Category: The Conversation

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Kobus Maree, Professor of Educational Psychology, University of Pretoria

Thirty-two years after South Africa became a democratic state, the futures of millions of young people in the country are shaped to a large degree by uncertainty, exclusion, poverty and discouragement. As one lens on this scene, unemployment in the age group 15-34 borders on 46%.

I am an educational psychologist who has done 35 years of research on the career-life stories of young people growing up in contexts marked by extreme poverty, exclusion, inequality and disadvantage. These hardships shape their career development and views of the ever-changing world of work.

I have encountered many young people who have bottled up and eventually internalised repeated experiences of disenchantment, rejection and “failure”. Some have dropped out of education, lacking support. Others have completed their schooling only to learn that marks and qualifications alone could not open doors to successful futures. In many instances, in their environments, unemployment and unemployability have become normalised.

Yet many show resilience, adaptability and determination to find work and to construct meaningful lives.

In a recent journal article, I described an intervention which involved career counselling for a group of 51 disadvantaged black South Africans, aged around 27. They had experienced poverty, unemployment, social exclusion, and limited access to educational and occupational opportunities. I wanted to assess whether counselling could help them use their resilience as a resource. Could it improve their adaptability? And if so, how?

The results showed positive change for most participants following the programme, though the outcomes were uneven.

Structural barriers to finding work remained formidable. Nevertheless many participants developed a stronger sense of agency, hope, adaptability and future orientation. The intervention appeared to help them tell their career-life stories in new ways, with purpose, self-understanding and a shift towards taking action.

These findings underscore the importance of a counselling approach that helps young people recognise and mobilise their strengths, and convert their most significant developmental challenges into assets that benefit both themselves and their communities.

The intervention

In September 2020, the group of young, unemployed, rural South Africans took part in structured career conversations and reflections guided by researchers and career development practitioners. In a workshop and group discussions, we recorded their career interests, strengths and areas for development. They also thought about how their future careers could transform their early life challenges into something positive and empowering.

They explored fields of study aligned with their individual profiles and aspirations that could help them experience meaning, fulfil a sense of purpose and contribute existential value to their career-lives. To this end, they conducted in-depth analyses of occupations associated with their selected fields.

Participants then received guidance on managing emotions, stress and study techniques.

The aim was to elicit themes about their conscious knowledge about themselves and their subconscious insights.

A recurring theme in their reflections was personal development and motivation. Inspiration to work hard, and overcoming adversity, were part of this theme.

They showed a growing awareness of the attitudes, beliefs and competencies necessary to achieve their career-life goals. Their awareness of the need to be adaptable increased. So did their understanding of employment and economic growth realities. They reported increased confidence in defining and achieving their career and life goals. They developed greater clarity about the meaning they wished to find in their work, the contribution they hoped to make to others through their work, and the deeper existential purpose that gives direction to both their work and their lives.

Career adaptability

The intervention used a method called Career Construction Counselling. This is essentially a way to help people come up with their own advice instead of being told what to do. Through reflecting on their own stories, they think of what steps they can take towards their future working life.

This approach is consistent with findings from our career construction and narrative career counselling research. This suggests that reflecting on and reconstructing personal life stories can enhance self-understanding, agency, career adaptability and future planning. Studies have shown that people who actively engage with their own narratives are often better able to identify meaningful career directions, clarify their self- and career identity, identify appropriate study fields, articulate their mission and vision, and develop strategies for navigating future transitions.

The approach emphasises adaptability, which has four elements:

• concern (do I have a future?)

• control (who is responsible for my future?)

• curiosity (what do I want to achieve in my future?)

• confidence (can I succeed?).

A year after the intervention, the participants reported back.

Their scores for career adaptability had improved somewhat. The area of strongest improvement was their career confidence.

I concluded that narrative-based career construction counselling can strengthen career clarity, adaptability, and self-directed action among severely disadvantaged unemployed youth.

However, lasting change also requires systemic intervention. Not only is career counselling scarce in South African schools; traditional approaches are often culturally mismatched and fail to empower disadvantaged youth.

Resilience

I’ve noticed that people often speak of resilience as if it’s an end point in itself.

I believe resilience may be understood not as the culmination of coping but as a preparatory phase in the movement from passive endurance towards what the psychologist Mark Savickas calls active authorship (“active mastery”). My belief draws on life design (people actively shaping their careers and lives by constructing meaning, adapting to change, and aligning work with personal values and identity) and career construction perspectives.

From this perspective, the crucial shift lies in supporting young people to move beyond “withstanding” adversity towards re-authoring their experiences.

– Young, South African and unemployed: finding direction starts with knowing yourself – counsellor
– https://theconversation.com/young-south-african-and-unemployed-finding-direction-starts-with-knowing-yourself-counsellor-283796

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Maria Suriano, Associate Professor, Department of History, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, University of the Witwatersrand

While many men are remembered as heroes of political struggles, women seldom get enough attention. Vesta Smith is a good example. She fought for South Africa’s liberation from white minority rule, called apartheid.

Historian Maria Suriano has written a biography of this activist. With the 50th anniversary of the momentous 1976 Soweto youth uprising in mind, we asked her to tell us about the woman affectionately known as Ma Vesta.

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Why is Vesta Smith important?

Vesta Smith was a community activist who dedicated her life to the anti-apartheid struggle, social justice, non-racialism and gender equality.

She participated in key events in South Africa’s history, attending the Congress of the People in 1955, where the Freedom Charter was adopted, and the historic 1956 Women’s March. Two decades later, during the Soweto uprising, Ma Vesta became a trusted mentor to younger militants.

Her political work happened largely outside formal politics. It was grounded in building non-racial and inter-generational networks of care and solidarity. She hid students in her home while they were on the run from the security police and supported the families of political prisoners. She paid the price with four months in prison.

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Read more: What is apartheid? New book for young readers explains South Africa’s racist system

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Ma Vesta’s story contributes to efforts to uncover the radical ideas, practices and key figures behind the students’ protests. These helped pave the way for South Africa’s democratic transition and continue to echo in today’s student struggles for decolonisation.

Ma Vesta’s passionate, community-based activism matters because it reveals the importance of “everyday politics” – the small acts of resistance, often outside official politics, that foster personal and collective emancipation.

This invites us to reconsider the dominant narrative of the liberation struggle, long centred on prominent male leaders and party strategies.

Who was Vesta Smith?

Born in Johannesburg in 1922, she was forcibly relocated in 1941, along with her mother and sisters, to Noordgesig. She lived there until her passing in 2013. Segregation laws governing residential areas reserved this small section of Soweto for poor townspeople classified as “coloured”.

She was born into a stable family. Her father, Stephen Mpama, moved in the circles of Johannesburg’s Black intelligentsia. Her early life was marked by hardships after his premature death in 1927. Inner-city cosmopolitanism shaped her non-racialism, and daily racial discrimination informed her refusal to be subservient to white people.

