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| African Feminist Macroeconomic Academy: The Audacity to Disrupt |
By Ramatu Ada Ochekliye
When I opened my email on June 16, I did it with a blasé attitude because the last couple of months had been filled with way too many rejections, with the much-needed sprinkling of acceptance. I saw the email notification from the African Feminist Macroeconomic Academy (AFMA) and steeled myself for another rejection. If you have been in these shoes, you know it is that pesky thing we do so that we act like another rejection doesn’t faze us.
Imagine my surprise when this one was different. That congratulations, sharing that I was selected for the Academy and would be going to Kigali, Rwanda, from July 20 – 24, 2026, made me warm all over. This cohort, put together by FEMNET | The African Women’s Development Network and Nawi Collective, was bringing feminists from across Africa to strengthen feminist engagement with macroeconomic policy, political economy, and economic justice across Africa. The Academy brings together women’s rights organisations, feminist movements, researchers, media practitioners, and activists to deepen their understanding of how macro-level economic decisions shape the lived realities of women and marginalized communities. AFMA equips participants with the knowledge and tools to challenge structural inequalities, influence economic policy, and contribute to feminist scholarship and advocacy. The 2026 convening, themed Feminist Futures of Work: Building Power for Labour Justice in the Digital Age, focused on the intersection of labour, care, technology, digitalisation, and feminist political economy, while encouraging participants to collectively imagine more just, equitable, and feminist futures of work for Africa.
To be honest, when I was applying for this opportunity, I did so with some trepidation. The idea of the economy is something I understand from my lived experience, but barely from the global definitions and theories about the concept. The theories always felt so removed from my reality and, in my view, could be high-falutin jargon. I told myself that if I was accepted, I would have to listen with 150% of myself to understand how my work could contribute to macroeconomic policy.
This was the context within which I travelled to Kigali, Rwanda: with an open mind, and what I thought was a fair understanding of feminism, storytelling, and development in tow.
Being selected as one of only 25 participants from more than 1,600 applicants was an honour in itself. Beyond the numbers, it meant being in a room with women from different African countries, disciplines, and movements, each bringing years of activism, scholarship, organising, and lived experience.
Before the Academy officially began, Kigali quietly introduced itself to me at about 3 am after a long day of flights and layovers. Oh! Did I mention Rwanda was at the top of my bucket list of countries I wanted to visit? Like many people, I had heard about Rwanda's cleanliness long before I visited. Kigali is remarkably orderly. Streets are clean, public spaces are well maintained, and there is an unmistakable sense of intentionality in how the city functions. What struck me even more was the feeling of safety. There was a confidence with which people moved through the city that immediately stood out. I wanted to wait to see if this feeling would remain when there were more people out and about.
After a well-needed sleep, I attended the first meeting on the itinerary: a welcome dinner. One humorous observation came to me. The Nigerians (yes, including me) were the first to arrive, moving away from the narrative that we are the ones who were always late. I was proud to show people that Nigerians are different from our stereotype.
As the night wore on, I got to meet the incredible women I was going to spend the next week with, questioning systems that many societies treat as unquestionable. Over meals, we compared countries, laughed about stereotypes, discussed politics, and slowly became more than participants attending the same programme.
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| Professor Sylvia Leading Her Session During the Africa Feminist Macroeconomic Academy |
The AFMA team started the session with a difference. I need to talk about that a bit before I go further. The seating arrangement was very…unique. There were straight-backed chairs, which were perfect for me. But there were also mats and puff pillows. There were sketches and loads of coloring pencils for women to express themselves as the sessions progressed. While I could never lie down or paint and listen to a session at the same time, most of the participants chose to do this and said that it really helped with their concentration. From the get-go, the AFMA team seemed to be saying that we were welcome to learn in ways that are specific to our personalities. I genuinely loved this.
Professor Sylvia Tamale, an Academic, Lawyer, Sociologist and one of the leading Feminist Activists in Africa, opened the Academy with a session on feminist theory and praxis, but she did not begin with definitions of feminism. She began with colonialism.
One statement stayed with me almost immediately: “Colonialism was designed to train Africans to contribute to capitalism.”
The statement forced me to think beyond the obvious violence of colonialism. We often discuss colonialism in terms of land, governance, and exploitation. We speak about the extraction of resources, forced labour, and political domination. We look at it from a place of racism and the erasure of our identity. We even discuss it from the introduction of patriarchal hierarchies and the promulgation of misogyny. Yet we spend far less time discussing how colonial education was designed to produce particular kinds of people to fuel the wide-toothed, soul-guzzling spirit of capitalism.
This quote and the Professor’s deep dive into colonialism set the tone for me. If I wanted to listen at 150% of my capacity, I knew I had to up it even more.
The point became even clearer when Professor Tamale spoke about education. She argued that our education system was designed to make us memorise and regurgitate information, something I agreed with. We learn enough to pass examinations rather than enough to interrogate ideas. We become experts at reproducing accepted knowledge instead of questioning it. Even today, more than 60 years since most African countries became independent, the education system is still wired this way.
I immediately thought about history. Most of us were taught about the French Revolution. Few of us learnt about the Haitian Revolution with the same seriousness. Or the Aba Women’s Protests, which the colonialists called ‘riots’ for the longest time. Or any of the other revolutionary moments across the continent – perceived to be good or otherwise – that paved the road to our ‘freedoms’ today. As the Professor emphasized, we learnt about Europe changing itself, but not about formerly enslaved Africans changing the world. The omission was not accidental. It reflected whose histories were considered worthy of preservation and whose victories could safely be forgotten.
