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Paper short abstract

Development often fails because it does not listen. This study shows how Yoruba musical practices function as systems of economic trust, accountability, and justice, arguing for development frameworks that recognise sound as infrastructure and indigenous knowledge as policy relevant

Paper long abstract

This paper examined how indigenous musical practices in African societies, with particular reference to Yorùbá musical epistemologies, functioned as agents of financial justice and community-led development beyond dominant, top-down financial models. Responding to persistent critiques of market-centred development and financial inclusion frameworks, the study argued that prevailing policy approaches continued to marginalise agrarian and indigenous communities by overlooking culturally embedded systems of value, redistribution, and governance. Drawing on Bourdieu’s Cultural Capital Theory, the paper conceptualised Yorùbá musical practices as forms of embodied and institutionalised cultural capital through which communal labour, mutual aid, and moral economies were organised. Musical genres associated with work, festivals, praise, and social satire were theorised as regulatory mechanisms that reinforced accountability, reciprocity, and collective responsibility within community financial life. The analysis was further informed by Decolonial Theory, which framed Yorùbá sound worlds as epistemic interventions that disrupted Eurocentric development logics and monetary reductionism. Indigenous musical knowledge was shown to encode alternative economic rationalities grounded in relationality, dignity, and intergenerational sustainability rather than accumulation. Insights from Sound Studies repositioned music as a material practice of governance and agency, through which communities mobilised participation, negotiated authority, and imagined future-oriented social orders. The paper concluded that development policy debates must move beyond instrumental notions of financial access to recognise indigenous sonic practices as legitimate infrastructures of financial justice. By foregrounding African musical epistemologies, the study advanced a culturally grounded framework for reimagining development that centres community agency, epistemic plurality, and locally articulated futures in an uncertain global context.