From the late 1960s to the mid-1990s she worked consecutively for the South African Council of Churches, the South African Committee for Higher Education and the Legal Resources Centre. Although formally an administrator, at these progressive organisations Ma Vesta relentlessly pursued social justice by mobilising her broad political networks.

In the 1980s she connected legal advocacy to Black townships through advice centres, while participating in key anti-apartheid campaigns. After 1994 and the first democratic elections, she advocated for women’s empowerment and poverty alleviation in the townships.

What are the key takeaways?

Drawing on personal conversations with those who knew Ma Vesta and on archival sources, private papers and press coverage, the book is structured around four key themes.

First, her activism was grounded in her faith – fighting injustice was a spiritual duty. Her work within the Young Women’s Christian Association from the 1960s onwards pioneered the idea that Christianity and political activism should be intertwined.

Second, Ma Vesta’s politics were non-sectarian. Although aligned with the African National Congress (ANC) resistance movement, she was a “bridge-builder”. She connected the struggles of the 1950s to those of the 1970s and 1980s as well as activists across generations, townships and ideologies.

Third, non-racialism was central to her political work. The formal and informal, secular and religious connections she forged over time reflected this belief. In the 1970s, her rejection of apartheid categories matched the Black Consciousness Movement. The book traces her friendships and shifting relations with white liberals, alongside her understanding of her Blackness.

Fourth, looking beyond prominent leaders reveals the pivotal yet under-recognised contributions of Black women who worked on the ground. What dominant historical accounts leave out about everyday politics deserves closer examination.

What was her impact on young militants?

During the 1976 uprising Ma Vesta emerged as one of the senior activists who provided practical help, political guidance and emotional support to student activists. This was regardless of their political affiliation.

Many young militants who encountered her in 1976 and afterwards describe her as a formative influence. She helped shape their political thinking and sustained them through difficult times.

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Read more: Travel as activism: 6 stories of Black women who refused to ‘stay put’ in apartheid South Africa

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She built networks with fellow anti-apartheid activists across generations. This brings into view a political world of friendships and mutual support. What emerges is a collective political biography, but also an intimate portrait. Locating her in Noordgesig extends our understanding of June 1976 beyond its epicentre in Soweto.

Why has she been overlooked?

Ma Vesta’s absence from academic and popular accounts of the liberation struggle reflects broader patterns in how this history has been written.

First, scholarship has focused mostly on male leaders, their strategies and political organisations. It has overlooked community activists and organic intellectuals, particularly Black women outside formal leadership structures. Ma Vesta’s politics were not defined by rigid allegiances. So, figures like her are harder to categorise and less visible in such accounts.

Her erasure may also be attributed to her refusal to accept racialised politics and apartheid racial classifications (black, white, coloured, Indian). This sits uneasily with recent efforts to celebrate iconic struggle figures from coloured communities as “coloured”, a framing she herself would have rejected.

Lastly, she was disillusioned with the unfilfilled promises of the ANC government that won democratic power in 1994. This may have also contributed to her being marginalised.

It’s important to restore Vesta Smith to her rightful place in South African history. Not as a footnote to more famous figures, but as a central example of how grassroots activists can become extraordinary agents of change and liberation.

But recovering this story is not only about correcting the historical record and advancing epistemic justice. It also speaks to pressing contemporary concerns. Her Christian-based activism offers a counterpoint to the recent resurgence of narrow identity politics in the country.

During South Africa’s first major xenophobic attacks in 2008, she called a Johannesburg radio station to question assumptions of national superiority over other Africans. She never grew tired of addressing issues of social justice.

Her commitment to community empowerment after 1994 is also a reminder that the democratic transition was only one step in the struggle for equality and dignity. Above all, her life shows that transformation is often driven by those who work in the background.

– Ma Vesta Smith: why this unsung activist matters 50 years after the Soweto uprising
– https://theconversation.com/ma-vesta-smith-why-this-unsung-activist-matters-50-years-after-the-soweto-uprising-280319

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Suleman Lazarus, Visiting Fellow, Mannheim Centre for Criminology, London School of Economics and Political Science

Forced labour in cybercrime might call to mind scam compounds in south-east Asia. A growing body of scholarship, journalism and policy attention has entrenched that stereotype. Images of fortified compounds, armed guards and confiscated passports are shaping how courts worldwide interpret cybercriminal participation.

But new research challenges that template. There are different kinds of coercion.

Physical coercion is visible: locked doors, armed guards, confiscated documents. Spiritual or psychological coercion is invisible: the fear of consequences no one can see, but many believe. One restrains the body. The other restrains the mind. The outcome is the same.

I have studied the sociocultural dimensions of cybercrime for over a decade, with particular expertise in online fraud, digital deception, cybercriminal networks, human trafficking and the experiences of fraud victims.

In my most recent work as a cybercrime researcher I looked at a cybercrime training academy in Nigeria, one of the underground schools that recruit and train young men in digital fraud. In a recent study on coercion I show how control, pressure and exploitation can operate within these illicit training spaces.

For the research I drew on three sources: conviction case files (court judgments, charge sheets, witness statements, exhibits); conversations with three officers directly involved in the investigation and prosecution; and courtroom observations of all 12 defendants’ proceedings.

I found that west African cybercrime is not always a free choice.

Understanding what drives recruitment into cybercrime academies is not a defence of fraud, which does great harm. It is a precondition for dismantling it.

What is a hustle kingdom?

Internet fraudsters use the term “hustle kingdoms” to describe their own illicit schools. Our analysis of Nigerian conviction case files, supplemented by ethnographic research and officer interviews, revealed that hustle kingdoms are semi-structured cybercrime academies, operating covertly in Nigerian and Ghanaian cities. They have hierarchies, curricula, and a governing authority known as the “chairman”. Learners are trained in hacking, romance fraud and business email compromise schemes. No upfront fees are charged. Instead, a percentage of scam earnings is extracted later, creating a debt-like arrangement from day one.

Recruits are typically young men aged 16 to 32, most with only secondary education. They enter through social networks, via friends, relatives, or opportunistic recruiters. One 18-year-old explained simply:

I did not pay any money to join the academy.

These academies did not emerge randomly. When formal routes to education and employment are blocked, young people seek alternatives. A sociologist, Robert K. Merton, calls this “innovation”: pursuing culturally endorsed goals, such as financial success, through illegitimate but accessible means.

Hustle kingdoms exploit that gap deliberately, offering free training where universities charge fees that most families cannot afford. Poverty, youth unemployment, and absent social welfare systems are the soil in which these schools grow.