That observation stayed with me because it demonstrated something much larger. Knowledge is never neutral. Someone decides what belongs in textbooks, and as one currently doing her Master's, this statement rang true again for me. Someone decides what deserves emphasis. Someone decides which revolutions become global history and which become footnotes. It also made me think about storytelling. Stories determine what societies remember, but they also determine what societies are allowed to forget.
The discussion naturally transitioned into learning, unlearning, and relearning.
Learning was presented not as collecting facts but as taking the first deliberate step towards understanding feminist theory and feminist narratives.
Unlearning, however, felt much harder. Unlearning requires us to examine our biases, our conditioning, and beliefs that have become so familiar we mistake them for truth. Professor Tamale reminded us that assumptions often survive simply because nobody challenges them.
I resonated with this because my life (and work) has always revolved around questioning assumptions. This is what made me the feminist I am today. Even when I feel sure of something, I still question it. In a way, I think studying science imbued in me the desire to understand, but more than that, to always leave room for the possibilities of change, development, or new information. A recent example was how I used to hold the idea that false rape allegations should be treated with the same temerity as rape itself. Now, my perspectives have changed because I now understand the law and know that libel cannot ever equal the horror that rape and other forms of gender-based violence constitute to victims or survivors. I am going to do a rebuttal video, but that is a story for another day.
Back in the room, Professor Tamele challenged us to metaphorically “slap ourselves on the wrist” whenever we found ourselves stereotyping people because of where they came from, what they believed, or how they lived.
This was an invitation to intellectual discipline.
One quotation summarised the conversation beautifully: “The illiterate of the twenty-first century are not those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot shed old beliefs and acquire new ones.” Although I had encountered Alvin Toffler's words before, hearing them in this context gave them renewed meaning.
The conversation also introduced me to STIWANISM, an acronym for ‘Social Transformation Including Women in Africa’, which was propounded by Molara Ogundipe-Leslie, a Nigerian feminist, poet, activist, and critic. I immediately noted that I needed to study it further because African feminist thought has evolved through multiple schools of thought that deserve much more attention than they often receive.
The afternoon moved into defining feminism. Ironically, the first lesson was that feminism refuses easy definition. The room had generated one-word descriptions of feminism before Professor Tamale introduced definitions by Louise Toupin and Sarah Gamble. Comparing those definitions with our own revealed something important. Feminism is not a single ideology with one universally accepted meaning.
Instead, there are feminisms.
Plural.
That distinction matters because women experience oppression differently across cultures, histories, economies, races, classes, religions, and generations.
We examined several schools of feminist thought: Liberal feminism, which emphasises equality within existing systems; Socialist and Marxist feminism, which focus on collective transformation rather than individual advancement; Radical feminism, which interrogates embodiment and patriarchy while contributing significantly to queer theory; Post-colonial feminism, which critiques the limitations of Western feminist frameworks and centres the experiences of women in the Global South; Ecofeminism links the exploitation of women with the exploitation of nature; and Cultural feminism that explores women-only spaces and cultures.
What struck me most was not simply the differences among these schools but the fact that they all begin by asking slightly different questions about power. I also, for the first time, realized that when I started to say four years ago that I am all kinds of feminists, I was onto something. I didn’t have the definitions, but I realized that while I am more some than others, I was all of these in one way or the other.
That observation carried into feminist theory itself, which was described as helping us answer the "how" and "why" questions of our everyday experiences.
Why does inequality persist? How did oppression evolve? Why do certain systems continue reproducing themselves generation after generation? More importantly, feminist theory helps us strategise ways to dismantle those systems.
Theory, however, is not enough. That is where feminist praxis enters.
I appreciated the simplicity of the explanation.
Feminist praxis is where theory meets action. It is the continuous, reflective process of integrating feminist theory with political action to pursue transformative gender justice. I particularly liked the idea that feminist praxis is a form of world-making. Movements are about resisting existing systems. They are also about imagining better ones.
I loved the session on understanding patriarchy as a system. The distinction between the economic base and the superstructure immediately reminded me how institutions reinforce one another.
Education.
Law.
Family.
Culture.
Religion.
Mass media.
Politics.
These institutions legitimise and maintain existing economic systems while simultaneously being shaped by those same systems.
The discussion on sex and gender also reinforced why feminists insist on distinguishing biological sex from socially constructed gender. Patriarchy deliberately conflates the two. Doing so makes socially constructed inequalities appear natural.
One statistic surprised me. “Approximately one in every two thousand births is intersex.” I did not know this, or maybe I forgot. I remember we touched on this as a second-year student studying Biochemistry. I often mention how I became a radical feminist because I saw how much humans could not be classed into easy groups like Male and Female because of our biology classes, but I never took to mind what this meant in terms of statistics. One in 2,000 people? That means that, using a global population of 8 billion people, approximately 4 million people would be intersex. And even that figure is a conservative estimate. The one-in-2,000 statistic generally refers to babies born with noticeable variations in genital anatomy, while broader estimates that include other intersex traits put the figure as high as 1.7 percent of the population. At 8 billion people, that would be approximately 136 million people. When we do storytelling, I often encourage my team to scale down so people can connect. However, this begged to be scaled up so we can see clearly how the supposed simplicity of “male” and “female” really does an injustice to the rest of the population. Biology is far more complex than the categories we often use to describe it. That alone challenges simplistic binary assumptions many societies treat as unquestionable.
The conversation on intersectionality was equally important.
Oppression does not operate in silos. Gender intersects with class, disability, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, geography, and countless other identities. Reducing anyone's experience to a single identity almost always oversimplifies reality.
I arrived expecting economic discussions. I am glad that the session started from our humanity, because there is no economics without our humanity. And especially as Africans, our economic turmoil and models are tied to the years of history and horror done to us and despite our humanity. If our thinking has been conditioned by centuries of colonialism and patriarchy, then challenging economic systems requires first challenging the assumptions we carry into those conversations.
