Paper short abstract

This paper examines how Southeast Nigerian women in civil service articulate valued capabilities through negotiation, care, and everyday moral reasoning. Utilizing the Capability Approach and African feminism, the study shows how women's agency redefines development ethics beyond colonial paradigms.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how women in the civil service articulate valued capabilities related to labour market participation and how these shape an indigenous feminist ethics of development grounded in everyday moral reasoning. Using qualitative research with Southeast Nigerian women in the civil service, the analysis draws on Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach (Sen, 2004, 1999) and African feminist thought, particularly Nego-feminism (Nnaemeka, 2004), Motherism (Acholonu, 1995), and Snail-sense Feminism (Ezeigbo, 2012). The data reveal how women express what they value through narrated constraints, negotiated choices, and survival strategies within institutions that are formally protective yet informally unequal.

The findings show women value interrelated capabilities, including work–life balance, voice, education and career development, security, recognition, and relational support. Importantly, these capabilities are not framed as individualistic freedoms but as relational and moral achievements, shaped by care responsibilities, institutional power, and gendered norms. Women’s agency emerges through negotiation, strategic compliance, incremental resistance, and ethical self-management, challenging dominant development paradigms that equate agency with overt opposition or autonomy detached from social relations.

This paper argues these lived philosophies constitute an indigenous ethics of care that redefines development as the expansion of survivable, dignified participation rather than abstract empowerment. By foregrounding women’s everyday moral reasoning as epistemic labour, the study contributes to debates on epistemic justice and knowledge sovereignty in African development, demonstrating how African feminist epistemologies can enrich the Capability Approach by situating aspiration, adaptation, and agency within historically grounded, relational, and care-centred frameworks that move beyond colonial and patriarchal models of development.

Paper short abstract

This paper argues that voice and knowledge transmission are deeply political practices for Malagasy women. Through orality, storytelling, intergenerational exchange, and creative expression, women turn everyday cultural practices into sites of political agency where formal spaces exclude them.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how Malagasy women engage politically through locally rooted and non-traditional practices. The paper argues that voice and knowledge transmission constitute deeply political practices. Women’s engagement emerges from culturally embedded forms of orality, intergenerational exchange, and creative expression, demonstrating how the personal, communal, and cultural intersect with political agency. Everyday practices, cultural expression, and intergenerational learning operate as vital modes of participation, asserting women’s presence, shaping discourse, and sustaining movements. The paper highlights how Malagasy women claim space, transmit knowledge, and sustain collective political consciousness in contexts where formal spaces of power often exclude them.

Orality structures social and political life. Slam poetry offers accessible and youth-oriented platforms for women to articulate local concerns, critique social norms, and connect with diverse audiences. Women further use public speaking and advocacy to influence legal debates, raise public awareness, and shape policy agendas. Social media enables women to influence broader audiences beyond traditional forms of speech.

Knowledge transmission is equally relevant. Women use both formal and informal gatherings to share experiences, educate peers, and collectively reflect on social and political challenges. Storytelling transforms personal experiences into collective awareness: narratives of resilience, professional achievement, or survival become resources for political inspiration and action. Artistic and cultural interventions, including performances, visual arts, and exhibitions, serve as tools to preserve heritage, reclaim erased histories, and reframe collective memory. These practices illustrate how preserving the self and community knowledge functions as political work, reinforcing collective identity and agency in subtle yet transformative ways.

Paper short abstract

Foregrounding the voices of out-of-school adolescent girls in rural Zimbabwe, this paper exposes the limits of dominant development frameworks and shows how the Shona concept kuzviitira ('doing for oneself') embodies a relational and culturally grounded form of agency.

Paper long abstract

Dominant development discourses continue to frame girls’ empowerment through universalised, Eurocentric assumptions that equate formal schooling with agency, progress and moral worth. This paper offers a decolonial critique of these assumptions by centring the lived experiences of out-of-school adolescent girls in rural Zimbabwe. Drawing on qualitative data from semi-structured narrative interviews and participant-led photography with six girls aged 17 to 18 enrolled in a donor-funded vocational education and training (VET) programme, the paper examines how girls articulate agency, value, and aspiration within conditions of structural constraint.

The analysis brings Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach into dialogue with decolonial African feminist thought to foreground indigenous, relational understandings of agency. A central finding is the significance of the Shona concept kuzviitira – “doing things for oneself” - which participants used to express aspirations for autonomy, self-reliance, dignity, and the capacity to care for oneself and others. While the girls valued formal schooling and recognise its social and symbolic importance, most did not wish to return to school. Instead, they framed vocational skills training as a more meaningful and attainable pathway for achieving kuzviitira within their social and economic realities.

By treating kuzviitira as a form of African women's philosophy rather than merely an empirical finding, the paper challenges deficit-based representations of ‘marginalised’ girls and exposes how dominant education and development frameworks marginalise indigenous epistemologies of agency. It contends that centring African women's everyday moral reasoning is key to decolonising development ethics and imagining futures beyond colonial legacies.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines the ethical tension between African feminist ethics of care and the moral logic of tech capitalism. Tech capitalism thrives on platform capitalism, data colonialism and neoliberal marketisation. The paper offers care as a central moral counterpart to contemporary tech capitalism.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the ethical tension between African feminist ethics of care and the moral logic of tech capitalism. This is because the political economy of the ongoing 4th industrial revolution, which typifies the advancement in the use of artificial intelligence, thrives on platform capitalism, data colonialism and neoliberal marketisation. These are, however, detrimental to the principles of African feminist philosophy, like àjùmòse/àjọṣe (collective responsibility, relationality, and reciprocity), as technological capitalism reproduces extractive, colonial and gendered forms of exploitation through invisibilisation and feminisation of care labour. To this end, this paper addresses the question of: how does African feminist ethics of care expose the limits of tech capitalism? Can digitalisation be ethical without centring care? This paper employs the philosophical methodology of critical thinking, argumentation, and the reconstruction of ideas to argue that African feminist ethics is fundamental to reorienting digital development toward dignity, moral responsibility, and collective well-being. This paper contributes to African feminist ethics, development ethics, and critical digital ethics by offering care as a central moral counterpart to contemporary tech capitalism.