Coercion without chains

These findings come from my analysis of 12 Economic and Financial Crimes Commission case files, specifically witness statements and court testimony in Nigeria. Hustle kingdom learners were not locked up, yet they could not leave. Movement was restricted to narrow, authorised purposes. Communication with the outside world was banned. Food was provided, but money and information about earnings were withheld. One 25-year-old recalled being told that food was free, calls were not permitted, and his percentage would only be disclosed after money was collected.

An 18-year-old learner is recorded in the case files as saying:

We were warned not to leave or contact anyone during the training. The chairman swore that both the person and their family would suffer lasting spiritual harm.

This is layered control, not visible captivity. Each mechanism reinforces the others. Isolation prevents learners from verifying whether threats are real. Financial dependency removes the practical means to exit. Spiritual intimidation seals the architecture.

The spiritual threats centred on juju, a traditional west African practice with deep roots in healing and community life. Within the hustle kingdom, however, it was deliberately weaponised.

The chairman invoked juju oaths to bind learners to compliance. Because belief in ancestral spiritual power is widely shared, these threats carry genuine coercive weight. Scholars describe this as “escapelessness”: the belief that nobody evades spiritual consequence. Similar dynamics have been documented in Nigerian sex-trafficking networks operating across Europe, including Italy and France.

Policy and justice implications

Comparing the case file evidence against existing frameworks on trafficking and coercion, we identified four areas where current responses fall short. Current criminal justice frameworks tend to draw a binary: either someone is a voluntary offender, or a trafficked victim. The hustle kingdom evidence does not fit neatly into either box. Learners entered with aspirations. They also faced escalating constraints that restricted exit, communication and economic autonomy. Participation shifted along a continuum, from initial aspiration toward gradual entrapment.

Treating individuals as fully voluntary offenders carries real costs. Sentences may be disproportionate to the actual agency. Victim-offender overlap goes unrecognised. Rehabilitation programmes designed for willing offenders miss the mark entirely. They assume the participant chose freely. A learner who entered under spiritual threat, financial dependency and restricted movement has a fundamentally different profile. The programme addresses the wrong problem.

The evidence supports more differentiated responses to cybercrime participation across west Africa:

Sentencing: Judges should weigh evidence of movement restrictions, communication bans and spiritual threats when assessing culpability, not dismiss them as cultural colour.

Rehabilitation: Practitioners must learn to identify coerced participants at the assessment stage. Spiritual intimidation is a real constraint on agency.

Prevention: Effective intervention must address structural drivers, including youth unemployment, blocked educational access, and the absence of social safety nets.

Law enforcement: Property owners who lease premises to cybercrime academies without due diligence are indirect enablers. Legislation should extend accountability beyond direct participants.

Why this matters now

Cybercrime is one of Africa’s most rapidly expanding criminal threats, generating estimated annual losses of US$3 billion continent-wide. Similarly, cybercrime enforcement is accelerating across Africa south of the Sahara. Classification decisions made today will harden into judicial precedent. If coercion is only recognised when it looks like a south-east Asian scam compound, constrained actors across west Africa will be sentenced as if they had chosen freely.

Understanding it better could make sentencing proportionate and rehabilitation effective. The structural conditions that feed recruitment into these academies also need to be addressed.

– Forced labour in West African cybercrime academies: how fear traps young men
– https://theconversation.com/forced-labour-in-west-african-cybercrime-academies-how-fear-traps-young-men-283661

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Ntshengedzeni Evans Netshivhambe, Lecturer, University of South Africa

Being an elderly person in South Africa presents a range of challenges. Apartheid shaped diverse experiences of ageing and elderly care along racial and ethnic lines. In the post-apartheid era, however, these patterns have begun to change.

Black elderly people are now more likely than before to live in old-age homes, particularly those who have pension funds from previous employment. There are also community centres that provide daytime care for elderly people through meals and social gatherings.

Hlanganani Malamulele Society for the Aged in Giyani, Limpopo province, is one of these daycare centres. It provides food packages and musical activities to support the elderly and help them cope with loneliness and stress. Giyani is a largely rural area in the northern region of South Africa, mostly occupied by the Tsonga people.

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Read more: South African study shows how unhealthy ageing takes its toll on health and income

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As a lecturer in indigenous African music at the University of South Africa, I was working with a musician, Agness Mabasa, and came to know about her regular performances for the elderly at this community centre. Mrs Mabasa performs on the xitende, lugube and tshihwana, which are all traditional bow instruments.

I was interested in understanding the impact of music on the wellbeing of the elderly people at the centre, particularly those who participate in choir singing and those who engage with the music as listeners.

Other researchers have highlighted the role of music in a holistic approach to promoting a good life for the elderly. Music has been found to act as a catalyst for participation, interaction and personal expression, helping people take an active role in their own wellbeing. In the African context, in particular, music is deeply rooted in the historical and cultural origins of health and wellbeing.

My research employed interviews, music and lyrical analysis, and a literature review to examine how gatherings at the Hlanganani centre contribute to the happiness, mood and overall wellbeing of elderly participants. They told me that singing, performing and listening to indigenous instruments together made them feel healthy and well. Music connected, entertained and comforted them.

Singing and remembering

The Hlanganani centre provides food parcels and activities like crafting and choir singing. I attended two performance sessions there and interviewed 30 people, mostly women, aged between 60 and 84, in 2022. We discussed the music in groups and in individual interviews.

My first visit began with the elderly choir performing two choral pieces as a gesture of welcome. Members explained that some serve as choir conductors, composers and lead singers. I learned that participation in choir activities has given them opportunities to travel for performances and competitions, which motivate them to remain actively involved in the choir. Participants also reported that attending and participating in musical performances together positively affects their mood and overall sense of well-being.

One told me:

Through singing and dancing, our bodies become more active and engaged.

Another said:

We rarely fall ill when we look forward to coming to the centre to connect with others, sing and listen to music.

Mrs Mabasa entertained the group with performances on indigenous instruments. She also told stories about memories and experiences connected to the songs she performed. Most of these were community songs that reflected on the participants’ earlier lives and shared social experiences. Some songs evoked memories of their youth, bringing smiles and laughter to the elderly audience. The songs’ themes included experiences of marriage in earlier times, and the realities of living with in-laws.

One of the songs she plays is Ni Landa John a Xitandani, the story of a woman waiting for her husband who has gone to seek work far away. It’s an experience many of her audience have shared. Another song she performed during my visit was Nonyana Wa Dura, Ntlhanu Wa Makume, with humorous lyrics about the high bridal price of women at the time when many of the audience were teenagers.

Through these musical performances and narratives, the songs revived memories among the elderly and created moments of joy and social connection, encouraging them to look forward to attending the centre each day.

Said one:

When we sing and listen to these traditional songs, their melodies stay with us even after we leave the centre.

