Africans under 25 already make up 60% of the continent’s population. At this rate, by 2050, one in every four young people on earth will be African. The tools that generation builds with will shape the continent for decades.
The pressure to build them locally has never been greater, especially in the face of bilateral aid to sub-Saharan Africa falling by between 16 and 28%, according to the IMF’s Regional Economic Outlook, with further cuts expected. More than half of that funding had supported health, education, and humanitarian programmes. African countries can no longer count on external donors to fund their development, and a growing movement of educators, designers, and problem-solvers on the continent argues they never should have.
Consider Richard Turere. At the age of nine, the young Maasai inventor was tasked with protecting his family’s cattle from the lions that roam outside Nairobi National Park. Killing the predators was unthinkable, and losing the livestock was untenable. Turere experimented with fires and scarecrows before noticing that lions stayed away when he walked the perimeter at night with a torch. He rigged a sequence of LED lights powered by a solar panel and a car battery to mimic that movement. Weekly losses dropped to zero. Today, his Lion Lights system protects more than 2,300 smallholdings in Kenya at around USD 20 per unit, and has been adopted in Botswana, Namibia, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, and as far afield as Argentina and India.
Turere was nine. He had no laboratory, no funding, and no design degree. What he had was an intimate understanding of the problem and the people it affected. That, participants at the recent Afrikan Design Thinking Convening at the Hasso Plattner d-school Afrika at the University of Cape Town argued, is the kind of design the continent has always done. It simply has not been credited.
“Design is not new to us. It has always been here. It just was not called design,” observes Tebogo Chaka, Design Thinking Programme Lead at the d-school.
At its core, design thinking is a way of solving problems by starting with the people they affect. Practitioners observe, listen, and prototype quickly, testing rough ideas in the real world before scaling what works. The principles are simple: Understand, Observe, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test. Popularised globally by figures such as David Kelley, founder of the Stanford d.school and the design firm IDEO, and backed by SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner, the methodology has been applied to everything from hospital wait times to financial inclusion. Africa’s contribution, Chaka argues, is the substance these principles have always needed.
She highlights that for most of the discipline’s formal history, the case studies, methodologies, and frameworks have been drawn almost exclusively from the global north. “The thinking has happened there, and the application here. M-Pesa, which reimagined financial access for millions locked out of traditional banking, was built not from a Silicon Valley blueprint but from a precise understanding of how money moves between people in East Africa. Lion Lights was built by a child watching his family’s cattle. The pattern is the same: local knowledge, low cost, fast iteration.”
“We don’t always have to look elsewhere for solutions. We know how to do things. We just need to give ourselves the agency and the confidence to do it,” says Chaka.
That agency draws on a different philosophical foundation. Ubuntu, the ethic of collective humanity that runs through much of African social life, reframes what design is for. Where conventional approaches centre the individual user, Ubuntu centres the relationship.
“People are used to sitting around and really listening to others’ stories,” reflects Chaka. “What can I take from this to make the situation better? What can I share from what I learned here with somebody who might be struggling? That spirit of Ubuntu is something I think the rest of the world can learn from too.”
With external funding withdrawing and the demand for local capacity rising, the case for backing African-led problem-solving has become harder to ignore.
“Our forefathers opened the way for us. Now we get to create a new world and reshape it for the next generation. This is about ownership: owning our voice and shaping things in a way that is contextually relevant to who we are,” concludes Chaka.
