By Chidimma Augustina Edeze
Maria Manjate
Innovation has become the dominant language of development in Africa as Governments, development agencies, universities, and private sector actors are investing in technology hubs, entrepreneurship programmes, digital transformation strategies, and creative industries as pathways to economic growth and youth employment. Increasingly, Africa’s future is being framed through the language of innovation, skills development, and competitiveness. Yet a very important question ask in the midst of this change is:
Whose knowledge is recognised as innovation?
Innovation is commonly associated with technology, modernity, and formal institutions, while indigenous knowledge is often confined to culture, heritage, and tradition. As a result, knowledge systems that have long shaped African societies are frequently overlooked as sources of innovation, despite their continued contribution to learning, creativity, entrepreneurship, and community resilience.
For African scholars such as Paulin Hountondji, this is not merely a question of policy but of epistemology. Hountondji argued that Africa has long been positioned as a producer of cultural experience but not as a producer of knowledge. Indigenous knowledge systems have frequently been documented, archived, and studied, yet rarely recognised as legitimate sources of theory, innovation, and development. More recently, Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni has described this condition as a form of epistemic marginalisation in which African ways of knowing remain subordinate to dominant Western knowledge systems. This debate is particularly relevant to contemporary discussions on Africa’s creative and digital future. If innovation is understood only through technological advancement, start-up ecosystems, and formal education, we risk overlooking the knowledge infrastructures that have enabled African societies to adapt, create, and thrive for generations.
This research is an attempt to bring those two conversations together, and to make the case that heritage entrepreneurship in Mozambique and apprenticeship systems in Nigeria are not relics of the past but living knowledge infrastructures and, Africa’s future may depend on how seriously it is taken. The authors’ study knowledge systems that Africa has always had, systems that generate skills, create entrepreneurs, build community, and transmit values across generations and are asking why these systems so consistently left out of the conversation when Africa talks about innovation and development. Innovation is not only about producing something new. It is also about sustaining, adapting, and mobilising knowledge across generations.
Heritage Beyond Preservation: The Case of Mafalala Museum
In Mozambique, the Mafalala Museum represents a powerful form of community-based knowledge infrastructure and heritage entrepreneurship. Established in 2019 within the historic neighbourhood of Mafalala, Maputo, the museum was created not only to preserve heritage but also to activate community knowledge, strengthen local identity, and generate social and economic opportunities. Unlike conventional museums that focus primarily on collections and exhibitions, the Mafalala Museum treats the neighbourhood itself as a living museum, where memory, cultural practices, historic sites, and local residents become part of the heritage experience.
Mafalala occupies a unique place in Mozambique’s cultural and political history. It is remembered as a site of anti-colonial resistance, cultural creativity, and intellectual production, having been home to several of the Mozambique’s most influential political, literary, and sporting figures, including Samora Machel, José Craveirinha, and Eusébio Da Silva Ferreira. Today, with an estimated population of 25,000 residents, it remains one of the country’s most significant urban cultural landscapes.
The significance of the Mafalala Museum, however, extends beyond the preservation of this history. Through the Mafalala Walking Tour, storytelling practices, exhibitions, educational programmes, community archives, cultural events, artistic residencies, community identity murals, and the Mafalala Festival, the museum has transformed heritage into a resource for community development. As a result, it has created spaces where memory, culture, tourism, creativity, and entrepreneurship intersect, demonstrating how local knowledge and cultural heritage can generate both social value and economic opportunity.
This experience challenges conventional understandings of heritage. As heritage scholar Laurajane Smith argues, heritage is not a thing but a process; it is something people do rather than something they simply inherit. Heritage emerges through acts of remembering, interpreting, negotiating, and transmitting meaning. From this perspective, the core value of the Mafalala Museum lies not only in the stories it preserves but also in the ways local community continue to engage with, reinterpret, and give new meaning to those stories.
Through this lens, heritage functions as an infrastructure of knowledge that enables local community to interpret their histories, strengthen cultural identity, generate economic opportunities, and transmit knowledge across generations. By sustaining ongoing social practices, heritage serves as a resource for both cultural continuity and local development, fostering local businesses and economic initiatives associated with the museum. Heritage entrepreneurship in Mafalala is therefore not simply a tourism activity but a form of knowledge production and circulation. This understanding resonates with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s call to decolonise knowledge by recovering the cultural resources through which African societies make sense of themselves and imagine their futures.
