Short Abstract

This panel traces practices and framings of “moral investments” and the moralization of larger economic life in Africa. It seeks to unpack the promises, contradictions, and ambiguities of investments and their framings to examine how virtue, profit, and power intertwine in shaping African futures.

Long Abstract

What does it mean for investment in Africa to be moral? Across the continent, investors, states, and communities increasingly invoke notions of reciprocity, responsibility, social affiliation, or stewardship for projects that claim to balance profit with social and ecological good. Yet the promises of “moral investment” often sit uneasily alongside persistent inequalities, environmental degradation, and the reproduction of colonial relations of value.

Various concepts seek to frame the diverse narratives and practices of moral investments across endogenous and foreign capital and sectors such as farming, conservation, hospitality, infrastructure, or finance. “Ubuntu Economics” seeks to bridge socialism and capitalism by embedding values of collective care and well-being within market systems; whereas “Africapitalism” draws on “ubuntu” ethics of interdependence to imagine African enterprise as a pathway to shared prosperity. Also “Ujamaa” socialism with its emphasis on communal production and exchange is still invoked. Other notions include “Conscious Capitalism” or the fields of “Islamic Finance”, “Social Entrepreneurship”, “Impact Investing” or “Community Based Development”.

This panel invites contributions that interrogate moral economies of investment and the moralization of larger economic life in Africa together with a critical reflection on the respective concepts that frame them. How are claims of ethical or “African” capitalism enacted, negotiated, framed, or contested? What are their politics and political affiliations, e.g. to customary authorities? What forms of value, inequality, or belonging do they (re)generate and what potential do they hold for equitable possibilities in a polarized world? And in what ways do they become vehicles for elite self-(re)making and arenas to negotiate identities between global entrepreneurial-capitalist ideals and situated ideals of care and communality? We welcome empirically rich and theoretically evocative papers that unpack the promises, contradictions, and ambiguities of moral investment and their framings and examine how virtue, profit, and power intertwine in shaping African futures.

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