afrotecha.urban: youth, digital cultures & urban justice in Africa
According to the UN’s report “The Power of 18 billion”: ‘[n]ever before have there been so many young people. Never again is there likely to be such potential for economic and social progress. How we meet the needs and aspirations of young people will define our common future’ (UNFPA, 2014, p. i).
Youth in African cities are connected and tech savvy in unprecedented ways and young people are making and envisioning futures for the continent in ways that are not always rendered visible for decision-makers. These overlooked perspectives bring knowledge and skills that will become crucial for the future of cities. In this 3-year applied and action-oriented project, afrotecha.urban, as a growing interdisciplinary collective, concentrates on the intersection of: youth-led, tech-enabled, urban-oriented, and justice-focused initiatives that young people are using to establish lives in African cities.
Goal 1: Produce a grounded evidence base for action and experimentation through a process of surfacing existing information on technologies, hubs and platforms that explicitly intersect with youth and engaging in transformative work in African cities.
Goal 2: Developing a typology from this rich data set and amplifying initiatives, themes, trends, grounded practices and policy insights, connecting youth-led urban interests to decision-making objectives.
Goal 3: Using tech-enabled tactics (e.g. data visualization, serious games, arts-based methods) to experiment with interdisciplinary teams, including youth, street technicians, scholars, decision-makers, and cultural producers from a wide range of fields.
Goal 4: Collaborating transformatively through redressing inequalities in research arrangements through first, de-centering the locus of intellectual power by foregrounding ACC as the leading partner in the collaboration; second, by including and supporting young ‘rising star’ scholars in the research; and third, by including African youth in the decision-making processes of the project.
The growing team includes:
