Published 2026 – As part of the Earth4All project, collaborators have submitted deep-dive papers to delve further into the issues and solutions needed to transform our economic system and provide an equitable future for all on a finite planet.
In Africa’s just transition opportunity: decolonising economic transformation for climate resilience, authors Fadhel Kaboub, Associate Professor of Economics at Denison University and member of the Earth4All Transformational Economics Commission, and Mohamed Adow, Executive Director at Power Shift Africa, provide an analytical framework for understanding the root causes of Africa’s economic challenges and articulate an alternative pathway of strategic opportunities for the continent to unleash its full potential as a renewable energy economic powerhouse.
Africa’s disproportionate climate burden and colonial economic legacy
Africa has contributed the least to global climate change, resource scarcity and biodiversity loss, yet it is the continent facing the brunt of the related economic and ecological impacts. While the formal colonial presence on the continent ended decades ago, the colonial legacy persists to this day, largely in the form of economic roles imposed on Africa. Africa today continues to play the same colonial economic roles that were designed to produce and maintain a particular economic and geopolitical hierarchy in which Africa was to remain locked at the bottom. These colonial roles were not supposed to deliver economic development, prosperity or a just transition; they were designed for colonial extraction of wealth from the African continent.
A Giant Leap forward for Africa
The analysis demonstrates that demonstrated that Africa’s just transition requires a coherent and comprehensive radical approach to climate, energy and development policies that transforms the economic structures of the continent. Africa’s just transition framework must also be accompanied by structural economic transformation to undo its colonial economic roles, which is consistent with the five Earth4All policy turnarounds that are needed for humanity to survive and thrive.
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