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Eyob Balcha Gebremariam, PhD
Epistemic injustice is one of the systemic causes of Africa’s present-day disadvantaged position in pursuing socio-economic justice for sustainable development. Efforts to address the visible socio-economic challenges will continue to create more harm and damage unless they adequately recognise the invisible causes of the problems, in this case, epistemic injustice.
Epistemic injustice is the systematic discrediting, sidelining and denying of a particular group or society's knowledge systems and meaning-making institutions, processes and practices. Over the past four decades, Africa’s systems and practices of academic and policy-relevant knowledge production and consumption have remained marginal in generating, contributing to and shaping Africa-focused policies and practices. Instead, Africa became too dependent on academic knowledge, policy prescriptions and best practice lessons imported mainly from the West. Economic, social and cultural aspects of development have been designed, funded, and implemented with more external influence than African orientation and relevance. This compromised African countries' collective and individual knowledge sovereignty and reinforced epistemic injustices. Hence, ascertaining epistemic justice and knowledge sovereignty should be Africa's ultimate means and objective for justice and sustainable development.
Africa has not recovered from the drastic socio-economic consequences of the structural adjustment periods of the 1980s and 1990s. Higher education and universities were among the primary victims of the short-sighted, market-conforming neoliberal economic reform in almost all African countries. These reforms , implemented with the support of Bretton Woods institutions, deprioritised the higher education sector. One of the key reasons provided was that the rate of return for the wider public is lower than individuals' gains. Hence, the policy prescription was deceivingly framed as a policy of fair distribution of resources.
Among many others, I want to focus on three interrelated problems due to the onslaught on African higher education institutions.
The first problem is the damage to the ecosystem of academic knowledge production in Africa. The damage created a significant disconnection between African academia and the socio-economic development policy-making processes on the continent. Most universities have lost their financial, institutional, and human resource capacities, with significantly limited or no funding for higher education research and excellence. Most African academics left their institutions either by migrating to the Global North or changing professions. This significant loss reduced the institutional capacity of African universities to be leading actors in economic, social, and cultural policy-making at the national and global spheres.
The second problem is the proliferation of consultancy practices among Africa-based academics. African academics who remained in the countries during the divestment period resorted to all available options to compensate for their financial loss. One option was research consultancy for local and international policy advocates and research and development agencies. Most consultancy opportunities provided a superficial space to influence economic, social and cultural policymaking. However, since most research and consultancy activities are externally designed and funded, there is limited room for a substantive influence. One essence of consultancy research projects is their action-oriented focus with restricted room for rigour, historical understanding and detailed account of complexities. The overall trend shifted the responsibility of detailed intellectual work informing socio-economic policy to the Global North research institutions, bilateral and multilateral organisations. African higher education institutions continued to play a negligible role, often through personalised and informal channels, or only as the lead of primary data collection. This process further cemented the power asymmetries, solidified epistemic injustice and the erosion of epistemic sovereignty of African countries.
The third related problem is the replacement of African universities by new actors, funded mainly by “development partners”, to generate, contribute to and shape the policy-relevant academic knowledge. The filling of the gap by externally funded actors that primarily serve the interests of their donors and the orientations of the dominant global actors. As a result, the African intelligentsia become further alienated from shaping socio-economic policies or are made to contribute only within the parameters defined by the interests and priorities of external actors. Most importantly, the training of economists through donor-funded academic research has been primarily in line with the market-confirming neoclassical perspective, further strengthening the hegemony of policy processes that continue to trap the continent in cyclical crises.
In summary, Africa's present-day challenges in pursuing socio-economic justice in the context of sustainable development are manifestations of epistemic injustice. African academic actors who are supposed to produce policy-relevant academic knowledge and perspectives are crippled, disrupted, or made to serve an externally designed development agenda. Unless the bigger goals of epistemic justice and knowledge sovereignty are adequately articulated, addressing socio-economic problems with orthodox approaches can hardly bear any fruit.