During the interviews, many elderly participants stated that the centre contributes positively to their emotional well-being and helps them maintain a happier state of mind. They explained that when alone at home, they often spend long periods reflecting on personal challenges and difficulties.

The centre owner told me:

Many elderly individuals grapple with concerns beyond their control, leading to stress and anxiety.

However, when they gather with their peers at the centre, they feel emotionally supported, develop a stronger sense of belonging, and enjoy social interaction.

One told me:

Boredom is no longer our greatest concern because, as individuals with few or no remaining relatives, we often find ourselves overthinking and feeling like a burden to others. Some people are even reluctant to cook for us, but at the centre, we receive proper meals and care.

The participants also indicated that remaining alone at home may leave them vulnerable to crime, like theft of their pension money.

Music uplifts and connects

The findings demonstrate that a centre like Hlanganani (which means “come together”) can play an important role in improving the well-being of elderly people, particularly those living in communities affected by poverty and high unemployment rates.

The study further shows that music, especially music that has formed part of the elderly participants’ lived experiences over time, contributes to emotional well-being and an improved quality of life. Through musical participation, shared memories and social engagement, the elderly can experience comfort, joy and a renewed sense of community.

– How traditional music helps the elderly in a South African care centre
– https://theconversation.com/how-traditional-music-helps-the-elderly-in-a-south-african-care-centre-284164

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Nana Kesse, Assistant Professor of History, Clark University

The transatlantic slave trade was a multilayered, highly commercialised global enterprise that lasted from the early 1500s to the mid 1800s.

The events over this period are far too complex to fit into a straightforward perpetrator-victim narrative. While the trade catastrophically dehumanised and commodified over 12.5 million Africans, it was not just an external conquest.

Europeans lacked the geographical knowledge, immunity to endemic tropical diseases, and the military power to venture into the African interior. So they became dependent on African states and merchant elites for the supply of captives.

By controlling coastal ports, regulating market access, and managing the interior trade routes that brought captives to the coast, these African brokers enabled and shaped the European trade in human beings.

Yet, this internal participation was rarely uniform. While certain powerful African societies and groups largely procured captives from weaker communities through warfare or raids, a few centralised African states chose neither to fully participate in nor completely abstain from the slave trade.

One such society was the Kingdom of Appolonia (today known as the Nzema State) in the southwestern Gold Coast (present-day Ghana). Throughout the four centuries of Atlantic slavery, Appolonia traded only 352 captives while other Gold Coast towns like Elmina and Cape Coast each shipped hundreds of thousands of enslaved people.

As a historian of west Africa, particularly Ghana, specialising in environmental and water history as well as the slave trade, I have spent nearly a decade researching Appolonia’s role in the Atlantic slave trade. My recent study reveals that Appolonia was the only port region on the Gold Coast where the Atlantic slave trade did not thrive, although indigenous African slavery was practised in the kingdom. Appolonia stands out as a statistical and geographical outlier within the slave trade economy.

Appolonia’s story raises several critical questions. Why did the kingdom trade so few enslaved people? Why is it important to study regions of Africa where the slave trade was less dominant? And what do outliers like Appolonia teach us about historical and reparative justice?

Appolonia in historical context

Appolonia is an Akan society in southwestern Ghana, located at the border with Côte d’Ivoire. The Portuguese named this region after Saint Appolonia, an Egyptian Christian virgin, because they discovered the area on her festival day.

The region was made up of small villages that came together to establish the Appolonian Kingdom in the late 1600s. It was here that Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, was born in 1909.

The founding of the Appolonian Kingdom coincided with other grand historical developments on the Gold Coast. These include the rise of the Asante Kingdom to superpower status and the transformation of the region into a centre for the Atlantic slave trade.

These events drew Appolonia into the larger Atlantic economy. However, Appolonia was probably the only Gold Coast society that effectively said “no” to the Atlantic slave trade.

Saying “no” did not mean a complete abstinence. The 352 enslaved individuals that Appolonia shipped account for 0.0028% of the Africans transported across the Atlantic Ocean. My intention is not to reduce these precious lives to mere statistics. Rather, I aim to show that, in percentage terms, Appolonia’s involvement in the trade was minimal.

To illustrate this point, let’s examine some comparative data.

The table displays slave exports from various regions of the Gold Coast. This information was obtained from the SlaveVoyages database, compiled over decades by various researchers in an international collaborative effort. It offers statistics on enslaved individuals shipped from Africa and those who survived the journey.

For instance, in the 18th-century Gold Coast, port towns like Anomabo recorded 168,348 slave exports, Cape Coast 100,434 and Elmina 85,636 – compared with Appolonia’s 352.

Consider the figures alongside the historical population densities of these areas.

During the 1700s, Anomabu had approximately 8,750 inhabitants; yet a staggering 168,348 captives were shipped from there. This indicates significant slave trading. Similarly, Cape Coast and Elmina had projected populations of around 5,000 and 25,000 residents, yet recorded high slave exports.

Appolonia, on the other hand, had an estimated population of 15,600-19,600 inhabitants but traded only 352.

What this means

Why did Appolonia trade so few enslaved people? Using demographic database analysis, European archival records, and oral histories, my research suggests two main reasons.

First, Appolonia was not a slaving society. Its economy depended rather on the gold and ivory trade.

Second, the kingdom implemented policies, such as the amonle covenant, that prevented the sale of Appolonian subjects. Amonle was a sacred ritual involving human sacrifice of Appolonian royals and the mixing of their blood with a special herbal concoction. It was then drunk by both Appolonian rulers and migrants who settled in the kingdom.

This powerful ritual served as the binding oath against selling Appolonian locals and refugees, cursing anyone who broke the oath. This policy undermined any internal system for producing enslaved people within the kingdom for sale.

The question of reparations

Appolonia’s story further complicates our understanding and approach to seeking historical justice and reparations for the slave trade. It is one thing for a known victim to demand justice and reparations from an identifiable perpetrator, whether through symbolic acts like an apology, or through monetary compensation.

It’s a different matter when the identities of both the victim and the perpetrator are unknown – or when the perpetrator and the victim are one and the same. Who dispenses reparations to whom?

In the case of Appolonia, we do not know the identities of the 352 victims exported, nor have scholars, including myself, been able to trace these captives to a specific African homeland.

We have not found historical records indicating that the people of Appolonia captured or purchased these individuals for resale. Given this context, should Appolonia be expected to offer reparations? If yes, to whom?

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Read more: Slavery reparations: why the West is morally bound to pay them

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Conversely, is it ethically justifiable for Appolonia to seek reparative justice from the unknown Europeans who purchased the 352 captives?

Appolonia’s story complicates the call for reparative justice. However, it does not contradict the landmark March 2026 United Nations resolution officially declaring the transatlantic slave trade as the “gravest crime against humanity”. For the slave trade is indeed the most violent and catastrophic of the many atrocities committed against Africans and African descended people.

