Sustainability and inclusion from African perspectives

Sustainability entails a change in the exploitation of resources while maintaining essential ecological processes and life support systems, preserving genetic diversity, and ensuring the utilisation of species and ecosystems. Effective realisation of sustainability requires the implementation of inclusive practices, whereby diversity is embraced from the educational, economic, social, cultural, and psychological dimensions of human life and climate change. Commenting on the African perspective, the need to search for alternative solutions to Africa’s development challenges calls for a critical examination of what sustainability and inclusion mean for Africans and how these can impact their lives in the 21st century. Sustainability and inclusion from African perspectives, therefore, raise concerns about the cultural, socioeconomic, political, health, spiritual, environmental, and socially responsible processes, underpinned by Africentric humanistic philosophies of communalism and socialism. The discussions of this paper posit a paradigm shift from Eurocentric scientific and pedagogical principles. In this light, the paper critically situates the significance of Ujamaa and Ubuntu, African philosophies to illustrate that sustainability and inclusion, are exemplified by harmonious relationship between the human being and nature. Nonetheless the changing context of Africa poses some new challenges for sustainability and inclusion within African cultures. Development issues ought to be people-driven, inclusively focusing on African values, guided also by relevant orientations from Africa’s Agenda 2063 of “an integrated, prosperous and peaceful Africa, driven by its citizens and representing a dynamic force in the international arena”.