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Beyond Homo Economicus: Reframing Africa’s Economy for Women’s Empowerment
In the heart of Ghana’s capital, the African Feminist Macroeconomics Academy (AFMA) is hosting its 2025 events under the banner: “A Feminist Approach to Tax Justice – Recovering Public Resources for Gender Equality and Economic Justice.” From August 18 to 22, visions and voices will converge to challenge traditional economic ideas and reshape the continent’s future from a more inclusive perspective.
Economics has long been presented as a neutral and objective science, governed by abstract numbers and theories. But what has been the cost of this “neutrality”? The answer, as discussions at the AFMA Academy reveal, is the exclusion and marginalization of half of humanity—women—and the invisibility of essential roles in building our societies. Traditional economic models have ignored unpaid work, known as “social reproduction,” which includes raising children, caring for the elderly, and managing household affairs. This work, primarily done by women, serves as the foundation of the global capitalist system, yet it remains unseen and undervalued. In the African context, this exclusion is even more profound. African nations inherited economic and political systems from the colonial era designed to serve foreign, not local, interests. These systems have helped entrench structures that marginalize women and push them into the informal sector and precarious jobs, leaving their real economic contributions unrecognized. As the concept of intersectionality suggests, experiences of inequality are not limited to gender alone; they intertwine with factors like race, class, and colonial legacy. Understanding the political economy in Africa requires grasping how these multiple systems of oppression work to reinforce each other.
The situation is no different in the realm of tax policies. As the sessions have shown, taxation in Africa has never been merely a means of state finance; it has always been a mirror of power relations. During the colonial era, taxation transformed from a communal system based on contributing to the public good into a coercive tool of exploitation, leading to famous popular uprisings and resistance movements. However, what is concerning is that post-independence tax systems have not fully freed themselves from this legacy. They still rely on regressive taxes like Value Added Tax (VAT), which burden the poorest segments of society, while large corporations and elites benefit from tax exemptions and incentives that reduce the state’s capacity for wealth redistribution. Consequently, the question of tax legitimacy becomes central: how can citizens trust a system where they see no reflection of their tax payments in the form of public services? And how can social justice be achieved when the most vulnerable groups pay the largest proportion of taxes? Understanding the political economy of taxation in Africa today requires looking beyond the numbers. It demands questioning the role of international institutions that impose neoliberal reforms and holding accountable the illicit financial flows that siphon wealth out of the continent.
Rereading economics from a feminist and African perspective is not just an intellectual luxury; it is an urgent necessity. It is a call to “decolonize” the political economy—that is, to rebuild economic and financial systems that are more just and equitable, placing people, especially women and marginalized communities, at the heart of the development process. What if we finally acknowledged the value of women’s unseen labor? What if taxes became a tool for repairing the past instead of repeating its mistakes? These are not merely academic questions; they are the start of a path toward a more inclusive and humane economy for all, which is precisely what the AFMA Academy aims to achieve through its ongoing activities.