– Appolonia: the story of an African kingdom that resisted the Atlantic slave trade
– https://theconversation.com/appolonia-the-story-of-an-african-kingdom-that-resisted-the-atlantic-slave-trade-282102

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Tania Prinsloo, Associate Professor in Applied Information Systems, University of Johannesburg

Foot and mouth disease is common in South Africa’s wildlife reserves. There are constant efforts to make sure it doesn’t spread to farmed animals. But since 2019 the country has seen repeated outbreaks on farms. In 2026 the country’s R80 billion (US$5 billion) beef industry faced a crisis as unchecked outbreaks spread to all provinces. This caused a 26% drop in exports of beef in 2025, heavily affecting trade with China in particular. The lack of a mandatory, nationwide system to trace diseases like this means they can’t be effectively managed. We asked Tania Prinsloo, who has researched disease surveillance systems, to explain what’s gone wrong.

How bad is the foot and mouth outbreak in South Africa?

There have consistently been sporadic foot and mouth disease outbreaks in the country. But the most recent outbreak of the SAT2 strain started in May 2021 in the province of KwaZulu-Natal . Foot and mouth disease has spread to all provinces, with clusters of confirmed outbreaks in different regions.

A January 2026 study by the Bureau for Food and Agricultural Policy estimated that South Africa’s current outbreak could cost the livestock sector R13.1 billion over the next five years. This includes R11.3 billion in lost production value and R1.8 billion in lost export revenue.

Between 2019 and 2025, three outbreaks resulted in R821 million in export losses. This figure was projected to rise to R2.6 billion by the end of 2026.

Since January 2025, key export markets, including China, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Namibia and the United Kingdom, have remained closed to South African beef exports.

Foot and mouth disease affects cloven-hoofed animals. It is highly contagious. There are vaccines available, and the country has continuously imported vaccines, with massive campaign drives from the start of 2026.

The disease is often transferred from wildlife to domestic animals such as sheep, pigs and cattle. It spreads through contaminated animals, animal products, equipment, vehicles, human activity, and even windborne viruses. Clinical signs include blisters on the lips, tongue, palate, gums, nose, coronary band, and between the hooves.

Foot and mouth disease poses little risk to human health. But it has significant economic effects due to livestock losses, reduced productivity, and the high costs of disease control. Meat and dairy products are safe for human consumption, and the disease does not get transferred to humans. There is a common misperception: foot and mouth disease should not be confused with hand, foot and mouth disease, a common childhood illness. The two diseases are caused by different viruses.

Wildlife and livestock interactions are particularly high along the borders of protected areas like the Kruger National Park. Fallen or broken veterinary fences allow wildlife – which naturally carries the foot and mouth disease – to wander into community grazing lands, making it very difficult to prevent the spread.

Common control measures include movement restrictions, quarantines, culling of infected and exposed animals, and the cleaning and disinfection of affected facilities, vehicles and equipment.

What are traceability systems?

Livestock traceability systems are used to track food products, animals and related substances throughout the production, processing and distribution chain. They produce an accurate record of every animal throughout its lifetime, including vaccination, movement and the destination of the meat after slaughter. The animal is also uniquely identifiable according to its ear tag number.

In disease outbreaks traceability systems would play a key role in managing their spread. The only traceability system currently used widely in South Africa is from the Red Meat Industry Services. But participation is voluntary.

Livestock traceability systems identify an infected animal, which other animals it came into contact with, where water areas were shared, and which animals grazed together. This enables the quarantine of all possible infected animals, preventing any further spread of the disease.

Global markets are increasingly requiring national levels of livestock traceability. South Africa has a target for implementing one by 2030.

How functional are they in South Africa?

South Africa does not have a country-wide traceability system. There are groups of farmers who have created their own traceability systems. Karan Beef, one of the country’s leading beef producers, has stated that it would only buy animals that could be individually identified and fully traced. In addition, the farm of origin had to be registered on the Red Meat Industry Services platform and have a valid Global Location Number.

Its efforts were rewarded in June when it announced it was resuming exports after more than a year of disruptions caused by foot and mouth disease.

But the largest part of the South African beef market remains locked out.

The Red Meat Industry Services has created a traceability system that is gaining traction. This is a large industry role-player that encompasses the full value chain, including livestock producers, feedlots, auction houses, abattoirs, processors, marketers and exporters. It is the only organisation mandated to implement the Red Meat Industry Strategy 2030 on behalf of this entire sector.

But several challenges prevent South Africa from making a country-wide traceability system mandatory:

• The Department of Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development faces budget constraints, staff shortages and service delivery challenges. This makes nationwide enforcement difficult.

• Agriculture is the responsibility of the provincial governments, according to the country’s constitution. So nine provincial administrations and one national one would have to work together to create a viable system. In 2017 the national government assigned the task of developing a system to the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. But the project has lost traction.

• The differences between commercial farmers and emerging, small-scale farmers make it difficult to have one traceability system that caters to all. Small-scale farmers have limited access to farmland, credit and other essential resources, and lack the newest technologies.

• Many commercial farmers have invested in their own traceability systems, using their own technologies and infrastructure. It’s difficult and costly to integrate their data into a single central place.

What needs to happen to fix them?

The South African government is responsible for regulatory oversight, policy enforcement and disease surveillance to ensure food safety, combat livestock theft, and unlock export markets.

It has public-private partnerships such as the red meat industry platform and compliance tracking protocols that satisfy strict European Union and global import requirements.

A nationwide mandatory traceability system is vital for South Africa’s economic and agricultural future. A drive is needed to encourage farmers to develop and adopt innovative technologies by increasing their knowledge of available digital solutions, addressing affordability issues and improving internet infrastructure.

If a traceability system is implemented, every animal must be fitted with an ear tag containing a unique number. But the tags are expensive.

Neighbouring Eswatini implemented its traceability system in 2012 and made it mandatory in 2013. Communal farmers’ tags were subsidised. But Eswatini is a small country. In South Africa, the number of animals requiring free or subsidised tags is high. There are roughly 2.4 million small-scale farmers.

Still, South Africa cannot afford to wait. Access to global markets will continue to decrease if the disease is not brought under control.

Paballo Phakoe, business application junior specialist at the Auditor General of South Africa and master’s student in the Department of Applied Information Systems at the University of Johannesburg, contributed to this article.

– Foot and mouth disease in South Africa: how a tracking system would control outbreaks
– https://theconversation.com/foot-and-mouth-disease-in-south-africa-how-a-tracking-system-would-control-outbreaks-284727

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Dominic Rohner, Professor of Economics and André Hoffman Chair in Political Economics and Governance, Geneva Graduate Institute, Graduate Institute – Institut de hautes études internationales et du développement (IHEID)

The last 18 months have seen a historic decline in development aid budgets from various donor countries, in a period where many of them are earmarking more funds for rearmament. The biggest waves have been made by the abrupt and massive reduction in American aid.

Less than a week after President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2025, his administration ordered the immediate suspension of all programmes run by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) – historically the world’s largest national humanitarian donor. Officers had hours to vacate their posts, local contracts were terminated, and medical and food supply chains ground to a halt.

Researchers have already issued warnings of the severe health toll. A study published in Lancet Global Health estimates that USAID helped prevent nearly 92 million deaths between 2001 and 2021. It also projects more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030 if the cuts continue.

The rapid and massive decline in foreign aid experienced by various recipient countries can have very substantial consequences, ranging from health outcomes to armed conflict. Recent evidence suggests what types of international support could allow countries to build back better and foster peace and prosperity for coming generations.

Development aid also matters for various socio-economic outcomes. Hence one would expect aid cuts to have wide-ranging societal consequences as well. Drawing on our past work on political economic topics and development economics, we have decided to investigate this question.

Our new study finds that the sudden cuts to USAID programmes are associated with surging armed conflict in various regions across Africa.

We cross-referenced geolocated data on historical USAID disbursements with violent incidents recorded by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) project across 870 African regions and over nearly two years. The project monitors conflicts.

The data paint a clear picture: in areas that had received the most American aid, the probability of conflict increased by 3.1 percentage points after January 2025 relative to the control group of places not benefiting from USAID. To account for the fact that places with US aid and others may be different from each other, we filter out the time-invariant conflict risk of particular places and focus solely on changes over time.

This amounts to a relative rise in conflict risk of 6.5%. Battles increased by nearly 7%, protests and riots by more than 5%, and conflict-related deaths by roughly 9%. These effects appear within the first few weeks and intensify over time.

International aid has always divided opinion. Some economists see it as a lever for stability; others, as fertile ground for corruption and conflict, by creating resources worth fighting over. Academic work has indeed found evidence pointing in both peace-promoting and conflict-fuelling directions when it comes to gradual aid flows. But a massive, sudden withdrawal follows a different logic – and our results confirm this.

When aid vanishes abruptly, economic opportunities contract very quickly. The cost of rebellion mechanically decreases, as participants have less to lose, yet many of the underlying reasons for conflict – economic rents, territorial disputes, ethnic tensions, political grievances – remain intact.

This mechanism may explain why violence flares up precisely where aid had been most present. Our data also show that institutions play a buffering role: where governance is stronger, the destabilising effects are markedly weaker.

We find no evidence, however, that the presence of Chinese aid projects softens the impact of USAID’s withdrawal.

What to do next?

Sub-Saharan Africa, where USAID primarily funded health, food security and basic services, is also the continent where state fragility is most widespread. Our estimates likely represent a lower bound: other European donors (including France) have begun reducing their own contributions. If these cuts accumulate, the effects could exceed what we are measuring so far.

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Read more: Where do cuts to USAID leave the future of foreign aid in Africa? Podcast

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Since today’s conflicts are the best predictor of tomorrow’s, a spike in violence can quickly become a trap that is very hard to escape.

Hence, the policy implications of these results are manifold. As far as other major donors are concerned, one interpretation of our findings is that at present they may want to act slowly and cautiously. After having witnessed a very significant drop in global aid and a surge in armed fighting, a rapid and massive disengagement of other major donor countries may very well accentuate the serious effects that we have documented.

Rethinking development aid

In the wake of USAID’s dismantlement there is an urgent need to rethink development aid. It is the right moment to ask difficult questions and reassess the type of international support that is best suited to promote peace and prosperity. Many questions arise: how can aid be made more resilient, less dependent on a single donor, more firmly rooted in local institutions?

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Read more: Why Donald Trump’s decision to slash USAID is hurting American soft power and making the world less safe

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A growing academic literature on optimal policies for peace can serve as a useful guide. A synthesis of recent research highlights the role of sound institutions, security guarantees and productivity-promoting policies. While institution building is often home-grown, international cooperation is key for the other two aspects. In particular, a series of recent studies documents the paramount importance of UN blue helmets for guaranteeing security. The presence of United Nations troops prevents the worst atrocities, suggesting that what the international community should do is to increase the blue helmets budget rather than cutting it.

Relatedly, financial aid can play a key role when it comes to investments into the economy, with wide-ranging consequences. When people have opportunities and perspective in life, they are much less likely to engage in armed conflict as leaving legal employment would entail much larger opportunity costs. Hence, it is not surprising that policies such as school construction, better health treatments and labour-market access have been found to promote peace.

Sound public policies and safety nets are crucial. As shown in a recent article, public employment programmes can provide insurance in the face of adverse shocks, leading to lower conflict levels.

Build back better

Now that the previous foreign aid system has been largely broken, the international community should not aim to restore much of the same. Rather we should aim to “build back better”. This starts with favouring types of investments that cannot be easily appropriated – physical capital can be stolen while human capital cannot. We need to make sure that money gets invested in ways that boost productivity and economic perspectives for everybody.

Together with domestic pushes for the strengthening of institutions and of inclusive governance, such international financial aid can bear fruits for generations to come.

– Do aid cuts fuel violent conflict in Africa? How to promote peace
– https://theconversation.com/do-aid-cuts-fuel-violent-conflict-in-africa-how-to-promote-peace-284158

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Kinfe Yilma, Senior Lecturer, University of Leeds

Mauritius set out its national AI strategy in 2018, the first by an African country. Since then over a dozen African states have adopted national AI policies of some sort or another.

As a national policy plan, an AI strategy typically sets out the priorities and aspirations in achieving certain policy objectives.

At the continental level, the African Union has adopted an AI strategy.

Kenya and Ethiopia have tabled draft AI laws that set out how the countries want AI governed. Morocco, Egypt and Nigeria are already mulling the idea of AI legislation. The trend shows that policymakers are slowly turning their attention from unchecked enthusiasm about AI to reckoning with governing AI risks.

As technology law and policy scholars, our research explores the dynamics of and approaches to the governance of emerging technologies like AI. Our recent work explores the origins, nature and scope of AI governance initiatives in Africa. We found a number of common threads in recent policy and legislative exercises. One such trend is for African states to adopt the European Union’s approach to AI regulation. But this needs to be called into question.

No doubt, Africa needs AI legislation. It will be vital to regulate the development and use of AI systems that pose risks to individual rights, social cohesion or even national security. Legislation can also create new regulatory bodies that oversee AI rules or other relevant laws such as data protection.

Kenya’s AI Bill, for instance, institutes the AI Commissioner as well as the AI Advisory Committee as regulators of AI systems in the country.

But the effort to turn AI policies into legislation requires reckoning for two reasons.