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| Omolara Oriye Leading Her Session During the Africa Feminist Macroeconomic Academy. |
Before arriving in Kigali, I thought political economy was a relatively straightforward concept. Politics influences the economy. The economy influences politics. Governments make policies. Policies shape markets. Markets affect people's lives.
That understanding was not necessarily wrong. It was vastly incomplete.
Omolara Oriye, Human Rights Lawyer, Activist and Feminist Legal Researcher, began with this quote. “Knowledge is an embodied practice. Our liberations are inside our bodies. When you are not even considered a person, how do economic policies even tie to you?”
Knowledge exists in lived experiences, histories, identities, and bodies. She argued that many of the systems within which we operate are fundamentally dehumanising. I agree.
Development conversations often assume that economic policies affect everyone equally. Yet if an entire group of people has historically been treated as less than fully human, then even supposedly neutral policies will inevitably affect them differently. Policies are designed by people who inherit particular assumptions about whose lives matter and whose do not.
One statement particularly stayed with me: “To devalue someone's labour, you first have to devalue them.”
I have spent years working around social and behaviour change communication, women's rights, and storytelling. We often say that women's labour is undervalued. Omolara challenged us to go further.
How?
Why?
By whom?
What systems make that undervaluation possible?
Saying something is undervalued without explaining the structures that produce the undervaluation risks treating inequality as inevitable rather than manufactured.
This made me think about how often Africa borrows frameworks that were designed elsewhere and then wonders why they do not fully explain African realities. Whether the conversation is economics, governance, technology, or even development, we frequently begin from assumptions developed in entirely different historical contexts.
That does not necessarily make those frameworks useless. It does, however, make them incomplete.
Omolara argued that we cannot learn new methods of survival if we refuse to unlearn the traumas that have shaped our understanding of survival itself. I found that particularly profound because trauma often disguises itself as common sense. We convince ourselves that certain behaviours are simply practical when, in reality, they are adaptations to systems that have long failed us.
She then made perhaps her strongest critique of capitalism. According to her, the entire goal of the capitalist economy and consumerism is the perfection of slavery. It was one of several moments during the Academy where I found myself both challenged and reflective. I immediately didn’t accept every argument presented, but I appreciated being pushed to interrogate assumptions I had rarely questioned before.
That became one of the strengths of the Academy.
Agreement was never the goal.
Critical thinking was.
The session then moved into feminist political economy.
At its simplest, political economy examines the relationship between politics and economics. We encounter it every day, often without recognising it. It appears in tax policies. Public debt. Government revenue. Budgets. Public expenditure. Subsidies. Trade. Inflation. Interest rates.
Yet feminist political economy argues that traditional political economy leaves out one enormous part of the story: unpaid labour.
That omission changes everything. Conventional economic analysis tends to focus on production, markets, employment, and exchange. Feminist political economists ask additional questions. Whose labour counts? Whose labour is recognised? Whose labour remains invisible? And tying them all together, why?
The conversation repeatedly returned to land, gender, and labour.
These are not independent issues. They are deeply connected. Who owns land? Who works it? Who benefits from it? Who performs unpaid labour that enables others to generate income from it? These questions significantly expand the scope of economic analysis. I kept thinking about how often economic debates become obsessed with numbers while ignoring the people behind those numbers.
Budgets, policies, revenue, and debt tell stories. Are we asking the right questions when reading those stories?
I also noted something important in my notebook app. (Yes, I was writing all day, like someone may have asked me to return my flight tickets if I didn’t.) I did not agree with every perspective presented during this session. That disagreement is worth acknowledging because learning is not the same as acceptance. And it should not be. One of the most valuable aspects of attending programmes like AFMA is being exposed to ideas that stretch your thinking. Sometimes they persuade you completely. Sometimes they sharpen your own position by forcing you to defend it. Both outcomes are valuable.
One conclusion I fully agreed with, however, was that feminist political economists continually evaluate policies rather than treating them as politically neutral. That mindset extends beyond feminism. Every policy has winners. Every policy has losers. The important question is whether we are willing to identify both.
The afternoon shifted towards African feminist macroeconomic analysis. Rather than viewing macroeconomics simply through indicators such as GDP, inflation, exchange rates, or fiscal balances, African feminist economists widen the frame.
Colonialism, history, and care become part of the analysis.
And it brought us to deep-seated questions.
Where is unpaid labour? Who suffers so someone else suffers a little less? Who is providing care? Have they slept? How is their wellbeing?
I found those questions remarkably powerful, especially the one I italicized above.
Recognition of this problem alone, however, is not enough. There has been increasing conversation globally about recognising unpaid care work. Recognition matters. Visibility matters. But African feminist macroeconomic analysis argues that recognition cannot be the end goal. The broader objective is understanding the entire continuum of care: Who cares for children? Who cares for older people? Who provides emotional support? Who keeps households functioning? Who absorbs the emotional cost of economic crises?
The emotional cost of every economic decision is itself a form of social reproduction, another term I heard for the first time whilst in Kigali.
Care is not simply about washing dishes, preparing meals, or raising children. It includes emotional labour. Mental labour. The invisible work that enables societies to continue functioning every single day.
Several topics were introduced during this session that I deliberately marked for further reading rather than pretending I fully understood them.
Financialization of life was one. I want to understand better how financial markets increasingly shape ordinary aspects of everyday living and what that means for African societies.
Monetary policy was another area I want to revisit. As someone who works primarily in storytelling and social change, I often engage with the consequences of economic policy without always interrogating the policies themselves.
