance arrangements shape their capacity to sustain local food security under conditions of socio-ecological change. These fisheries face mounting pressures from climate change, global market integration, shifting governance regimes, and emigration, while also undergoing profound institutional and socio-ecological transformations. Based on three months of ethnographic fieldwork, including participant observation and semi-structured interviews, the study traces the historical evolution of fisheries governance from precolonial common-property arrangements through colonial and postcolonial interventions to contemporary challenges such as industrial overfishing and environmental degradation. The analysis combines theoretical perspectives from New Institutionalism, Political Ecology, and Common-Property Theory to illuminate how local fisheries governance operates within a context of institutional pluralism and external pressures. The findings demonstrate that inland fisheries remain embedded in communal responsibility, local rulemaking, and ecological stewardship, but are increasingly strained by state regulation, market integration, and demographic shifts. Nevertheless, local actors sustain resilience by negotiating institutions and diversifying livelihoods. These adaptive strategies not only mitigate external pressures but also reinforce the role of fisheries as a cornerstone of local food security. By highlighting the resilience of artisanal fisheries as locally grounded governance systems, this study contributes to broader debates on sustainability, food security, and institutional change in West African fisheries. It underscores the need to recognize the enduring importance of community-based governance in managing common-pool resources under conditions of globalization and environmental uncertainty. Full article

Baboons inhabit diverse ecological and socio-political landscapes, from African savannahs and forests to the fragmented habitats of the Arabian Peninsula. This comparative synthesis examines how geography, governance, and adaptation shape human–baboon interactions and conservation outcomes. Geography determines habitat heterogeneity, species distribution, and encounter rates with people. Governance ranges from community-based management in Africa to centralized, technology-driven approaches in Saudi Arabia, influencing mitigation and policy implementation. Adaptation, especially behavioral flexibility, helps baboons persist in human-dominated landscapes while complicating management. Together, these factors support locally tailored, scalable conservation strategies and highlight the need for stakeholder engagement, technological innovation, and climate resilience to improve coexistence. Full article

Neither women’s studies nor lesbian and gay studies offers an adequate theoretical or political base for disruptive scholarship. Reading and interpreting Southern African writers, especially Sindiwe Magona and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, promotes women’s studies as an academic and political approach to both gender and the erotic. Drawing on genealogies of rupture and intergenerational studies, we argue that the feminist is a positionality that must be widely available to challenge heterosexual perspectives and become a catalyst for audiences to engage in nuanced analyses of discourses on places and genres—narrative in particular—where memories are rearticulated and elaborated. This article explores how the narratives of Magona, Ngugi, and Soyinka inform and complicate the erasure, erosion, and amnesia that accompany contemporary imaginaries of what is re/membered. We challenge the tendency to evaluate African feminisms as only either oppressive or empowering and read the selected texts and their prototypical characters as dynamic embodiments that inform gendered spaces across both the attachments that people hold to particular gender identities and styles and recognising the punitive realities of dominant gender expectations. The article takes a positionality on the often troubled relationship between feminism and femininity, a critical but generous reading that highlights the potential for an affirmative orientation towards identity politics. This study utilises the theoretical lenses of border thinking and decolonial and African feminisms to interrogate matrifocal borderlands and the sociohistorical and cultural dis/continuities of being and becoming. We explore notions of the entanglement of motherhood, daughterhood, wifehood, and sisterhood as morphing identities. These are identities at the margins of political, sociocultural, and gender normativities in African literature. Magona’s “threshold people”, like Ngugi’s perfect nine, destabilise, disrupt, and refuse to be subordinated as they codify living differently in the in-between worlds. Magona, for instance, laminates the challenging discourse of contestation to map difficult, dangerous, and marginal spaces where women live at the borders of sociocultural, religious, ethnic, and gendered norms. These are spaces suffused with affective possibilities—defensiveness, shame, anxiety, anger, curiosity—and the women have to develop relational solidarities in negotiating hyper-visibilities or (in)visibilities within the 21st-century global south. Full article