More laws, less implementation

One concern is whether the continent really needs a new layer of digital laws while preceding pieces of tech legislation remain largely unenforced. AI policies were meant to coordinate AI development at the national level. While some countries committed to responsible AI development, others have yet to set up or fund institutions that were to give the strategies meaning.

This points to an endemic problem in Africa: lack of implementation. Data protection is a case in point. Many African countries have enacted data protection legislation but are yet to install oversight bodies, or those established lack the resources to enforce laws.

Legislating for AI in this environment risks producing laws that will largely be aspirational in the same way as the strategies before them: they are there but aren’t implemented.

Europeanisation of African law

The second concern relates to the heavy reliance on European standards in fashioning emergent AI laws. Both Kenya’s and Ethiopia’s AI bills adopt the European Union’s risk-based approach. This involves regulating AI systems based on the nature of risk they pose. Those posing “unacceptable risks” are banned altogether and those with lower risks have to meet requirements.

Transplanting European standards is not new in African states’ attempt to regulate new and emerging technologies. The first generation of data protection and cybercrime laws in Africa drew directly from formative legal instruments in Europe. But rarely have such legal transplanting exercises been informed by or taken into account local contexts, interests and concerns. Perhaps this is why data protection standards aren’t implemented effectively.

The concern is not that the EU’s approach is inherently problematic. It’s why African states fail to envision an approach informed by local realities. AI regulation in Africa should not emerge from a compulsion to signal regulatory modernity. Laws calibrated for mature digital markets, well-resourced regulators, and rights aware consumer populations do not translate cleanly into contexts defined by thin institutional capacity, informal data flows, and populations with limited ability to exercise the rights those laws nominally protect.

Grounding regulation in reality

African states need AI laws based on a concrete and honest reckoning with what AI is actually doing or could do to the continent. Fashioning AI regulation should be preceded by critical reflection on the following key questions:

• How is it being deployed by technology companies? How is information and misinformation spread on the continent?

• How is it being used in public services? Who benefits when governments deploy AI in social protection, policing, or public administration?

• Who controls the data? Large technology companies, many of them headquartered in the United States, China, or Europe, are able to collect and process vast amounts of data generated by African users. This is often done under terms of service that most users neither read nor meaningfully consent to, and with little accountability to African regulators.

• Who bears the harms? Who bears the risk when those systems get it wrong?

• Whose interests are unprotected? AI-powered content moderation systems, for example, perform poorly in African languages and local contexts.

Imperatives of moratorium

As the AI hype continues, African states are already deploying AI in different sectors, including healthcare. Ethiopia and Rwanda, for example, used AI in TB and cervical cancer screening. But it’s happening in a regulatory vacuum. In the absence of a robust regulatory regime, AI is likely to cause considerable harm to individuals and societies.

While AI legislation might be a promising step forward in filling the regulatory void, this effort appears to be restricted only to a few countries whose approach is yet to move past European parameters. Policymakers should rather prioritise pursuing a more considered and contextualised approach to address AI risks meaningfully.

Until then, a moratorium on the use of high-risk AI systems in sensitive domains such as healthcare should be seriously considered.

– AI regulation in Africa: why copying the European model won’t work
– https://theconversation.com/ai-regulation-in-africa-why-copying-the-european-model-wont-work-283524

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Justin Visagie, Associate Professor at the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies, University of the Witwatersrand

It’s time South Africa faced up to an honest question: what if the formal economy can’t deliver the jobs that are needed?

I am an economist who has been working closely with South Africa’s administrative tax data over the past five years – arguably the best way to track progress in the formal sector.

The sobering reality is that the country has gone backwards. And young people are bearing the brunt of the deterioration. The scale of the jobs crisis is now so large that even decades of strong economic growth won’t be enough to eliminate it.

Looking at the last 10 years (2013/14 to 2023/24 tax years) of formal sector jobs data, as reported in the Spatial Tax Panel – a database constructed from employer-employee tax returns – South Africa managed to create only about 130,000 net new full-time equivalent work opportunities per year. This rate of job creation works out at just under 1% growth per annum – which isn’t enough to keep pace with the country’s growing population.

The official statistics from the Quarterly Labour Force Survey confirm this. The number of unemployed job seekers in South Africa has risen from about 8 million to almost 12 million between 2014 and 2024. The reported number of formal sector jobs is also around 12 million.

What is perhaps more alarming is that even if formal sector employment were to grow at 3% per annum, it would still take more than 50 years to substantially reduce unemployment.

The crisis of unemployment youth is deepening

The problem is not only the pace of job creation, it is also who is being left behind. The next cohort of young job seekers is faring worse than ever, according to the latest tax data.

Figure 1 shows how formal employment has shifted across age cohorts in cities, compared with the pre-COVID baseline. It’s drawn from our recent report on the performance and economic outlook for South African cities.

Figure 1: Percentage change in employment by age group across all metropolitan municipalities

The main message is that the pandemic had a dividing effect on labour market outcomes across younger and older workers.

Workers aged above 35 years were surprisingly resilient to the shock. Numbers fell only slightly. They soon reached – and even surpassed – their pre-pandemic levels.

It was younger age groups – either aged 15-25 or 25-35 years – that faced the worst of the layoffs. The 15-25 cohort contracted by 5% and the 25-35 cohort by 15%.

Neither of the younger age cohorts showed much sign of recovery. Job numbers levelled off much lower.

Job creation has apparently shifted even further away from young people. This trend isn’t unique to the tax data; a number of other studies confirm it.

The limits of standard economic tools

What do mainstream economic theory and related empirical work have to say about addressing this crisis?

The economist’s toolbox is powerful when it comes to tweaking incentives, prices and market functioning around an existing equilibrium. The rise in data availability and computational power has also made analysis more precise and useful.

But South Africa’s unemployment crisis is not that kind of problem. It doesn’t need just a small adjustment.

When the required changes are large, the assumptions underpinning the models become less reliable. Attempting to move the dial on unemployment at the scale South Africa requires pushes us into guesswork.

South Africa is facing the prospect of multiple generations with little chance of finding employment. This calls for more than just policy tinkering.

The constraints of standard economic reasoning are illustrated in the debate around minimum wages and the costs of labour. In its simplest form, economic theory suggests that unemployment should all but disappear if you could be flexible about setting wages. Problem solved.

The trouble is that empirical evidence about this is mixed. The employment tax incentive and sectoral minimum wage laws, intended to encourage hiring, showed little effect on employment.

What if South Africa’s market can’t clear out surplus labour even at half the current wage level?

This is further complicated by spatial constraints. For many poorer people, high transport costs mean they can’t get to work even when low-wage jobs are available.

Policy choices

There are other options.

The informal economy is receiving growing policy attention. While I do not want to romanticise the precariousness of many micro and small enterprises, there is reason to believe that this sector could generate far more employment in the future.

