African Fellowships for Research in Indigenous and Alternative Knowledges (AFRIAK) Selection Report

CODESRIA Bulletin Online, No. 10, September 2025

Abstract

Introduction

The African Fellowships for Research in Indigenous and Alternative Knowledges (AFRIAK) is a collaboration resulting from a discussion between CODESRIA and Mastercard Foundation. The discussion goes back to 2021, when CODESRIA reached out to Tade A. Aina, then Head of Research and Senior Director: Research and Learning at Mastercard Foundation, to consider support for research and policy impact initiatives at CODESRIA. Although the thematic focus was not clear at the meeting, it soon zeroed in on the mutual interest that CODESRIA and the Foundation shared in Indigenous knowledge systems (IKS). Between that meeting and 2024, a range of discussions were held to concretise the initiative and frame a concept note that would encapsulate the mutual interests of the two organisations in supporting work on the dynamic between IKS, the youth and livelihood opportunities that this intersection offers.

The culmination was the official launch of AFRIAK in November 2024. AFRIAK is a three-year research and mentorship programme implemented in partnership with the Mastercard Foundation. It aims to broadly strengthen the research and training ecosystem in Africa by focusing on IKS as a thematic area and seeking to support the education and skilling of young people to undertake research based on Indigenous and endogenous knowledge perspectives.[1] It is envisaged that this project will enable the application of Indigenous Knowledge perspectives and evidence to promote growth in priority sectors and spur economic activities led by young people as a source of dignified livelihoods for themselves and their communities.

Ultimately, AFRIAK seeks to recentre the contribution of Indigenous and alternative ways of knowing, in the quest for Africa’s social transformation. Embedded in the project conceptualisation is a desire to change how knowledge is produced, with an emphasis on the co-production of knowledge rather than on the existing processes that advance a rather exploitative and extractive approach by researchers to bearers of Indigenous Knowledge.

In designing the project, the Council was cognisant of the pejorative baggage that the notion ‘Indigenous’ carried. Previous research at CODESRIA, led by the Beninois philosopher, Paulin Hountondji, located the problematic use of the notion in its colonial heritage and persisting scientific dependence in Africa today.[2] In colonised societies, ‘indigenous’ was contrasted with ‘exotic’, implying that the former was native, traditional, primitive and resistant to change. Indigenous knowledge (IK) was thus framed as vernacular, uncivilised, deprived and superstitious. Hountondji analysed these forms of knowledge, noting that the pejorative connotations made sense only in contexts of persisting extraversion of knowledge in Africa.[3] He preferred the notion of ‘endogenous’ to ‘Indigenous’, arguing that this reframing would recentre Africa in knowledge production. In response, AFRIAK, while acknowledging these debates and the historical baggage many terms carry, uses the notion ‘Indigenous Knowledge’ to refer to what is organic to society, to borrow Gramsci’s concept of the organic intellectual. It underscores the idea of ‘using what we have’, while recognising that what we have in society is not static nor does it exist in splendid isolation from numerous other influences; rather, it evolves through continuous interaction with other knowledge systems.[4]

AFRIAK will be implemented over a period of three years with the hope that this can be extended to a ten-year programme. Its primary target is young Africans under the age of 35 years. AFRIAK is prioritising young Africans who currently reside on the continent partly because they have the immediacy of contact with communities but also because young Africans resident on the continent suffer challenges very specific to their contexts. The first year of the programme set out to recruit 100 fellows. In addition, CODESRIA committed that 70 per cent of the fellows admitted into the programme for each of the three years would be young women under the age of 35. In daring to set such a high standard of gender equity for AFRIAK, the Council aimed to change the narrative in which the absence of female applicants in similar programmes, in the Council and beyond, had been turned into a confirmation that there are, in fact, no female applicants to fill the vacancies advertised for such a programme. As this report documents, the response surpassed the 70 per cent threshold.

To achieve these goals, the Council disseminated widely the 2025 AFRIAK call for proposals on 15 March 2025, with a submission deadline set for 15 May 2025. The response to this inaugural call was overwhelming, reflecting both the demand for opportunities of this kind and the vibrant interest in emerging scholarship in Indigenous Knowledge systems across the continent. This interest in this scholarship was already visible to attentive observers in countries like South Africa, Mali, Benin, Nigeria and Ethiopia, to name but these few.

This report provides a detailed account of the selection process that commenced soon after the submission deadline. The end goal of the selection process was the recruitment of the inaugural cohort of fellows to be inducted into the programme in 2025. Although the original target was 100 fellows, after a sequenced selection process a total of 150 fellows from an initial pool of 861 applicants were selected. As envisaged, 70 per cent of the selected fellows were young women. The selected fellows are drawn from 32 African countries spread across the continent’s core five regions (North, West, Central, Eastern and southern Africa).

The Selection Process

The 2025 AFRIAK Fellowship selection process proceeded in four stages, with premium being paid to the quality of applications submitted and the diversity needed for the cohort of successful applicants.

The initial process involved screening the applications to remove multiple and dummy submissions (applications with no substantive content in all their accompanying attachments). In the end, the Council retained a total of 609 valid applications submitted in response to the 2025 AFRIAK call for proposals. These comprised 521 individual submissions and 88 group submissions. Collectively, these represented a total of 861 applicants. The diversity of these applications is indicative of the opportunities that this fellowship programme provides.

Of the 861 applicants, 432 were women and 429 were men, reflecting an almost even gender distribution. Figure 1 summarises the results. The geographic distribution of the applicants demonstrates a spread across 39 African countries and 5 non-African countries, with 3 applicants holding dual citizenship. Table 1 provides a detailed breakdown of applications by country; Figure 2 illustrates the percentage distribution across the five African regions.

Please see the attached PDF file for the full report.