The significance of this model becomes even clearer when viewed against global evidence. According to UNESCO, cultural and creative industries account for approximately 3.1% of global GDP and 6.2% of global employment, while cultural tourism represents around 40% of international tourism activity worldwide. The World Bank similarly argues that cultural heritage, when linked to tourism and local entrepreneurship, can become a catalyst for inclusive urban development, job creation, and poverty reduction.
Mafalala provides a compelling example of these dynamics at a local level. The museum has contributed by transforming heritage into a community asset and creating opportunities for residents and in cultural production and tourism activities. The community members of Mafalala are not merely beneficiaries of the Museum’s activities but active custodians and producers of heritage. Local youth participate as cultural mediators, supporting heritage interpretation and community engagement, while elders contribute oral histories, memories, and knowledge that shape the Museum’s narratives and preserve Mafalala’s living heritage. This approach reflects UNESCO’s vision of community-centred heritage management, in which local people are active custodians rather than passive beneficiaries of heritage.
What the Evidence Shows
The Mafalala Museum emerged from the work of IVERCA, an association of 31 active members and collaborators dedicated to heritage preservation and cultural development. Evidence from Mafalala demonstrates that heritage can function as both social and economic infrastructure. According to Ivan Laranjeira, Director General of the Mafalala Museum, the institution employs 14 staff members. Its sustainability is supported by a diversified funding model, with 33% of revenue coming from grants, 7% from individual donations, and 60% from business activities linked to the museum and the Mafalala community.
Through guided tours, cultural events, exhibitions, the Mafalala Festival, and artist residency programmes, the museum generates income that circulates within the local economy, benefiting guides, artists, cultural workers, and small businesses. This demonstrates how heritage serves not only as a cultural resource but also as a catalyst for local economic development and the creation of community infrastructure.
The museum’s impact is also reflected in strong community participation. Residents contribute to heritage documentation, storytelling initiatives, and other activities that facilitate the transmission of knowledge across generations. These practices align with UNESCO’s 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage, which identifies community participation as a fundamental element of effective heritage safeguarding.
From a governance perspective, the Mafalala Museum represents an important example of social museology in Africa. Rather than operating as a top-down institution, it actively incorporates local voices into the interpretation and management of heritage. This approach reflects the growing recognition within UNESCO and ICOM that museums can contribute to social inclusion, citizenship, and sustainable development.
The museum also serves as a space where Indigenous knowledge and cultural innovation converge. By combining heritage preservation with entrepreneurship and community-led initiatives, it addresses challenges such as cultural erasure, economic marginalization, and identity fragmentation. In this context, the Mafalala Museum stands out as a rare and innovative grassroots model that leverages cultural heritage to create economic opportunities, strengthen community resilience, and support sustainable local development.
As a living site of Indigenous knowledge, the museum functions not only as a space for cultural transmission but also as a platform for innovation, adaptation, and community empowerment.
Heritage and Development in Africa
The broader policy environment increasingly supports such initiatives. The African Union’s Agenda 2063 identifies culture and heritage as strategic resources for development, social cohesion, and economic transformation. UNESCO has likewise highlighted the potential of Africa’s cultural and creative industries as drivers of economic growth, while the World Bank has emphasised the role of heritage in urban regeneration, particularly in historic neighbourhoods facing pressures from rapid urbanisation and social change. These discussions are highly relevant to Mafalala. As Maputo continues to expand, the neighbourhood faces challenges associated with urban transformation, infrastructure deficits, and the risk of cultural displacement. The museum therefore performs a dual role: safeguarding heritage while creating pathways for sustainable local development. Its activities demonstrate that heritage is not simply about preserving the past but about mobilising cultural resources to address contemporary social and economic challenges.
The case of the Mafalala Museum ultimately shows that community-based heritage institutions can generate value across multiple dimensions. Heritage preservation, community participation, education, tourism development, and social inclusion are not separate outcomes but interconnected processes.