According to the Quarterly Labour Force Survey, the informal economy already employs more workers than formal manufacturing.

Another advantage of expanding informal sector employment is that it is often well matched to marginalised communities and places, including township economies, women, and black-owned enterprises.

Yet despite this potential, South Africa still does not have a coherent strategy for supporting small and informal businesses at scale.

Another widely discussed option is some form of basic income grant.

The appeal of this option is that the public sector already has the administrative capacity to do it. It has the blueprint in the Social Relief of Distress grant.

The main constraint is fiscal cost and the associated risks to public finances.

A further set of ideas relates to large-scale infrastructure-led stimulus. This might be complemented by a minimum employment guarantee, such as expanded community works or public employment programmes.

It is likely that the answer lies in some combination of these approaches.

Yet the fundamental challenge across all of them is the financial cost required to scale them to a point where they can make a meaningful difference. Would global financial markets punish South Africa for expanded public spending, or worse, would it destabilise the broader economy?

I am sympathetic to the difficult balancing act faced by the National Treasury.

Taking some strategic bets

Does South Africa still need the formal sector to create millions of jobs?

Without a doubt. But formal employment can’t double in size overnight.

It is difficult to accept a future in which millions of South Africans who are willing and able to work go hungry while the country waits for the formal sector to grow.

It is time to take some bold and strategic bets.

This article was originally published by Econ3x3 under the headline, What if the formal economy can’t deliver the jobs we need?

– South Africa’s jobs crisis: what 10 years of tax data tells us
– https://theconversation.com/south-africas-jobs-crisis-what-10-years-of-tax-data-tells-us-282187

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Jeran Cloete, PhD Candidate in Conservation Ecology and Entomology, Stellenbosch University

Conservationists analyse overwhelming volumes of ecological data in their work. For example, they might need to process decades of weather data or the movements of millions of insects. Up until now, these scientists and decision makers have had to manually find and sort information, then use statistical tools which often oversimplify the source information.

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools now promise to help with all that. But can they deliver on the promise?

They are far from perfect. It’s been shown that they can confidently make up information and amplify hidden biases in their training data. And different AI tools have different uses, strengths and weaknesses. They need to be chosen carefully.

AI featured among the top 10 emerging issues in biodiversity conservation in South Africa in a recent horizon scan that we undertook. As part of a group of 14 experts in biodiversity conservation, we drew on discussions within our diverse professional networks, literature and news trends to identify issues likely to emerge and intensify over the next 5-10 years.

The issues fell into three main groups: technological disruption; regulatory complexity; and infrastructure impacts.

Among them, AI featured as both an opportunity and a risk for future biodiversity conservation.

AI opportunities

Our scan brought to the surface the power and pitfalls of AI in the kind of work we do.

One potential use of AI is in tracking. Tracking animals and insects at scale is essential for conservation decisions. Birds and whales migrate across the planet every year, and insect numbers change through the seasons in the billions. Image recognition AI can process camera trap data to help populate databases such as Wildlife Insights and provide information about animal behaviour to help predict the impacts of global processes like climate change and industrial development on biodiversity.

Mass monitoring also records people sharing those landscapes with animals. This surveillance can be used to detect illegal wildlife harvesting (poaching) or avoid human-animal conflict.

Land use is another area of conservation where AI offers opportunities. Using economic data together with landscape information, custom AI models can be trained to predict deforestation, allowing preventive action, or choose land with high conservation value for the best price.

Ecosystem complexity needs to be summarised and condensed into maps and categories to inform broad landscape-level decisions. Using AI increases the amount of data that can be summarised.

Chatbots are one kind of AI tool that can distil information from huge amounts of text. For example, they can be used to monitor product listings and detect illegal wildlife trade online the moment it occurs. They can read hundreds of scientific publications to help decide which species are at risk of extinction. They can draw on many different sources to create environmental impact assessments; the basis of land development decisions, offering a tempting shortcut around a time-consuming reporting task.

But we also identified downsides and risks.

The risks

Local communities living off the land might experience the mass surveillance as an intrusion. Alienation of local communities in this way could cause them to oppose conservation governance and sabotage technology in the field to protect their privacy.

Another challenge is that the technology itself has limitations. Using AI for tracking animals means specially training image and audio identification systems to work with each ecosystem and piece of hardware. An AI model is only as good as the effort that was put into teaching it. For example, training a model on recordings from a city might cause it to “hear” pigeons everywhere, producing a confident but incomplete list of birds from natural area data.

Another worry about AI is that replacing human involvement could lead to job losses. When used for animal identification, it could contribute to an ongoing decline in taxonomy knowledge which is more severe in biodiversity-rich, low-income countries in Africa. That knowledge is essential for improving and correcting AI systems.

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Read more: Counting Uganda’s lions: we found that wildlife rangers do a better job than machines

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We also found reasons for concern in land use applications.

The risk is that using AI tools for map making could disconnect the map from reality on the ground by replacing human judgment in the field and favouring data sources compatible with AI methods. A skilled ecologist surveying an ecosystem will notice unexpected things that were not specified during the planning stage. For example, speaking with local people may reveal planned farming expansion or harvesting wildlife activities. An AI system would miss this critical context because it can only read information that has been digitised.

AI can’t see animals that evade cameras or identify animals that were not expected to occur in that location (images that it was not trained on). It also can’t speak to humans to discover their intentions or uncover ecological wisdom passed down from their ancestors.

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Read more: First fossil hyena tracks found in South Africa – how expert animal trackers helped

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Chatbots too need to be used with caution. They can generate or embed fictional information. Even when drawing on real information, they often reflect bias in their training data, favouring research and perspectives from well-represented institutions in the global north, where publications have historically been dominated by men in high-income universities.

Uncritical use of chatbot-generated recommendations could lead to poor environmental decisions. For example, it might suggest planting trees without considering diverse ecosystems like Africa’s savannah grasslands.

Using chatbots as a shortcut to summarise knowledge and inform conservation decisions in Africa will reinforce colonial systems and marginalise indigenous communities and knowledge.

Careful use of AI

Strong regulation of the use of AI in environmental science is therefore a moral and legal imperative. The sector needs clear safeguards, standards and oversight mechanisms to prevent faulty or inappropriate AI outputs from influencing decisions. It needs:

• validation protocols to catch fabricated information

• limitations to prevent chatbots from overriding human knowledge and perspectives

• mandatory disclosure of AI prompt histories

• standards for describing training datasets so that appropriate models can be selected.

The explosion of AI presents a powerful opportunity for conservation if we use the right tools with care. If we replace human judgment with unchecked automation, we risk becoming tools of the very systems we built.

– AI in nature conservation: powerful tool or dangerous shortcut?
– https://theconversation.com/ai-in-nature-conservation-powerful-tool-or-dangerous-shortcut-283718