Decolonising research partnerships: the ambitions of the Africa Charter
Divine Fuh, co-architect of the Africa Charter during a visit to NAI
As Africa Day is marked on the continent and around the world this week, questions of equality, representation and global power imbalances are shaping debates on research and knowledge production. The Africa Charter for Transformative Research Collaborations aims to make international research partnerships more equitable, inclusive and more African-led.
Launched in 2023 by major African higher education and research institutions, the charter External link., argues that Africa remains structurally disadvantaged in the global production of scientific knowledge and that research collaborations and development initiatives tend to reproduce unequal power relations rooted in colonial legacies.
The Nordic Africa Institute became a signatory to the charter in 2025, joining a growing international community of more than 150 institutions in Africa, Europe and around the world committed to promoting more balanced and transformative research collaborations.
“By signing up to the charter, we send a signal that we acknowledge the stark imbalances and want to do something about them,” said NAI Research Coordinator Julia Falkerby.
“When African researchers are not the ones formulating the problems or designing the objectives [of research on Africa], the historical power imbalances in academia and research persist.”
Julia Falkerby, NAI Research Coordinator
For African researchers and institutions and their allies in the Global North, the charter reflects broader calls for greater intellectual autonomy, stronger African-led research agendas and a shift away from extractive models of knowledge production. At a time when global inequalities are increasingly apparent, efforts to transform research partnerships are a key part of the wider struggle over voice, representation and whose knowledge counts.
Divine Fuh, Director of the Institute for Humanities in Africa at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, is a co-architect of the Africa Charter.
“The charter is the beginning of a solution … It asks us to pause a bit and ask whether it could be that our relationships with each other that are reproducing this toxicity," he explained during a visit to NAI.
Beyond equal partnerships
It aims to make power imbalances visible and contributes to exposing the shortcomings of the “development gaze” which sees the world in hierarchical terms, recreating power imbalances while emphasizing a commitment to equal partnerships.
“The charter attends to deeper issues by looking at the relationship between Africa and the North, introducing African-centered perspectives and taking decoloniality seriously – building on empirical research,” said Fuh.
It also puts a spotlight on how the predominantly Global North orientation of Africa’s scientific production contributes to reproducing exploitative colonial relationships based on extracting value from the continent
“So, people come to collect data, go turn it into theories and then bring it to us to apply in Africa. And African scholars just want to publish in Europe – there is this idea that you have to be published in an ‘international publication’,” said Fuh.
Collaborations with European partners, using European funding – which represents more than 70 percent of Africa’s scientific production – are an obvious starting point for decolonizing research.
“If Africa’s knowledge production is directly linked to its development then it’s those relationships you have to change,” added Fuh.
“My wish and hope it that in the coming years these two collectives [Africa and Europe] can build a community that is truly co-dependent and respectful of each other and therefore generate prosperity for all.”
Text: Tom Sullivan