Carleton researcher Samuel Ojo Oloruntoba is leading an international effort to re-centre Indigenous knowledge systems in entrepreneurship and development initiatives across Africa.
Across Africa, Indigenous knowledge systems carry generations of lived experience, ecological understanding and collective wisdom.
But when it comes to development, those ways of knowing have been sidelined and marginalized in favour of imported models that place decision-making power outside the communities they are meant to serve.
A major Carleton-led international research initiative is working to change that.
From 2023 to 2026, researchers, local partners and students across Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda have been working together through a community-based project led by Dr. Samuel Ojo Oloruntoba, assistant professor in Carleton University’s Institute of African Studies and founder of the Africa Indigenous Knowledge Research Network (AIKRN).
Supported by the Mastercard Foundation, the “Unlocking Sustainable Solutions for Youth Employment and Entrepreneurship through Indigenous Knowledge in Africa” project brings together eight research working groups examining how Indigenous knowledge systems shape youth livelihoods and entrepreneurship in areas such as agriculture, health, ecotourism, cultural entrepreneurship, climate adaptation and environmental sustainability.
At the centre of this work is the simple but powerful methodological premise that communities are not simply participants in research, but knowledge holders in their own right. For Oloruntoba, that conviction is shaped as much by his training as a critical political economist as it is by his lived experience witnessing the repeated failures of many postcolonial development programs to address basic challenges around poverty, health and employment in Africa.
“Because I was personally affected by these challenges, I felt the need to look back and ask the question: What types of knowledge existed in Africa before colonialism and how can these forms of knowledge be studied, recorded, disseminated and recentred in ways that they can be applied to solve the challenges facing the people?”
“Historically, we know that Africans have lived and achieved great things, such as building empires and kingdoms, using their own knowledge systems before the colonial intrusion.”
That vision is the heartbeat of AIKRN’s work: re-centering African Indigenous knowledge not as an artifact of history, but as a living framework for innovation, resilience and sustainable economic development.
Promoting Knowledge Sovereignty in Africa
The project responds to a gap in what Oloruntoba calls “epistemic freedom and knowledge sovereignty.” In applied terms, that means foregrounding the knowledge, practices and lived expertise of communities whose perspectives have too often been excluded from development policy, university curricula and formal research systems. It also means having community members and holders of knowledge as co-creators of policies and programs that have direct effects on their lives.