How Gen Z is Redefining Governance in Africa
Jide Okeke explores how by blending digital-age accountability with institutional design, youth-led movements could transform how African societies govern themselves in the twenty-first century.
In 2019, alongside Zoe Marks and Erica Chenoweth at the Harvard Kennedy School, I asserted that people power — defined by protest movements — was on the rise in Africa. At the time, popular uprisings saw protracted regimes dislodged in Algeria and Sudan. While this perspective remains accurate today, a shift has occurred. Increasingly, the expression of collective power is shaped by Gen Z — those born between 1997 and 2012.
Representing at least 30% of Africa's population, Gen Z makes up the continent's largest demographic group. Frustrated by political elites’ failure to deliver security, development and jobs for growing populations, they are scrutinising, challenging and changing governance norms. Their approaches are creative and often unconventional.
The foundations of state legitimacy are based on a social contract between the government and citizens. However, countries like Senegal, Madagascar, Kenya, Tanzania and Nigeria, among others, are beginning to experience, in varying ways, the challenge of the state by the Gen Z. This generation is actively influencing political and economic decision-making. They blend tech-driven mobilisation with cross border solidarity. In the process, the social contract is reframed in ways that challenge entrenched power. The result is less a single political upheaval than a broader, systemic reconfiguration of who participates, how decisions are made and how commitments are monitored and enforced. The outcomes may be informal, context specific and eclectic in nature, but the net effect is a dynamic governance shift. It reflects a shift from top-down authority toward more open, contestable governance that is continuously shaped by youth-led feedback, digital transparency and cross-border cooperation.
Four distinct attributes are evident in how Gen Z is influencing and shaping governance. The first is the rise of a new wave of legitimacy. Rather than episodic protests, Gen Z is advancing a form of participatory governance shaped by key factors. Youth movements harness low-cost, high-reach digital tools to create real-time checks on state power. Beyond catchy slogans, hashtag campaigns function as live, distributed dashboards that track demands, pledges and evidence. Another attribute is the rapid cross-border diffusion of symbols and tactics — such as mirrored hashtags within 48 hours — turns local protests into a pan-African conversation about legitimacy. In some instances, live-streamed confrontations with security personnel generate a novel governance mechanism. These streams impose reputational costs for repression, incentivise considered responses and create a public ledger of rights violations that can attract international attention and domestic reform pressures.
Second, Gen Z’s organizational logic eschews centralised leadership in favour of distributed networks. Telegram and Signal groups, youth coalitions and student networks form a latticework that coordinates actions without control by a single entity. This structure strengthens resilience against surveillance. It also disperses risk and enables the rapid planning, sharing and scaling of protest logistics, information and policy advocacy. In the process, agenda-setting becomes more democratic as local grievances can rise quickly to regional and pan-African levels, embedding bottom-up governance inputs into national policy debates.
Third, Gen Z’s approach also extends to shared governance through real-time policy experimentation. When youth movements mobilise in the streets and online, these double up as incubation spaces for innovative policy ideas. The proposals that emerge show a shift from resistance to constructive governance design. Recent examples include strengthened independent electoral commissions with biometric rolls and electronic transmission, inflation-response measures paired with SME and youth support funds (as debated in Kenya), and expanded asset-declaration requirements linked to anti-corruption reform. In testing these concepts through public scrutiny, online campaigns and coordinated advocacy, Gen Z sometimes create channels to feed their ideas directly into governmental processes and public debate.
Fourth, Gen Z activism is also constructing a form of emerging continental governance, where national reforms are evaluated against shared regional norms and reinforced through cross-border solidarity. The rapid translation of country-specific concerns into continent-wide demands creates incentives for harmonized standards on aspects including electoral integrity, digital rights and youth representation. In turn, bodies like the African Union and regional economic communities are pressed to operationalize new governance tools. This regionalization of governance-sharing does not dilute national sovereignty but enhances the bargaining power of youth voices by situating their demands within a wider continental legitimacy framework.
Overall, Gen Z is co-creating a policy laboratory in which reforms can be prototyped, observed and iterated in real time. This pattern of Gen-Z-inspired governance, if institutionalised, could embed more durable structures for policy design and implementation — structures capable of outlasting electoral cycles and leadership changes.
Prospects for stability across the continent are now contingent upon a deliberate and urgent choice by governments and policy makers to listen, engage and deliver for the continent’s dominant demographic: young people. Gen Z patterns of mobilisation are not devoid of risks and tensions. The path forward requires balancing escalation with inclusive dialogue, safeguarding digital security and privacy as networks extend beyond borders, and ensuring that governance-sharing mechanisms remain resilient to elite capture and political manipulation — especially within the prevailing geopolitical context.
Ultimately, Gen Z’s African renaissance embodies a redefinition of sovereignty, legitimacy and the state–citizen partnership. Blending digital-age accountability with institutional design, youth-led movements could transform how African societies govern themselves in the twenty-first century.
The path forward now demands deliberate, rights-based actions from national governments, regional bodies and international partners to translate this mobilized legitimacy into durable, outcome-oriented governance arrangements. If Africa can convert the current wave of protest energy into shared institutions, the continent may chart a future in which governance is truly participatory, transparent and delivers for its citizens.
Dr Jide Okeke is the Director of the Regional Programme for Africa, at the United Nations Development Programme Regional Service Centre for Africa in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia where he leads strategic initiatives supporting the continent’s priorities to advance Agenda 2063 and the Sustainable Development Goals. He holds a PhD in Development Politics from Leeds University, UK; Mid-Career MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard University, USA.
Photo by Tope J. Asokere
