Africa’s path to development must begin with how we think. For too long, how we think about ourselves, our economies, our wellbeing and our place in the world has been determined by others. If we want sustained development, we need to start with structuring our own thinking around our own stories, our own health, our own economies rather than relying on borrowed models.
Narrative is one of the most powerful tools in this shift. For decades, the way Africans have been taught to see development has been tied to colonial history, foreign benchmarks and languages that many communities don’t even speak. Changing this begins with education and storytelling. In Ghana, radio dramas are reconnecting people to pre-colonial systems of value and governance. In Kenya, elders are helping integrate indigenous farming into school programs, which has led to more student-led farming groups and revived local economies. Senegal is using local languages and visual storytelling to reshape public ideas about debt and microfinance. Even Nollywood films, often dismissed as entertainment, have driven a rise in small enterprise registration by showing African-led success. These are all part of a larger effort to change what development looks like in the African imagination.
What makes these efforts powerful is that they work through local languages, youth-led platforms and media spaces that belong to African communities. In South Africa, townships have created outdoor forums that break down global finance into visual language and stories people can understand. Young leaders are trained to create media that fits their communities, not external expectations. The impact is measurable. Studies show economic activity grows in communities where civic storytelling is part of everyday life. This representation shifts power by shifting the mental frameworks people use to understand their own futures.
Mental health and civic education are the next frontier. Africa’s mental health burden is serious. Depression affects 26.9% of people in sub-Saharan Africa, PTSD rates are as high as 22% in some countries and resources are painfully limited. Nigeria spends only 3% of its health budget on mental health. Uganda spends even less. On top of this, many of the solutions being promoted are foreign. They ignore cultural context, they create dependency and they do not last. Ethiopia’s community health worker programs show what’s possible when care is made local. People trust it more, stigma drops and results improve. In South Africa, oral storytelling tools have helped improve attitudes toward mental illness without using clinical jargon or foreign references.
Civic education also matters, but only if it belongs to the people. The USAID-funded Democracy for All program trained over 16,000 students a year in post-apartheid South Africa, but with a $230 million price tag, the question remains: whose values were being taught? Development won’t come from being told what democracy looks like. It will come from designing civic education that is grounded in lived experience, African political philosophy and a history that includes figures like Sankara and Lumumba, not just imported governance templates. And when mental health and civic education are combined, they create a sense of belonging and agency that makes participation possible, both politically and economically.
Economic thought must change as well. The numbers are alarming. Africa spends close to 78 billion dollars on food imports every year. This is projected to reach 110 billion by 2025. At the same time, it has 60% of the world’s uncultivated arable land. The problem was never resources but the way economies are structured. Zimbabwe’s Command Agriculture program shows how local food production and agro-processing can save up to 2.5 billion dollars in foreign exchange. Nigeria’s agricultural agenda raised output by 11% in just three years and cut food import bills by over a billion dollars. These are not perfect programs, but they show that building value chains locally, like processing, packaging and selling what we produce can reduce reliance on external economies.
The African Continental Free Trade Area could boost intra-Africa trade by 33% and shrink trade deficits by half. But trade cannot work if logistics don’t. Poor roads and infrastructure add up to 40% to trade costs. Financing gaps stand between 27 and 65 billion dollars. These are the kind of barriers keeping African economies from trading with themselves and depending less on others. Agriculture, infrastructure and local manufacturing are not old ideas, but they are still the missing pieces of what self-determined growth looks like.
Africa has always had the knowledge, the land and the people. What it has lacked is the space to think in its own voice. That is beginning to change through community-led storytelling, mental wellness rooted in culture, civic education that builds agency and economic policies that close the door on extraction. The longer these systems stay disconnected, the longer dependency lasts. But when they come together, that’s when sovereignty will begin to stand on its own.