Introduction
This volume arrives at a critical juncture for the African continent. Decades after independence, and firmly within the era of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the rhetoric of inclusion, equity, and justice is enshrined in national constitutions, development plans, and policy frameworks from Cape Town to Nairobi (United Nations, 2015). Yet, this rhetoric often clashes with the lived realities of citizens.
This is not a gap of citizen apathy, but one of institutional responsiveness. The latest Afrobarometer (2025) report, reveals a citizenry that is actively "claiming the promise of democracy", with significant numbers attending community meetings, contacting local officials, and joining others to raise issues. Yet, this high level of engagement is met with profound skepticism about its effectiveness; in many countries, fewer than half of the citizens believe their local government councilors actually listen to them (Afrobarometer, 2025). This disconnect between participation (the act) and influence (the result) is the "implementation gap." This gap is not an accidental policy failure; it is a symptom of the underlying political settlement (Kelsall et al., 2022), the stable, often informal, distribution of power among elites which dictates who benefits from state institutions and whose voice is considered legitimate. The unresponsiveness of formal institutions is, therefore, a rational feature of a settlement structured for elite preservation, not broad public accountability. As Schöne and Dumani (2025) argue, when formal civic space shrinks in response to this settlement, citizen energy does not simply vanish; retreats into "pockets of democracy", resilient, everyday spaces organised around "bread and butter issues" like community gardens or local care networks, where participation is practiced away from the unresponsive gaze of the formal state.
This collection, The African Journal of Inclusive Societies (AJIS) Volume 5, is premised on the objective of moving beyond a simple mapping of who is excluded. Instead, it brings together a diverse, multi-disciplinary, and empirically rich set of papers that critically dissect the how and why, the very mechanisms through which exclusion is produced, reproduced, and contested. The volume’s purpose is to re-centre the debate, shifting from a technical discussion of "inclusive policy" to a political analysis of "inclusive practice." Its core contribution is the synthesis of nine distinct case studies from South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Kenya, which, read together, provide a powerful, ground-up perspective on the structural, cultural, and environmental barriers that define belonging in contemporary Africa.
Making Sense of Exclusion: Beyond Presence to Power
The study of inclusion has often been siloed; economists study financial inclusion, political scientists study civic space, and sociologists study gender norms. The strength of this volume is its multi-sited, multi-disciplinary approach, which demonstrates that these are not separate phenomena. Rather, they are facets of a single, interlocking system of power.
The contributions here implicitly draw on established frameworks of justice and empowerment (e.g., Kabeer, 1999; Fraser, 2009), arguing that inclusion is not merely about presence (e.g., a quota for women) but about power (e.g., the ability to set agendas, command resources, and hold institutions accountable). This distinction, between presence and power, is the critical insight of this volume. It moves beyond the metrics of participation found in large studies (Afrobarometer, 2025) which quantify how many people engage, to ask the more difficult qualitative question of what happens when they do. The papers collectively demonstrate that exclusion is:
• Structural and Legal: Produced by the state itself through policy gaps, such as the precarious status of undocumented learners (Murata & Murigu)
• Cultural and Interpersonal: Enforced by patriarchal norms that question women's leadership (Oino) or by hostile institutional cultures that deploy "contrapower harassment" to silence female academics (Munyuki & Vincent).
• Economic and Financial: Driven by market logics that may, counter-intuitively, link financial inclusion to systemic instability (Mutale & Shumba) or by development models that promise a "just transition" while failing to deliver social justice.
• Environmental and Gendered: Intensified by climate change, which places a disproportionate and unpaid care burden on women (Hoveni) and frames gender-responsive agriculture as a human rights imperative (Muperi & Sisimayi).
By connecting these threads, the volume argues that exclusion is not a passive state of "being left behind"; it is the active result of political, economic, and cultural choices embedded in the prevailing political settlement.
A Snapshot View from the Chapters in This Volume
The conceptual knot tying this volume together is the deep interrogation of the implementation gap. The contributions are clustered here to illustrate three core insights. First, several chapters reveal the deeply gendered mechanisms of exclusion. Peter Gutwa Oino (Chapter 3) provides a foundational analysis of Western Kenya, demonstrating how entrenched patriarchal cultures and norms construct barriers to women’s leadership long before they reach the political arena. This is powerfully echoed by Chipo Munyuki and Louise Vincent (Chapter 7), who analyse the "contrapower harassment" faced by female academics in South Africa. Read together, these chapters expose a dual barrier: one cultural barrier to entry (Oino) and a second institutional barrier to survival for those who do manage to enter (Munyuki & Vincent).