In this article, I explore Blackface Minstrels as a burlesque representation of African Americans. Black minstrelsy was an American nineteenth-century entertainment sensation that was subsequently exported to Europe and sustained there. While it would be impossible in this article to give an overview of the history of blackface minstrelsy, it is necessary to first tease out some of the characteristics of the genre, at particular historical moments, in order to reach an understanding of the genre’s popularity, how it sat in its social (and primarily race-sculpted) landscape, and examine some of the inherent contradictions therein. I scrutinise in particular blackface minstrelsy’s reception by Irish audiences, probing the politics of representation therein involved. To this end, I also investigate issues of social and cultural visibility in an Irish landscape that was remarkably homogeneous racially until at least the 1990s. As two core documents in this regard, I firstly examine the BBC’s ‘Black and White Minstrel Show’, created by George Inns in 1958, which ran from 1958 to 1978, in black and white, ironically, until 1967, and thereafter in colour. The second document that I examine is the very successful Irish Lyons Tea Company’s advertisement from the 1980s, which featured stick-figure black-and-white minstrels in stereotypical makeup and ‘standard minstrel Kentucky dress’ singing and dancing to a simple but memorable jingo. Full article

This study examines how Black women navigate spiritual widowhood and cosmological disinheritance in contemporary America through the biblical figure of Ruth. Employing what I call a critical embodied epistemology (CEE)—a womanist methodology integrating Hortense Spillers’ hieroglyphics of the flesh, Michel Foucault’s genealogical analysis, and Emilie Townes’ ethical reimagination—this article analyzes Ruth’s transgressive movements as a template for sacred belonging beyond State-sanctioned citizenship. Against the backdrop of reproductive rights rollbacks, voting restrictions, and the political rejection of Black women’s leadership, the research reveals how African-descended cosmology offers alternative frameworks for community, covenant, and citizenship. Findings demonstrate that Ruth’s embodied risk on the threshing floor models what I term “faith in the fracture”—an insurgent spirituality that refuses to tether sacred belonging to empire. The study contributes to womanist theology, political theology, and diaspora studies by theorizing sacred citizenship as relational rather than national, and by centering embodied knowledge as theological epistemology. Implications include reconceptualizing belonging for all marginalized communities navigating displacement, State abandonment, and cosmological rupture. Full article

Africa’s food systems, dominated by smallholder farmers, have yet to benefit from the transformative potential of digital technologies. While large-scale farms have widely integrated digital solutions, smallholder farms have lagged behind. This disparity creates unequal opportunities in the sector. African governments are not oblivious to the severe impact of the digital divide. Therefore, several policy frameworks and strategies are being adopted to address the challenge. This article examines current policy frameworks and strategies to address the digital divide in Africa’s food systems. It also explores the impact of these policy frameworks and strategies. The article draws from a qualitative review methodology underpinned by a review of primary and secondary sources, both in grey and academic formats. The article reveals that at the regional level, policies such as the African Union (AU) Digital Transformation Strategy, the Comprehensive African Agricultural Development Programme, the AU Digital Agriculture Strategy and the African Continental Free Trade Area Digital Protocol are being adopted to address the digital divide. There are also several Regional Economic Communities Initiatives that focus on several intertwined areas to address the digital divide. In addition, countries adopt notional strategies and policies to address country-specific challenges related to the digital divide. The article concludes that policies aimed at addressing the digital divide have had a limited impact in Africa due to poor implementation. Accountability must be built into the policy lifecycle, from planning and implementation to monitoring and evaluation, to address the digital divide in Africa’s food systems effectively. This can be achieved through a combination of political oversight, legal and regulatory frameworks, civil society engagement, and the establishment of measurable performance metrics. Full article

