EVALINDIGENOUS AFRICA: COMMUNITY KNOWLEDGE, PARTICIPATION, AND PRACTICE

Seeding Projects, 2025

Across Africa, Indigenous evaluation is not emerging as something new—it is being recognised, named, and strengthened through work that begins with communities themselves. Four 2025 AGDEN-led EvalIndigenous Seeding grant projects from Nigeria, Lesotho, and Liberia offer a powerful, collective insight: evaluation already exists within Indigenous systems of knowledge, practice, and relationship.

What connects these projects most strongly is their shared commitment to participatory, community-led methodologies. Through focus group discussions, storytelling, observation, and dialogue, each project centres local voices—engaging elders, women, youth, and community leaders not as subjects, but as knowledge holders. ​

In Liberia, for example, Misann Miapeh’s H-Live Project worked with communities across three counties using focus groups to identify Indigenous indicators of economic growth, social wellbeing, and environmental change. This approach reflects a broader shift: evaluation as something generated from within, rather than imposed from outside.

Across the projects, evaluation is revealed as embedded in everyday life. In Nigeria, Angela Inyang and Rinji Kwarkas’ project on the Ikom Monoliths shows how knowledge of governance, memory, and accountability is held in cultural artefacts—stone carvings that encode community values across generations. Similarly, Dr Dagwom Dang’s research with the Berom people demonstrates how Indigenous business systems operate through reciprocity, trust, and collective responsibility. Here, economic activity is not separate from evaluation; it is where fairness, contribution, and wellbeing are continuously assessed.

In Lesotho, Nurain Ahmed’s project showed how Indigenous cultural practices—including initiation rites, storytelling, and communal life—function as systems of reflection and social regulation. These are spaces where communities teach, reinforce, and evaluate behaviour, ensuring continuity and cohesion across generations.

Germinating Projects, 202

The Germinating projects offer a rich and critical engagement with Indigenous knowledge systems as living, contested, and adaptive foundations for evaluation. Across the Germinating projects, Indigenous practices—whether expressed through taboos, proverbs, governance systems, or cultural understandings of identity—are treated as dynamic frameworks that shape social order, ethical conduct, and decision-making within communities.

Findings highlight both the strength and complexity of these systems. For example, Solomon Waiyego’s project on taboos with the Agikuyu community in Kenya demonstrates how cultural norms continue to regulate environmental stewardship, leadership legitimacy, and social responsibility, while also revealing tensions where some practices reinforce gender inequities and exclusion. Similarly, Dr Almas Mazigo, Miss Miriam Mkombozi and Mr Patrick Mpedzisi’s study of Shona and Swahili Proverbs, and Francis Dago, Roger Apahou and Christelle Tetialy’s project on endogenous governance systems in Kagbès in Côte d’Ivoire demonstrate how knowledge is transmitted intergenerationally, embedding values of reciprocity, accountability, and collective wellbeing into everyday life. At the same time, the projects identify a generational shift, with younger community members engaging these systems selectively, prompting processes of reinterpretation and renewal.

Mr Rutagewelera Mutakyahwa, Dr Almas Fortunatus Mazigo, Ms Forunata Mulekuzi’s Germinating project explored Bahaya wedding ceremonies in northwestern Tanzania as living sites of Indigenous evaluation practice, illustrating how cultural ceremonies themselves operate as evaluative spaces. In a similar vein, Arnoux Nopi’s project in Cameroun examines biological and cultural femininity within the Ngiembo’on community in Cameroon as a foundation for strengthening Indigenous evaluation practices. These projects highlight how evaluation operates not only at the level of actions and decisions, but also through the ongoing negotiation of identity, roles, and belonging. 

Taken together, findings from the Germinating and Seeding projects confirm that Indigenous evaluation requires deep engagement with Indigenous knowledge as a source of evaluative criteria, ethical guidance, and governance. They offer more than case studies—they point toward a future where evaluation is accountable to communities, informed by their knowledge, and aligned with their aspirations, reflecting the strength of AGDEN’s mentoring and the commitment and the excellence of the researchers who have brought this work to life.

EvalIndigenous thanks you all

An excerpt from our 2026 January - March quarterly newsletter.