Second, the volume breaks new ground by connecting exclusion to the intersecting crises of climate and care. Jamela Basani Hoveni (Chapter 2) offers a poignant ethnographic study from rural South Africa, revealing how climate impacts intensify the "triple burden" on grandmothers, who must navigate the unpaid, intersecting demands of childcare and eldercare with dwindling resources.
James Tauya Muperi and Tapiwa Patson Sisimayi (Chapter 5) extend this analysis from Zimbabwe, re-framing this gendered burden not merely as a development challenge, but as a failure of human rights. They argue for "synergies of convenience" where gender-responsive climate-smart agriculture is treated as a non- negotiable legal and moral obligation.
Finally, the collection provides a sober, critical assessment of the limits of policy. These chapters serve as cautionary tales, demonstrating that even "inclusive" policies and platforms can reproduce exclusion. This critique of a "best-practice" model resonates with Tinashe Gumbo’s (Chapter 6) analysis of national dialogue initiatives in Zimbabwe, which shows how a supposedly inclusive process can fail to engage key stakeholders, thereby preserving old power hierarchies. This critique of policy failure is further detailed in three powerful case studies. Charles Murata and Winnie Wothaya Murigu (Chapter 1) expose the structural barriers (xenophobia, policy ambiguity) that deny undocumented Zimbabwean children in South Africa their right to education, despite clear legal frameworks. Perhaps most counter intuitively, Japhet Mutale and Darold Shumba (Chapter 4) present a quantitative challenge from Zimbabwe, suggesting that the drive for financial inclusion, a core SDG target, may have a significant negative relationship with banking stability, forcing a hard reconsideration of how development goals interact.
Conclusion: Implications and Future Directions
In different ways, the nine contributions in this volume answer the question: "Why does inclusion fail?" The epistemic knot tying these chapters is the demonstration that inclusion is not a technical problem solvable by a "better policy," but a deeply political, cultural, and economic contest over power, resources, and belonging.
This collection's primary contribution is its multi-sited, empirical grounding of this "implementation gap." The authors have moved beyond diagnosing victimhood to analysing the systems of power that produce marginalisation, as well as the strategies of agency used to resist it.
The implications for future research are clear. First, while several papers document agency and resistance (Munyuki & Vincent; Oino), a deeper inquiry is needed into successful, sustainable models of collective action that have translated "voice" into "influence." This remains the central challenge for the continent. The new Afrobarometer (2025) data confirms that citizens are already participating; the failure is not one of citizen apathy but of institutional responsiveness. The next generation of scholarship, which this volume aims to instigate, must therefore focus on deconstructing the institutional, political, and cultural barriers that sever the link between participation and power, barriers that, in effect, constitute the political settlement (Kelsall et al., 2022) itself.
It must also, as Schöne and Dumani (2025) suggest, learn to identify, protect, and build "horizontal" and "vertical" linkages for these informal "pockets of democracy", such as the care networks in Hoveni’s work (Chapter 2), or the farmer groups in Muperi & Sisimayi’s study (Chapter 5), as these are the critical sites of "democratic renewal from below."
Second, this volume is heavily weighted toward Anglophone Southern and Eastern Africa. Comparative research from Francophone and Lusophone contexts is essential to test whether these mechanisms of exclusion are universal or context-specific.
Finally, the collection poses new causal questions, particularly the provocative link between financial inclusion and instability (Mutale & Shumba), that demand urgent, further quantitative and qualitative testing.
This volume was brought together through a rigorous, double-blind peer-review process, and we are confident that all contributions adhere to the highest ethical standards. Ultimately, the chapters all set an invigorating agenda by providing the critical, ground level evidence required to move from inclusion as rhetoric to inclusion as practiced, resourced, and lived reality.
References
Afrobarometer. (2025). Citizen engagement, citizen power: Africans claim the promise of democracy. Afrobarometer.
Fraser, N. (2009). Scales of justice: Reimagining political space in a globalizing world. Columbia University Press.
Kabeer, N. (1999). Resources, agency, achievements: Reflections on the measurement of women's empowerment. Development and Change, 30(3), 435–464. doi.org/10.1111/1467-7660.00125
Kelsall, T., Schulz, N., Ferguson, W. D., vom Hau, M., Hickey, S., & Levy, B. (2022). Political settlements and development: Theory, evidence, implications. Oxford University Press.
Mamdani, M. (1996). Citizen and subject: Contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism. Princeton University Press.
Schöne, T., & Dumani, N. (2025). Pockets of democracy: Ideas for democracy support in restrained contexts. Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung.
United Nations. (2015). Transforming our world: The 2030 agenda for sustainable development. UN General Assembly. https://sdgs.un.org/2030agenda
