Paper short abstract:

We present on the African Youth Livelihoods Knowledge Hub as a community of joint responsibility that demonstrates the potential of creative, shared vision outside of the binary thinking that characterises conventional development discourse.

Paper long abstract:

The description of this panel hinted at one problem with “development knowledge”: its inherently colonial logic takes Europe as the blueprint that societies should strive to reproduce through “development”. Another problem is that “development” often turns political problems into technical problems, proposing that “under-development” can be solved through expert knowledge rather than a politics of redistribution.

This kind of binary thinking (insiders versus outsiders; technical versus political problems) can partly be resolved though the creation of communities of joint responsibility. We describe one that tackled the issue of African youth livelihoods through the creation of a virtual knowledge hub, an online space where materials like webinars, book reviews, art, podcasts and links to other websites were curated in order to produce a publicly accessible repository on this topic. Project participants included staff at the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa (HSRC), eight young African research fellows employed for two years by the HSRC, invited guests and the project funder, namely the Mastercard Foundation.

A range of values, visions and ideological orientations emerged through participants’ ideas about the form that the knowledge hub should take and the materials it should include. Despite the existence of insiders and outsiders and different beliefs regarding how the issue of African youth livelihoods should be addressed- either through technical solutions, politics or some combination- we believe that this community of joint responsibility was, to some degree, able to develop a creative, shared vision and offer useful ways to think about this issue.