This Academy reminded me that storytelling cannot remain disconnected from economics at the conception level, while trying to understand it at the symptom level. Economic systems shape people's choices. Those choices influence behaviours. Behaviours influence narratives. Narratives eventually shape policy again. The cycle continues.
By the end of Day Two, I realised that feminist political economy is not merely about inserting women into existing economic conversations. It asks whether those conversations have been framed correctly in the first place. It is one thing to ask how women can participate more effectively in the current economic system. It is another thing entirely to ask whether the system itself requires fundamental rethinking.
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| Busi Sibeko Leading Her Session During the Africa Feminist Macroeconomic Academy. |
By the third day, I had started noticing a pattern.
Every session challenged a concept I had previously considered complete, as I was willing to explore. On the first day, it was education. On the second, it was the political economy. On the third, it was work itself.
Busi Sibeko's session focused on labour, social reproduction, and the changing nature of work. Busi is an Analyst at the South African Parliamentary Budget Office and PhD Candidate in the SOAS-Wits Joint PhD programme in Applied Development Economics, and came in asking about our understanding of economics. I expected a discussion about employment, labour markets, and perhaps unemployment. Instead, the conversation began with history.
We were asked to think about a woman's day across four different periods: precolonial society, the colonial era, the so-called democratic period, and the present day.
At first glance, it seemed like a straightforward exercise. Then the patterns became impossible to ignore. Political systems changed. Governments changed. Economic models changed. Colonial administrations came and went. Constitutions changed. Yet one thing appeared remarkably constant.
Women's work around care barely changed.
Across generations, women continued cooking, cleaning, caring for children, caring for older people, maintaining households, and ensuring families survived. Even where societies changed dramatically, care work remained stubbornly attached to women.
Another observation emerged just as clearly. Powerful men continued to be cared for regardless of the political era.
We often describe history by focusing on what changed. This exercise forced us to notice what did not. Continuity can be just as revealing as change. Capitalism benefited from women remaining within the household because they reproduced labour.
Cheaply.
Freely.
Continuously.
Every worker who shows up at a factory, office, hospital, school, newsroom, or construction site has already been prepared for work long before arriving there. Someone cooked. Someone cleaned. Someone cared for them when they were sick. Someone raised them. Someone made sure they had clothes to wear. Someone often carried the emotional burden that allowed them to function. The economy depends on that work. Yet it rarely counts it.
One of the most interesting parts of the session examined the foundations of mainstream economics. I had always thought economics was primarily concerned with production, consumption, investment, employment, and growth. The session suggested something different. Mainstream economics is built around what economists call homo economicus, the rational economic actor. Someone who continuously participates in markets, makes logical choices, and contributes productively throughout life.
The model is elegant. It is also incomplete.
Real people become children. They become ill. They become caregivers. They age. They grieve. They spend time outside markets. They rely on others. They perform work that markets never pay for. Once those realities are included, the neat economic model begins to look far less complete.
And while the theory of economics had me concentrating extremely hard, I couldn’t help but walk away from Busi’s session with new knowledge. This included that while economics often studies people as producers, feminist economics insists on studying them as human beings.
Another idea that stayed with me was that feminist political economy refuses to analyse the market in isolation. Instead, it examines the relationship among three institutions: the State, the Market, and the Household.
Households are deeply economic. They produce labour. They reproduce labour. They distribute resources. They make decisions. They negotiate power. They absorb shocks created elsewhere in the economy. More importantly, households are not harmonious units where everyone automatically shares the same interests. Households contain inequalities, power differences, negotiations, conflicts, and decision-making structures. Who controls income? Who performs unpaid work? Who makes financial decisions? Who sacrifices opportunities? These questions differ from one household to another. The household is therefore a family unit and also an economic institution.
Another concept I immediately noted for further reading was path dependency.
The discussion reminded us that history matters. Economic systems do not emerge overnight. Current realities are shaped by previous decisions, previous policies, previous institutions, and previous histories. Ignoring those histories often leads us to misunderstand present-day inequalities.
I found myself thinking about Nigeria.
Many of the policy conversations we have today cannot be understood without understanding colonial administration, military rule, structural adjustment programmes, and decades of institutional evolution. History then becomes part of the explanation.
Capitalism often measures productivity by asking whether something can be bought or sold. That seems reasonable until you begin listing all the work that cannot easily be sold but without which markets themselves could not function.
What does it cost to prepare meals? Look after children? Supporting older relatives? Cleaning homes? Providing emotional care? Helping someone recover from illness? None of these activities disappear simply because they are unpaid. If anything, they become even more essential.
Perhaps productivity is not simply about producing goods. Perhaps it is also about sustaining people.
One of the strongest sections of the day focused on work performed inside households. Economics often treats the household as something outside the economy. Yet every single worker depends upon work performed within households before they can participate in the labour market. What enables someone to arrive at work each morning? Breakfast, if you are not fasting for religious or social reasons. Rest. Clean clothes. Care during illness. Yet conventional economic analysis often ignores these activities because they occur outside formal markets.
Perhaps no discussion generated more questions for me than GDP.
Like many people, I have always understood Gross Domestic Product as one of the most important measures of economic performance. It measures the value of goods and services produced within an economy. It tells us whether economies are growing or shrinking.
Governments celebrate rising GDP. Economists analyse it constantly. The equation itself is familiar: Consumption. Investment. Government spending. Net exports.
Useful.
Necessary.
But incomplete.
Several observations from the discussion immediately stood out. GDP measures the size of an economy. It says relatively little about wellbeing. It excludes much of the unpaid labour taking place inside households. It tells us nothing directly about gender inequality. It cannot fully capture the enormous volume of care work sustaining society.