Abusive relationships are too often explained solely in terms of individual behaviour, as if a woman’s decision to stay were simply a matter of psychology or poor judgement. In South African communities, however, the reality is considerably more complex. The reasons women remain are situated within what can be described as a distorted process of care: a network of relational, material, and structural forces that alter the very meaning of care itself. This study aimed to explore these interconnections. Guided by an ethics of care framework, we employed multimodal qualitative methods to engage participants from four South African communities between August 2024 and July 2025. Participants (n = 262) were recruited through snowball, purposive, and convenience sampling. Data were coded using ATLAS.ti V8 and analysed thematically. Five interconnected themes shaped the framework. Distorted care described how caregiving could become coercive, shaped by fear, rigid gender roles, intergenerational abuse, and substance misuse. Care under constraint highlighted the material limitations, financial dependency, daily survival challenges, and self-sacrificing caregiving, that left women depleted. The silence of care captured emotional withdrawal, isolation, and the disabling effect of shame on help-seeking. Reclaiming care traced the tentative routes towards healing through ethical self-care, faith, forgiveness, and a conscious effort to disrupt harmful patterns. Woven throughout was structural failure, including absent family networks, the moral decline of communities, and institutional systems that consistently failed women. Remaining in an abusive relationship is not a sign of weakness. It is a negotiation, profoundly constrained, within systems of care that have been fundamentally distorted. Effective intervention should move beyond framing gender-based violence as an individual problem and address it as a collective one, restoring care as a shared social and political responsibility. Full article

For many Christians, the Gospel has nothing to do with socio-political issues. It is a “spiritual” matter. However, this is an unbiblical understanding of Christian faith. It is too a misunderstanding of what authentic spirituality is and the implications it entails. There is false piety which resulted in a faith and a spirituality divorced from the real world. This study focuses on the ethical implications of spirituality and explores its deep connection with the mission of the Church in the struggle for justice and peace and the quest for reconciliation. It argues that the South African experience can help us to a better understanding of true spirituality and the ethical implications of Christian faith. In the context of apartheid, many Christians understood that their faith compelled them to develop a “mystique of action,” involving themselves in the struggle against injustice and engaging in the search for reconciliation. The South African experience shows us that reconciliation is not a private affair between God and the individual; it has far-reaching social and political implications. Full article

This article juxtaposes the Indigenous communitarian feminist concept cuerpo-territorio and the African proverb musha mukadzi drawing on ethnographic research with Zimbabwean women activists in the context of land reform, thereby expanding the scope of both concepts. Our entry point is Zimbabwean women’s struggles for land in the Third Chimurenga, or post-2000 Fast-Track Land Reform Programme. Despite egalitarian promises, land redistribution efforts have favored political elites and men, reinforcing colonial capitalist practices of extraction and accumulation. Our comparative exercise reveals musha mukadzi as a political discourse that enables Indigenous women to reclaim their body–land relationship through struggles for land reform and beyond. In the process, we identify four key resonances between musha mukadzi and cuerpo-territorio, namely, an ontological similarity expressed through Indigenous women’s commitments to and responsibilities for re/generating the network of life; a common appeal to ancestral (feminist) wisdom to enhance ongoing struggle; the political mobilization of the concepts by Indigenous women to seek liberation from patriarchal, neo/colonial oppression; and, their conceptual utility as feminist analytics. Finally, we lay the foundation for further work on the possibilities of transnational feminist solidarity between Indigenous women in Africa and Abya Yala. Full article

Despite the aim of municipal boundaries re-demarcation to improve capacity, functionality, economic viability, and service delivery in South African municipalities, it often leads to community unrest, protests, and violent confrontations. This article examines socio-political factors that contribute to the ongoing disputes in Vuwani and Malamulele communities, Limpopo, South Africa, and their implications for social cohesion and local governance in a post-apartheid context. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 52 community members and other stakeholders who are directly involved in or affected by the disputes. Guided by territoriality theory, through thematic analysis, the study findings reveal that re-demarcation disputes are intertwined with political interests, differentiated ethnic and cultural identities, inadequate community consultation, and governance power imbalances. By situating Vuwani and Malamulele communities within wider debates on municipal border disputes, this study calls for an inclusive, transparent, and culturally sensitive approach to the implementation of municipal boundary changes. This is crucial for building united, peaceful, and sustainable communities, and for local government to regain public trust in post-apartheid South Africa. Full article