Apprenticeship as Knowledge Infrastructure
In Nigeria, a different but equally powerful knowledge system called Igba Boi has been producing entrepreneurs, building communities, and transferring skills for generations. In this system, a young person is placed under the guidance of an experienced master, known as an Oga. They live and work together, the apprentice learning the trade through observation and practice, held accountable not by contracts but by family and community. At the end of the agreed period, the Oga provides start-up capital to help the apprentice launch their own business. The scale of this system is remarkable, as Igba-Boi has been estimated to have incubated over five million entrepreneurs and generates more than four billion dollars in economic activity each year. After the Nigerian Civil War left Igbo communities with almost nothing, this system became the vehicle for collective recovery, built on the principle of leaving no one behind. It is, by evidence, one of the world’s most effective indigenous business incubation systems. However, the system has stayed largely within what the author considers the traditional business sectors such as auto parts, textiles, general merchandise, even as Nigeria’s economy has shifted dramatically.
What the Evidence Shows of the System and Digital Economy
The ICT sector in Nigera’s digital economy contributed approximately 17.83% of GDP in 2020, and the country hosts the highest levels of startup venture funding on the continent. According the Bosun Tijani, the Minister of Communications and Digital Economy of Nigeria, the country now hosts Africa’s largest startup ecosystem, with its ICT sector contributing nearly 18 per cent of GDP. Yet a World Bank estimate suggests 65 per cent of Nigerian professionals lack foundational digital skills, and analysts warn this gap puts an estimated 11 billion dollars in annual tech revenue at risk. Government programmes like the 3 Million Technical Talent (3MTT) initiative have made important strides with over 135,000 Nigerians trained across three cohorts by early 2026. However, what these programmes offer is instruction, not formation. They deliver course completion certificates but not the mentorship relationships, community accountability networks, or progressive real-world business exposure that convert technical knowledge into entrepreneurial capacity. This is precisely where Igba-Boi offers something different.
Conversations with indigenous knowledge holders and current bois and ogas in communities show that Igba Boiis a living system that many young people are still willing to embrace if it is adapted with care. Bois were enthusiastic about the idea of apprenticeship in technology, particularly around software skills, but they were clear that a copy‑and‑paste transplant of the old model into the tech sector will not work. What they have in mind is a shorter, clearly defined pathway, backed by law and basic protections, where disputes are not left solely to informal processes that can be inconsistent or easily influenced. Tech startup founders expressed similar concerns from another angle. When asked to imagine what a tech‑sector version of Igba Boi might look like, they repeatedly returned to the need for structure. In their view, whether the framework is legal, relational, or institutional, it must be explicit enough to protect both sides and to reduce the sense of being “cheated” or “betrayed” that can arise when expectations are not written down. The kind of thick trust that underpins Igba Boi in traditional markets does not automatically carry over into the fast‑moving, high‑risk world of software and startups; it has to be rebuilt deliberately and with clear ground rules. Elders and other indigenous knowledge keepers also stressed that any reform must keep faith with the original intention of the system. For them, the point is not to abandon Igba Boi in favour of something entirely new, but to build a careful, community‑led bridge between an old, proven way of making entrepreneurs and the realities of today’s economy. Some of this is already beginning to happen. In 2025, Anambra State became the first state in Nigeria to place the Igba Boi system on a formal legal footing, signalling that what used to be treated as “informal” practice is increasingly being recognised as a legitimate foundation for economic policy.
The reflections in this piece draw on ongoing qualitative research currently being carried out on the Igba Boi apprenticeship system and its possible adaptation to Nigeria’s startup ecosystem. The project involves conversations with tech founders, current apprentices, established traders and indigenous knowledge holders in southeastern communities in Nigeria and what I share here are preliminary insights for public discussion.