One statement from my notes deserves further exploration.
National budgets are, in many ways, a game about making the books look good.
I was reminded that budgets are never merely technical documents. They reflect political priorities. Every allocation tells us something about what governments choose to value.
The discussion also introduced ideas I want to spend considerably more time studying: How does debt spending affect GDP? What role do total balance sheets play in understanding national wealth? How should countries account for assets such as mineral reserves, sovereign investments, pension funds, and profitable state-owned enterprises? I must admit that these are questions I simply had not thought deeply enough about before attending the Academy.
This was probably the one discussion where I found myself developing a stronger personal opinion.
The question itself is deceptively simple. Should unpaid care work be included in GDP? My instinctive answer was yes. If societies depend upon this labour, why should national accounting systems ignore it? The conversation, however, also highlighted an important counterargument.
GDP was never designed to measure everything. It was designed to measure market production. Perhaps the limitation lies not in GDP itself but in expecting GDP to answer questions it was never created to answer.
I am still exploring both sides of the debate more carefully even as I type. I also made a note to learn more about New Zealand's wellbeing approach to economic measurement. If countries are beginning to move beyond GDP as the primary measure of progress, what can African governments learn from those experiments? More importantly, what should they adapt rather than simply adopt?
Towards the end of the day, we discussed what has often been described as the Women in Development approach. Should our goal simply be integrating women into an unequal economic system? Or should we be imagining an entirely different system?
I also found myself disagreeing with some of the framing. I understand the critique that mainstreaming women into neoliberal systems does not automatically dismantle structural inequalities. At the same time, I kept thinking about reality. Women cannot wait for the perfect economic system before accessing power, income, opportunities, or decision-making spaces. Transformation takes time. People still have to survive in the meantime. For me, these two realities are not mutually exclusive.
We can challenge unjust systems while simultaneously ensuring women have greater access to the opportunities that currently exist. That tension is one I intend to keep thinking about.
It also made me ask another question relevant to my own work. How do we build sectors that respond to rights? Working in storytelling, communication, and social change, I spend considerable time thinking about rights-based approaches. The Academy pushed me to consider the macroeconomics of rights in ways I had not previously explored. That question is one I know will find its way into future work at Shades of Us.
By the end of the third day, I realised I was no longer simply collecting notes.
I was collecting questions.
And in many ways, that felt like the more valuable outcome.
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| Nanjala Nyabola Leading Her Session During the Africa Feminist Macroeconomic Academy. |
By the fourth day, I thought I had settled into the rhythm of the Academy. Every morning began with a new discipline. Every afternoon ended with a notebook full of questions. Every evening became an opportunity to revisit my notes and realise that what I had written down often meant something much bigger than I initially understood.
Then Nanjala Nyabola began speaking. For context, she is a Kenyan Writer, Political Analyst, and Activist.
One of the first things she reminded us was that our consciousness-raising circle was not about agreeing with one another. It was about listening to appreciate each other's Pan-Africanism without dismissing one another's lived experiences. Too often, conversations become competitions over who has the correct experience of Africa. This room was different. Women from different countries brought different histories into the discussion, and no one history cancelled another.
She asked this question and let me tell you…the room went into a mini confusion. We all had a different idea of what data was based on where we thought the data came from.
So…where does data come from? What is the difference between information and data? Who decides what counts as data? What information is collected? What information is ignored? Who owns the data? Can ownership be transferred? Who are the different actors within the data ecosystem? How do power relationships shape those interactions?
We often talk about data as though it is objective.
It is not.
Data is never simply there.
Someone decides what should be collected. Someone decides what categories should exist. Someone decides how information should be organised. Someone decides how it should be interpreted. Someone decides what becomes statistically visible. Those decisions are political.
Data collection begins with human choices. Those choices reflect priorities. Those priorities reflect power. And power determines whose lives become measurable.
I couldn’t help but think of Nigeria again. For exactly 20 years, we have not had a national census, a key component that contributes to national and economic policy formulations. For 20 years, we have seen how that has led to the sliding slope of destruction in our country, how this has affected education, healthcare, productivity, and even representation. The deliberateness of this is not without consequence. If anything, the current insecurity and all-around decline we are experiencing is reflective of the choice to not understand our population and what needs can make us advance. So this really hit home for me.
Like data, identification systems are often presented as administrative tools. Governments explain them as necessary for planning, taxation, security, or public service delivery. The session encouraged us to ask different questions. How else can identification systems be used?
One answer was deeply uncomfortable: to curb dissent.
Identity systems are also systems of power. Who gets documented? Who remains invisible? Who controls the database? Who determines access? Who decides whether your existence is recognised by the state?
Nanjala challenged us to think about where the internet actually exists.
My immediate response, if I am being honest, would probably have been something vague about cloud computing or wireless networks. The discussion dismantled that assumption almost immediately.
The internet is profoundly physical.
It depends on undersea cables. Data centres. Servers. Minerals. Factories. Electricity. Warehouses. Shipping routes. Engineers. Maintenance workers. Manufacturing plants.
The internet is infrastructure.
One sentence from my notebook has several exclamation marks beside it: Digital workers include EVERYONE in the supply chain from raw materials to digital services.
What a lightbulb moment! Until that discussion, I had unconsciously limited digital work to software developers, content creators, programmers, platform workers, and technology companies. I had not seriously considered the miners extracting rare earth minerals. The factory workers assembling devices. The technicians maintaining servers. The workers managing warehouses. The cleaners maintaining data centres. The transport workers moving equipment across continents. Every one of them contributes to the digital economy. The digital economy is therefore not simply digital. It is deeply material.
That insight immediately made me think about storytelling.