This study examines how relationship cultivation strategies are interpreted and enacted by strategic communication practitioners in Kenya’s county governments and corporate sector. Drawing on 38 in-depth interviews and guided by relationship management theory, the study employs a theory-informed inductive approach to explore how six key strategies—access, assurances, openness, networking, positivity, and task sharing—manifest in structurally distinct institutional contexts, extending scholarship on relationship cultivation to an underexamined sub-Saharan African setting. Findings reveal that while corporate practitioners operationalize these strategies through deliberate planning, responsiveness, and integrated stakeholder engagement, county government practitioners often face bureaucratic, political, and infrastructural constraints that undermine even basic efforts at relationship building. These sectoral contrasts highlight how the institutional context influences the cultivation of relationships and strategic communication practices. The study contributes to theory by demonstrating the need for a more context-sensitive and adaptive application of relationship management theory, and it offers practical insights for enhancing public engagement in decentralized governance systems. Beyond deepening understanding of strategic communication in Kenya, these findings carry implications for the global study and practice of relationship management across diverse institutional settings. Full article

Yam (Dioscorea rotundata) is a major staple crop in West Africa and plays a central role in regional food security, rural livelihoods, and cultural identity. Its wide ecological adaptation, diverse maturity periods, and in-ground storage capacity make yams critical to seasonal food availability and resilience of smallholder farming systems. Despite its importance, existing yam research has largely emphasized biophysical and agronomic dimensions, with limited integration of the socio-cultural and ecological factors that shape yam-based food systems. This review addresses this gap by synthesizing interdisciplinary knowledge on yam food ecology, focusing on how socio-cultural values, beliefs, behaviours, and interactions influence production, utilization, and sustainability of yam systems. We examine the roles of culture, politics, power relations, gender dynamics, and community organization in structuring yam production and consumption across the West African yam belt. The review further explores the long-standing human–yam relationship and the implications of eroding traditional knowledge for future food system resilience. By adopting a systems and ecological perspective that integrates life and social sciences, this review provides a framework to inform sustainable yam crop improvement, value chain development, and inclusive policy interventions, thereby supporting long-term food security and rural development in West Africa. Full article

Women’s political participation and representation is an important requirement for gender equality and achieving a truly democratic society. As provided in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, women and men have an equal right to civic and political rights. When women are involved in politics, communities move towards gender equality, which ensures that various voices are heard in governance and policy-making. This study was rooted in the fact that many African women continue to face repression, with several societies constraining their capability to contribute fully within political and social domains. The study employed secondary quantitative data to achieve its objective. Panel data for 17 countries with a poor track record on women’s rights and ever-declining rates on the Women’s Development Index were used by the study. A Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) panel technique was used for estimation purposes. The results showed that economic growth, participatory democracy, freedom of expression, globalisation and clean elections have a positive relationship with women’s political participation. This entails that these factors contribute to more political participation for women. The study recommends that in order to enhance women’s political participation, governments and civil society should strengthen by institutionalising inclusive decision-making processes at all levels. Full article

Theological studies of the Anglophone crisis in Cameroon have centred upon the question of secession. Those opposed to the creation of an independent (freedomland) Anglophone state (Ambazonia) draw extensively on the work of Emmanuel Katongole and Stanley Hauerwas, whose outright opposition to the nation state has shaped a number of African theologians. This essay engages the voices of Anglophone young people caught up in the crisis and brings them into dialogue with these professional theologians. Full article