Healthy Prosperity for Africa · first draft for discussion · October 2026
Five fields show where the initiative sees gaps and where new action could grow. They are not a programme. They are invitations to institutions and people who already work in these fields. None requires a new organisation: each can flow into existing AU, regional and national instruments.
Testing the hypothesis
Where and how the hypothesis is tested will be decided with African partners and local actors, within processes that are already under way, and with the consent of the authorities concerned. Combinations that could be tested include psychosocial support by trained lay counsellors, accompanied dialogue with symbolic and material repair, and economic agency through apprenticeships or start-up support: in communities, but also in security institutions and in their relations with the population.
Whatever form a test takes, it follows minimum standards: baseline data; indicators and criteria for disproof fixed in advance; a comparison with existing approaches; recording of harm (retraumatisation, new tensions, stigma, dependency); independent evaluation financed separately from implementation; referral pathways for severe cases; informed consent and data protection.
1 · Healing collective trauma, for victims and perpetrators
Gap: The AU’s reparations agenda focuses on slavery and colonialism; transitional justice works country by country; the AU guideline on mental health and psychosocial support in conflict and post-conflict settings has been validated but not yet formally adopted. Intra-African violence, the perpetrator side, the security sector and the economy are hardly included.
Initiative: Bring two extensions into existing AU instruments: include intra-African violence and the perpetrator side, and link healing with the security sector and livelihoods. Healing is never offered alone, but together with water, food, school, health and income. It reaches people through trained lay workers, teachers, religious and traditional authorities and local radio. Healing is not impunity: work with perpetrators combines responsibility, truth and repair with trauma work and reintegration.
2 · Youth: agency heals
Gap: Sub-Saharan Africa’s working-age population will grow by more than 600 million over the next 25 years; only about one in four new workers finds wage employment (World Bank, Africa’s Pulse, October 2025). Young people have voiced precise demands from Nairobi to Antananarivo, Rabat and Lagos: accountability, water and electricity, health and education, police reform.
Initiative: Treat youth protest as civic agency, not as a symptom. Create paid roles for young lay counsellors, modelled on Zimbabwe’s Friendship Bench; give youth councils their own budgets; strengthen West Africa’s traditional apprenticeship with schooling, recognised certificates and protection from exploitation. A good apprenticeship is predictable, reciprocal, recognising and embedded. It is a healing structure in itself.
3 · Corruption and impunity: restoring trust
Gap: Africa loses about USD 88.6 billion a year through illicit financial flows, more than it receives in aid (UNCTAD 2020). Corruption is named in Agenda 2030 and in the AU Convention, but the victims are hardly recognised, returned assets rarely bring visible benefit, and the responsibility of northern financial centres is seldom addressed.
Initiative: Recognise that corruption has victims, through public hearings on grand corruption (Gambia’s Janneh Commission). Return stolen assets as visible repair, channelled into health, youth and healing with civil society monitoring. Train young people as budget and procurement monitors (BudgIT, Nigeria). Reduce petty corruption through digital payments and fair, punctual pay. Act at our own door too: beneficial ownership, due diligence for banks and commodity traders, return of frozen funds, including from Switzerland.
4 · Nature and the next generation
Gap: The large agendas treat climate and nature extensively, but rarely bind resource revenues to the rights of the next generation.
Initiative: Make communities owners and guardians of nature, as Namibia’s communal conservancies do. Secure resource revenues in intergenerational funds: Senegal created one for oil and gas revenues by Law 2022-09 and Decree 2024-153. Mediate between herders and farmers as climate change sharpens conflicts over land and water. Create green apprenticeships for young people.
5 · Security that protects
Gap: Security forces carry, suffer and sometimes inflict traumatic violence. The UN has anchored psychosocial support for peacekeepers (Resolution 2668, 2022); for national armies, police and AU missions it is largely missing. A 2024 DCAF study (primary author Peter Aeberhard) identified trauma as a missing element of security sector reform.
Initiative: Introduce trauma-informed training at police and military academies; investigate violence against protesters independently and offer healing to victims and families; strengthen civilian oversight and complaint bodies; reintegrate former fighters through vocational training. Every order is measured by its legitimacy towards its own population.
Cross-cutting
Responsibility for the next generation · women and young people as shapers · religion and tradition as partners · ecological check (does a measure serve life as a whole?) · Do No Harm · Nothing about us without us: survivors, displaced people, relatives and former fighters take part in design, steering and evaluation.
Overview · Stress test · RSF · Method · Français