We celebrate innovation. We celebrate technology. We celebrate (for those who do) artificial intelligence. Yet how often do we tell the stories of the people whose labour makes those technologies possible? Almost never.
Another distinction that seems obvious once someone points it out, but which many of us rarely think about, is the difference between the internet and the platforms (Facebook, Twitter, which I will never call X, Google, etc) we use. Somehow, we have allowed platforms to become synonymous with the internet itself.
Platforms can change. Companies can disappear. Ownership changes. Policies change. The internet, however, is a much broader infrastructure. If platforms are designed by people, they can also be redesigned.
Rather than only critiquing existing technologies, we were asked to imagine alternatives as the day wore on. What kind of connectivity would genuinely serve Africa's digital future? What would African-centred digital infrastructure look like? What kinds of platforms would we build if we were not merely adapting technologies developed elsewhere?
There is still room for more imagination.
At Shades of Us, we constantly ask how storytelling can help people imagine different possibilities. This reminded me that technology also requires imagination.
Too often, Africa enters technological conversations as users.
Rarely as an architect.
The conversation naturally moved towards artificial intelligence. Generative AI has enormous material consequences.
Energy consumption.
Water usage.
Computing infrastructure.
Mineral extraction.
Data centres.
Electricity demand.
Environmental costs.
Again, the discussion brought us back to material realities. Technology is never only digital. It always exists somewhere. Someone powers it. Someone builds it. Someone maintains it. Someone pays the environmental cost.
The afternoon returned us to feminism, but this time through the lens of technology.
How can African feminism help us understand the world?
African feminism cannot simply import theories developed elsewhere without questioning them. The only places Africans did not resist colonialism are in the pages of colonial books. Resistance happened across the continent. Yet historical narratives often minimise African agency while amplifying colonial authority.
This brought me back to something Professor Sylvia Tamale had said on the first day about the Haitian Revolution. Again, the conversation returned to knowledge. Who writes history? Who preserves it? Who gets remembered?
African feminism uses the lived experiences of African women to understand power, institutions, governance, economics, and society itself. Too often, feminism is presented merely as activism. The Academy consistently reminded us that African feminist thinkers have spent decades developing rigorous intellectual traditions that deserve to be studied on their own terms.
I also left with several books and documents on my reading list. Some of them are things I have read before. Others are new.
By the close of the fourth day, the Academy had expanded my curiosity. I found myself asking different questions: technology, labour, economics, storytelling, Africa's future. For me, that may have been the Academy's greatest success. It did not attempt to produce agreement. It produced inquiry. And inquiry, when taken seriously, has the power to change not only what we know, but also what we choose to build next.
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| Few Minutes Before I Would Be Bawling My Eyes Out at the Kigali Genocide Memorial. |
Let me talk about the latter a bit.
I knew the history of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi before arriving in Rwanda. Like many people, I knew the numbers. I knew that approximately one million people were killed in about one hundred days. I knew that neighbours turned against neighbours. I knew that the international community failed Rwanda.
I read about them, watched the adaptations, listened to commentaries, even posted about it every year on the Shades of Us platforms.
Knowing those facts, however, was nothing like walking through the memorial.
The Academy had spent four days discussing power, colonialism, gender, economics, data, storytelling, and the politics of knowledge. I did not realise until I entered the memorial that all those conversations were about to converge in one place.
Walking through the memorial, I found myself confronting the reality that the genocide did not begin with machetes. It began with ideas.
Over the previous four days, we had repeatedly discussed narratives. We had discussed how education shapes consciousness. How colonialism shapes memory. How stories determine whose lives matter. Standing inside the memorial, those discussions suddenly became painfully concrete.
Long before people were killed, they had first been categorised. Then stereotyped. Then dehumanised. Then blamed. Then isolated. Then feared. Only afterwards were they murdered.
That sequence matters.
Violence rarely begins with violence. It begins with language.
One of the exhibits explained how propaganda became an ordinary part of daily life. People were repeatedly told who belonged. Who did not. Who posed a threat. Who deserved protection. Who deserved elimination.
Listening to and reading those stories, I could not help thinking about communication. I have spent all my career working in communication. We often describe communication as a tool for awareness, advocacy, or behaviour change. The memorial reminded me that communication is also capable of producing the exact opposite.
It can manufacture hatred. It can legitimize discrimination. It can normalise violence. It can prepare ordinary people to commit extraordinary cruelty. That may have been one of the hardest lessons of the entire trip.
As storytellers, we often celebrate the power of stories to inspire hope. The memorial forced me to confront their power to destroy. And mind you, this is not something new. If anything, reading about Nigeria, Africa, black Americans, or any other group of people that has been vilified tells us this is the status quo.
But seeing this was different, poignant.
You know what part of the memorial had my skin on edge? The Hutu Commandment, with the first three focusing on women. I realized that colonial Rwanda must have been in some way like colonial Nigeria: women without as many rights as men. Yet, when the seeds of hatred were going to be institutionalized, women were the first to be mentioned. Isn’t that the irony of the century?
Another exhibit examined the role of classification.
The colonial administration institutionalised categories that had previously been far more fluid. Identity cards became instruments of division. Communities that had lived alongside one another for generations became separated into rigid classifications. Walking through that section, I kept returning to a question that had emerged during Nanjala Nyabola's session: who decides how people are classified?
At the Academy, we discussed data. Identification. Categories. Power.
At the memorial, those discussions became deeply human.
Classification is never merely administrative. Categories shape lives. Sometimes they shape deaths.
I also found myself reflecting on the role of Belgium and France, about how they are not held accountable enough in all of this, about how they have laundered their image when they set the boulder rolling that rammed the entire village to the ground. These colonial powers did not simply occupy Rwanda. They helped reshape how Rwandans understood one another. The memorial traces how colonial policies hardened social distinctions and embedded inequalities that later became politically weaponised.
