Business
Who Gets a Seat at the Table? By Ciku Kimeria, Quartz Africa editor
Climate na Tille earlier
RECENTLY I CAME ACROSS a very interesting article in The Conversation: Although Rwanda has been written about extensively in top academic journals—especially as it pertains to the 1994 genocide—less than 3% of articles about Rwanda are by Rwandan researchers. In other words, Rwandan researchers are not yet even considered experts on Rwanda, and no, this isn’t for lack of Rwandan researchers. The case of the missing experts on Rwanda is just the latest iteration of something that’s long been the case: The routine exclusion of minorities of power from global discussions. It cuts across gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity and many other layers. (I refer to minorities of power as Black and brown people, women and other marginalized groups, who are not actually minorities by number, but are minorities when it comes to corridors of power.) This routine exclusion often manifests on highlevel panels where all the experts are men—yes, there’s a word for that, it’s manels—or where there is only one person of color or one woman. 16
May-June 2022
This type of bias is increasingly being called out. Some public figures have been vocal about turning down speaking engagements that do not include a diverse range of speakers. On Africa Day this past week — which coincidentally coincided with the two year anniversary of the horrific murder of George Floyd—I found myself on an all-African panel discussing how Africa can shape the global agenda. In this safe space, one of the major aspects discussed was just how difficult it is for Africans to get included in high-level global discussions, even those pertaining to Africa. Uzoamaka Madu, the host of the discussion, is a Nigerian communications specialist who is taking concrete steps to change that. After years spent in Belgium, where she frequently found herself the only African panelist on conversations about Africa, she decided she had to do something to change the status quo. For those who claim it’s really too hard to find African experts, she’s building a database of, you guessed it, African experts. Madu recently put out a call for African experts DAWN
www.africabusinessassociation.org
