Africa’s Path to Peace Runs Through Reparative Economies

Across Africa, a different approach to peace is taking shape: one that recognizes the central role of economic systems.

This vision is called the reparative economy. It starts from the recognition that economic systems are not neutral. They are shaped by histories of inequality, and addressing these histories is necessary to build shared prosperity.

Too often, peace has been treated as the absence of violence: a ceasefire, a security arrangement. But peace is brittle if it does not address the socio-economic conditions that caused the violence. True peace is sustained through the everyday governance of resources, the rebuilding of trust, and the restoration of power to those from whom it was taken.

These ideas are taking shape in communities across the continent.

In Niger, communities are organizing dialogue platforms to discuss peace and the economy at the same table. As a result of these conversations, communities are pooling resources to support community development projects and extend credit to local entrepreneurs.

In Mozambique, communities are working with leaders and government at every level to negotiate fair compensation for resource extraction projects that have harmed them.

In Mali, organizations help internally displaced women and girls secure land tenure, dismantling barriers that have excluded them from owning land for generations.

In Sudan, women’s groups are building cooperative economic systems alongside cultural healing practices—reconstructing both their economic life and social fabric.

Defining the Reparative Economy

The reparative economy is not a new invention. It is a naming, an acknowledgment that communities across the continent have long cultivated holistic models of living in harmony and cooperation. It also builds on Nwamaka Agbo’s Restorative Economics framework, which invests in the healing and self-determination of marginalized communities in the United States.

Conventional development frameworks focus on expanding economic opportunities but still work within structures that have historically produced exclusion and inequality. In contrast, a reparative economy recognizes these power imbalances. It seeks to redress past injustices and transform the systems that created them.

In practice, reparative economies are guided by three pillars:

1. Participatory Governance: Communities affected by conflict or injustice form collectives to manage resources for shared benefit. This restores agency, strengthens social cohesion, and turns democracy into a daily practice.
2. Reparative Investment: Public and private actors acknowledge their role in historical harm and invest accordingly as redress. This could look like multinational corporations making restitution for environmental destruction, or colonial reparations directed to communities. It means finance designed around community priorities, not the conditions of creditors.
3. Inclusive Economic and Political Empowerment: Communities impacted by extraction and exploitation gain the power to transform systems. This happens through political education and building alternative structures rooted in justice, care, and collective ownership.

The idea of the reparative economy carries genuine tensions.

Can you work with state resources when the state has historically been an engine of harm? Can communities hold the private sector accountable while still forging productive partnerships with it? When international donors fund reparative economies, do they inevitably reproduce the dynamics of dependency?

These are generative questions rather than disqualifying contradictions. We explore these issues in a new joint thought piece by the Open Society Foundations and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Regional Service Centre for Africa, intended to inspire ongoing reflection.

The piece builds on a workshop on reparative economies organized by these groups in December 2025, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. There, conversations between organizers, policymakers, and practitioners crystallized something we had been observing in our work for years: a framework for the reparative economy is taking shape—not through policy papers, but in practice, through the everyday courage of communities themselves. In doing so, communities are no longer just disputing conventional approaches to development. They are creating a new one.