Another part of the memorial examined the international response. Or perhaps more accurately, the lack of one. The failures of the United Nations have been extensively documented, and hearing Kofi Annan's reflections on those failures added another layer to the experience.
The genocide was not inevitable. Warnings existed. Evidence existed. Opportunities to intervene existed. Yet the response came too late. That left me thinking about responsibility. What does it mean to know something terrible is happening and still fail to act? The question extends far beyond Rwanda. It applies to humanitarian crises across the world. It applies to conflicts we watch unfold on our phones. It applies to every situation where evidence exists, but action does not follow.
The final thing that struck me was not the violence.
It was the children.
There is a section dedicated to children whose lives were cut short during the genocide. Some were infants. Some were toddlers. Some had barely started school. Beside their photographs were small details about who they were.
Their favourite foods.
Their favourite games.
Their favourite songs.
Then, beneath those ordinary details, came the reminder that they were murdered.
It was devastating. It is one thing to read that children died during a genocide. It is another thing entirely to be reminded that each child had a personality, preferences, friendships, and dreams before becoming a statistic.
One inscription stayed with me.
To the children who could have been our future.
I have thought about that sentence repeatedly since leaving Kigali. I have cried about it a lot.
Entire generations disappeared. Ideas disappeared. Communities disappeared. Possibilities disappeared. Oh! My soul broke.
One section of the memorial also acknowledges other genocides around the world. I appreciated that. The genocide in Rwanda, Armenia, Cambodia, Bosnia, Darfur, the Holocaust, or other atrocities show that humans can be deeply manipulated. We can be deeply cruel. We can be deeply evil. Hatred follows familiar scripts. So does dehumanisation. So does political manipulation. So does silence. Perhaps the most difficult part of the visit was recognising how easily those patterns can emerge elsewhere.
As a Nigerian, I could not help thinking about the language we increasingly use about one another. The casual demonisation of entire ethnic groups. The suspicion. The stereotypes. The ease with which complex communities become reduced to simplistic labels.
Our histories are different. Our political contexts are different. But the warning signs deserve attention.
Words matter. Repeated words matter even more.
By the time I left the memorial, I was grateful that it existed. It was a harrowing experience, especially seeing the extent of the cruelty inflicted on women and children. But it also showed me the long road to recovery, and make no mistake, that journey is still unfolding today.
There was something deeply dignified about the reburial of more than 250,000 people. But there was also something profoundly solemn about the responsibility to keep their memory alive. In a country where forgetting would be a disservice not only to those who died and those who survived, but also to those who participated, overtly or covertly.
If you noticed, I did not go into detail about the memorial. That was deliberate.
There are schools of thought that believe these things should be discussed openly and easily. Perhaps they should. But I am not Rwandan, and even speaking about what I saw means forcing the knot in my throat back down. How much more difficult must it be for those who lived through it? Some perpetrators who were sentenced to 35 years will be released in three years. Some have already been released. I understand, at least in part, why President Kagame is so determined not to allow the fissures to widen again. Those of us looking in from outside can have our opinions about his policies, and we should. But have we really stopped to ask the people who live with this history what they think? What it means to rebuild a country when the past is not really past?
I know some people believe that more than 30 years is enough time. That enough time has passed. Walking through that memorial taught me something different: no amount of time will ever be enough to erase what happened. Perhaps the work is not about forgetting. Perhaps it is about remembering well enough to ensure that it never happens again.
I had spent much of the week thinking about systems.
Educational systems.
Economic systems.
Political systems.
Digital systems.
The memorial reminded me that systems are ultimately built by people. People make choices. People tell stories. People create institutions. People classify. People exclude.
But people also resist. People also rebuild.
Perhaps that is why Kigali feels the way it does today. Rwanda has not attempted to erase its history. It has chosen to confront it. That does not remove the pain. It does not undo the unimaginable loss. But it does acknowledge that remembrance is itself a political act.
As I walked out of the memorial, I realised something else. Throughout the Academy, we had repeatedly been encouraged to imagine different futures. The memorial quietly asked another question.
What happens when we fail to imagine one?
As my flight left Kigali, I looked through my notebook app one more time.
I found it filled with question marks and reminders to myself that simply said, ‘Learn more.’
Looking back, there are several ideas I know will stay with me long after the details of individual lectures fade.
The first is that nothing is neutral.
If we are only taught certain revolutions and not others, that is not simply an omission.
If we inherit economic theories that assume unpaid care work does not matter, that is not simply a technical limitation.
If our technologies are built around assumptions about who the default user is, that is not simply a design choice.
Someone made those decisions. Someone decided what knowledge would become mainstream. Someone decided which stories deserved preservation. Someone decided whose labour would count. The Academy reminded me that neutrality often disguises power. That lesson extends far beyond feminism. It applies to communication, governance, technology, development.
It applies to storytelling.
As someone who works in storytelling, that last point perhaps affected me most. Throughout the week, I found myself returning to the same question.
Not simply in films, documentaries, campaigns, institutions, policies, budgets, algorithms, school curricula, development programmes.
Every system tells a story about what it values.
Perhaps that is why I kept returning to the conversations around unpaid care work. For years, I have worked on issues affecting women and girls. I have documented their experiences. I have listened to stories about unpaid labour, caregiving, education, reproductive health, and economic participation. The Academy gave me another lens through which to understand those stories.