Memory and Making
At first glance, heritage preservation in Mozambique and apprenticeship systems in Nigeria may appear to belong to different worlds. One is about memory and the other is about skills. One mobilises culture and the the other builds commerce but, the logic is exactly the same as both are fundamentally concerned with the transmission of knowledge from one person to another, from one generation to the next, and from the past into the future. Heritage preserves and activates collective memory while apprenticeship cultivates practical knowledge and professional competence. Heritage asks communities to remember and apprenticeship teaches them what to do. Together, they reveal that knowledge is not confined to universities, policy institutions, or technological laboratories but embedded in social relations, cultural practices, and community life. Both generate economic value from what communities already carry and they are both intergenerational by depending on older members to pass knowledge to younger ones through presence, practice, and trust, not formal qualifications. The systems are also innovative as innovation is not limited to simply the production of something new but the capacity to adapt, reinterpret, and mobilise existing knowledge in response to changing circumstances. Mafalala adapts historical memory into economic livelihood and cultural sovereignty. Igba-Boi adapts communal mentorship into a wealth-creation engine that has survived war, displacement, and marginalisation. These are not traditions resisting change but living systems that have always been changing.
Decolonising Development: What This Means for Africa
Recognising heritage and apprenticeship as knowledge infrastructures requires a rethinking of development itself. The sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos argues for moving beyond a ‘monoculture of knowledge’ which is the tendency to privilege certain forms of expertise while rendering others invisible. His idea of an ‘ecology of knowledges’ invites us to recognise that there are multiple valid ways of producing and validating knowledge. For Africa, this means acknowledging that communities already possess systems for generating knowledge, building skills, creating livelihoods, and sustaining cultural life. It means taking seriously the Igbo philosopher Ikechukwu Kanu’s concept of ‘Igwebuike’ ‘there is strength in numbers’ which frames knowledge transfer not as a transaction between a giver and a receiver, but as a complementary relationship in which both parties grow.
This is not an argument against technology, digital transformation, or entrepreneurship. Rather, it is an argument for expanding the intellectual foundations upon which these agendas are built. Africa’s creative future will require digital tools and technological innovation. But it will also require memory, mentorship, cultural knowledge, and community-based learning. Africa is not short of knowledge. What it has often lacked is the institutional willingness, including from its own governments, to recognise the knowledge it already has as legitimate, investable, and worth scaling. For policymakers, the message from both Mafalala and Igba-Boi is the same: stop treating indigenous knowledge systems as cultural remnants waiting to be archived, and start treating them as infrastructures worth investing in. That means funding community heritage initiatives as legitimate economic development programmes. It means designing digital skills training that builds on existing mentorship networks rather than replacing them; and it means bringing knowledge holders such as museum practitioners, Ogas, artisans, elders, into the design of policy, not just as consultants but as co-authors.
There is also a gender dimension that cannot be ignored as the apprenticeship system has historically excluded women from full participation as apprentices and settled entrepreneurs. Any adaptation of the system for the tech sector, or any other sector, that does not deliberately redesign this exclusion will simply reproduce it in a new form. The same attention to inclusion must be applied in heritage spaces, where women’s roles as knowledge holders and cultural workers are often unacknowledged and underpaid. The challenge is not simply to modernise but to also recognise that many of the resources needed for Africa’s future are already within African societies themselves.
Conclusion
As debates on the future of Africa’s creative and digital economies continue to grow, there is an urgent need to rethink what counts as innovation. Heritage entrepreneurship in Mozambique and apprenticeship systems in Nigeria demonstrate that indigenous knowledge systems are not relics of the past but living infrastructures that continue to produce knowledge, create economic opportunities, and strengthen communities. If Africa is to build inclusive and sustainable futures, it must move beyond narrow understandings of innovation and recognise the value of its own knowledge traditions. Decolonising development requires more than adding culture to policy agendas. It requires acknowledging that memory, mentorship, and indigenous knowledge are themselves foundations of innovation.
The authors are two researcher’s comparing notes on Mozambique and Nigeria and what is striking in our findings are not how different our cases are, but how consistent the message is. Africa has always known how to build, how to teach, and how to create value from community, from memory, and from relationship. The question is not whether these systems work, they demonstrably do. The question is whether Africa’s development institutions are ready to recognise them for what they are: not informal alternatives to the real thing, but indigenous infrastructures that are the real thing. The future of Africa’s creative economy may therefore depend not only on what is new, but also on how we recognise, value, and invest in what has always been there. The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) through the African Fellowships for Research in Indigenous and Alternative Knowledges (AFRIAK), whose assistance was invaluable to the successful completion of this research