One of the questions I am still wrestling with is whether unpaid care work should be incorporated into GDP. My instinct remains that societies should somehow account for work without which no economy could function. At the same time, I understand the counterargument presented during the Academy—that GDP was designed to measure market production, not every aspect of human wellbeing. Perhaps we need better measures alongside GDP rather than expecting GDP to become something it was never intended to be. That is one reason I intend to spend more time studying New Zealand's wellbeing approach to measuring national progress. It raises useful questions about what governments choose to measure. And what they choose not to measure.
Another area I know I will continue exploring is financialization. The Academy introduced the concept without pretending it could be exhausted in one session. I left recognising that financial markets increasingly influence aspects of everyday life that many of us rarely connect to finance.
Housing.
Healthcare.
Education.
Debt.
Savings.
Social protection.
There is far more for me to learn here.
The same is true of path dependency. History shapes present realities more than we often acknowledge. Whether discussing education, economics, technology, or governance, historical decisions continue influencing contemporary possibilities. Ignoring those histories rarely makes them disappear. It usually makes our explanations incomplete.
Technology is another area where the Academy fundamentally shifted my thinking. I have spent years working with digital platforms. I have managed online campaigns. Produced digital content. Analysed online engagement. Worked alongside communication professionals navigating increasingly digital spaces. Yet I had never seriously considered everyone whose labour makes those digital interactions possible.
The miner extracting cobalt.
The worker assembling devices.
The engineer maintaining infrastructure.
The technician managing servers.
The cleaner working inside data centres.
The driver transporting equipment.
The person installing fibre-optic cables.
Digital workers are not only those sitting behind laptops. That single insight may become an article of its own.
The Academy also reminded me that the internet seems simple until you begin asking who owns platforms, who governs infrastructure, and what Africa's digital future should actually look like. Those questions feel increasingly urgent as conversations around artificial intelligence continue expanding. The discussion on AI also reminded me that every technological innovation carries material consequences.
Data centres consume enormous amounts of energy and water. Generative AI depends on physical infrastructure. Digital technologies have environmental costs that often remain invisible to end users. Again, visibility became a recurring theme.
Invisible labour. Invisible infrastructure. Invisible histories. Invisible assumptions. Invisible costs. Perhaps the Academy's greatest contribution was making those invisible systems visible.
I also appreciated that not every session required agreement. There were moments where I found myself questioning some of the arguments presented. I know that is healthy. Learning should never demand intellectual surrender. It should demand intellectual honesty. There were ideas I immediately embraced. Others I want to investigate further. Some I still disagree with.
That does not diminish the value of the Academy. If anything, it strengthens it. The best learning environments are those that leave participants thinking long after the lectures have ended.
The Kigali Genocide Memorial reinforced that lesson in a different way. Walking through the memorial reminded me that communication is never neutral. Stories can humanise. Stories can dehumanise. Classification can become discrimination. Propaganda can become policy. Language can become violence. As someone working in storytelling, I left with an even greater appreciation of the responsibility that accompanies communication.
Stories shape how societies understand themselves. They shape what societies tolerate. They shape what societies become.
As I return to my work at Shades of Us, I find myself thinking less about individual sessions and more about a broader challenge.
How do we tell stories that help people imagine different futures? Stories that help people think differently about power, labour, gender, technology, economics, and justice.
The Academy repeatedly reminded us that another world is possible. That phrase appears often in activist spaces. What I appreciated in Kigali was that the conversations went beyond aspiration. They attempted to provide intellectual tools for imagining that world.
I left wanting to understand STIWANISM more deeply. I left wanting to study the Beijing Platform for Action properly rather than simply referencing it. I left wanting to explore path dependency, financialization, wellbeing economics, digital infrastructure, and African feminist political economy with greater rigour. Most importantly, I left wanting to ask better questions.
That, perhaps, is the greatest gift any learning experience can offer.
I am deeply grateful to the organisers for creating an experience that gave me far more than the learning. It gave me the opportunity to visit two new African countries: Rwanda, particularly Kigali, and, if we are being generous, Addis Ababa Bole International Airport, even though many people may refuse to count an airport as a country visit. (My thinking is simple: where is the airport? If it is in Ethiopia, I have visited Ethiopia. Period.)
More importantly, it gave me the gift of meeting extraordinary women from across Africa. Some of these women have become more than colleagues or fellow participants; they have become sisters. I left Kigali with new knowledge, new questions, new perspectives, and a beautiful sisterhood that I hope will continue long after the Academy.
Thank you, FEMNET | The African Women’s Development Network and Nawi Collective. Thank you to the amazing women who run the AFMA Cohort: Nicole Maloba, Laura Mado, Grace Namugambe, Whoopie Wasike, and more. Thank you to our facilitators: Professor Sylvia Tamale, Omolara Oriye, Busi Sibeko, and Nanjala Nyabola. And to the incredible women who made this cohort: Camerodene June Buys, Chilufya Theresa Mulenga, Denyse Agahozo, Etoe Ruddy Carine, Iyonsenga Aline, Leenshya Gunnoo, Lisa Tenneh Diasay, Mariama Fati, Michelle Anzaya, Mmabatho Boitshepo, Nicole Maloba, Robinah Kagoye, Rosine Sanginga, Sharon Eryenyu, Hassan Asmaa Abdalla, Irene Makau, Ireyimika Edun, Jacqueline Wambui Wamai, Jessica Colaco, Kauna Malgwi Ibrahim, Lorna Okeng, Pamela Chakuvinga, Rebecca Ryatikimbo, Caroline Kinyanjui, and me, Ramatu Ada Ochekliye. If you want to see excellence personified, meet these women; meet us. What an honor it was to be in a room with African feminists and meet other women who think like me, in a world where we are perceived as not just different but an aberration.
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| Image by FEMNET | The African Women’s Development Network and Nawi Collective |
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