INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RESEARCH AND INNOVATION IN SOCIAL SCIENCE (IJRISS)
ISSN No. 2454-6186 | DOI: 10.47772/IJRISS | Volume IX Issue XI November 2025
Page 219
www.rsisinternational.org
The African Child as a Technological Citizen
(CADP Civic Education Conceptual Papers: No. 3)
Technics Ikechi Nwosu
Founder, The African Science Fiction Project Convener, Child-Author Development Programme
(CADP)
DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.47772/IJRISS.2025.91100017
Received: 07 November 2025; Accepted: 14 November 2025; Published: 27 November 2025
ABSTRACT
This paper examines the philosophical, political, and pedagogical foundations for conceptualizing the African
child as a technological citizen. It proposes that the African child is not merely a beneficiary of technological
advancement but a potential architect of Africa’s technological future. Drawing from African Technological
Nationalism, Science and Technology Studies (STS), and postcolonial pedagogy, the paper advances a theory
of childhood that imbricates innovation, speculative imagination, and civic scientific agency. The CHILD-
AUTHOR DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMME (CADP) is presented as a pioneering institutional response to
this reconceptualization. The paper situates the African child’s technological citizenship within broader
debates in the philosophy of technology, global epistemic justice, and educational reform. It interrogates the
colonial residue in African science and technology education, while proposing new institutional pathways for
embedding speculative authorship and invention literacy into early childhood development. The work also
critically engages with the political economy of African development, showing how child-centered
technological citizenship can serve as a counter-hegemonic force against technological dependence. In doing
so, it deepens the theoretical underpinnings of African Technological Nationalism while proposing practical
mechanisms for its institutionalization through pedagogy, literary creation, and public policy.
Keywords: African Child, Technological Citizenship, Postcolonial Pedagogy, Science and Technology
Studies (STS), Child-Author Development Programme (CADP), Speculative Imagination, Civic Scientific
Agency, Invention Literacy, Postcolonial Science, Epistemic Justice, Technicity, Narrative as Technology,
Pan-African Futures, Digital Ecosystems / Algorithmic Colonization, Indigenous Epistemologies, Pedagogy of
Invention, Youth Technological Agency, Civic Technological Ethics.
INTRODUCTION
From Subject to Citizen
The African child has long been positioned within systems of education, development, and aid as a passive
subject to be acted upon (Mazrui, 1997). This paper challenges that narrative by introducing the concept of the
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RESEARCH AND INNOVATION IN SOCIAL SCIENCE (IJRISS)
ISSN No. 2454-6186 | DOI: 10.47772/IJRISS | Volume IX Issue XI November 2025
Page 220
www.rsisinternational.org
African child as a technological citizen – a being capable of understanding, shaping, and even transforming
technological landscapes. In a postcolonial context where science and technology are often imported, the
question arises: can the African child be more than a user of foreign technologies? Can they become inventors,
designers, and visionaries of African futures? In this paper, we advance a theory of childhood that imbricates
innovation, speculative imagination, and civic scientific agency.[
i
]
Technological literacy refers to the capacity to engage critically and creatively with the technoscientific
systems that govern their lives and the destiny of their communities (Brey, 2005). It also includes the civic
right to imagine and narrate technological futures – what Jasanoff (2003) calls a “technology of humility,” in
which citizens participate ethically in shaping science. Hence, technological citizenship goes beyond digital
literacy or vocational skill; it is an ethical, participatory stance toward technology.
This reimagination is central to the mission of the CHILD-AUTHOR DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMME
(CADP), which offers African children the tools and intellectual identity to function as early agents of
technological nationalism through science fiction authorship. The question then arises: why does the subject-
to-citizen transformation matter? The framing of the African child as a subject has been the historical result of
colonial epistemologies that rendered children in Africa as tabulae rasae – entities to be written upon by
Western forms of knowledge. The shift towards citizenship in the technological domain represents a rhetorical
inversion and a fundamental philosophical realignment. Citizenship implies agency, rights, and
responsibilities. It suggests that children are already engaged actors in the socio-technical fabric, rather than
deferred participants awaiting adulthood to claim a stake.
Moreover, technological citizenship disrupts the binary of child versus adult, positioning the African child as a
valid contributor to civic scientific discourse. Within this framework, writing, storytelling, and speculative
imagination become civic acts and not ancillary exercises. They constitute early rehearsals of policy thinking,
innovation design, and technological problem-solving. In other words, the African child, through authorship
and imagination, already engages in anticipatory regimes governance[
ii
] – the envisioning of futures and the
ethical interrogation of possible technological trajectories. This is notion of early participation in thinking
about how future technologies should be governed.
Finally, by affirming the African child’s capacity to theorize, critique, and invent, this paper calls for
dismantling adult-centric paradigms of science and technology in Africa – an act that is both counter-
hegemonic and foundational to epistemic justice.
The CADP then is an intensely futuristic educational programme, an insurgent intellectual project. Thus, it
insists that the future of African technology must begin in the narrative spaces authored by its youngest
citizens.
Philosophical Foundations: Childhood, Citizenship, and Technicity
Technicity as Identity
Drawing from Bernard Stiegler (1998) and Gilbert Simondon (1958), we argue that technicity – the human
condition of being technological – is not external to us but part of what makes us human. The child, in this
frame, is born into a world already shaped by technical systems and possesses the innate capacity to extend
their mind into technical inventions.
Yet to deepen this claim, we must recognize that technicity is not only an anthropological constant but also a
political field. When African children encounter technology, they are adapting to neutral instruments and also
entering terrains of power, dependence, and possibility. Recognizing technicity as identity[
iii
] therefore
demands teaching practices that treat them as creators and thinkers and not mere consumers of imported
technological artefacts. Such a shift demands nurturing African children as epistemic producers whose
subjectivity is interwoven with invention, design, and imaginative speculation.
African Epistemologies of Childhood
In many indigenous African societies, children are not seen as blank slates but as reincarnations and carriers of
ancestral wisdom (Nsamenang, 1992). This perspective subverts Western developmentalist paradigms (Piaget,
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RESEARCH AND INNOVATION IN SOCIAL SCIENCE (IJRISS)
ISSN No. 2454-6186 | DOI: 10.47772/IJRISS | Volume IX Issue XI November 2025
Page 221
www.rsisinternational.org
1950) and shows that African children are already knowledgeable, though in distinct cultural registers – an
insight that strengthens epistemic justice by validating indigenous ways of knowing. The child-thinker, in
African cosmogony, is thus a legitimate contributor to societal evolution.
This epistemological orientation has profound consequences for the notion of technological citizenship. If
children are acknowledged as inheritors of wisdom, then their technological imagination must be understood
as part of a continuum – an intergenerational transfer of creativity, not a spontaneous break. The African
child’s speculative thought may thus be situated within an ancestral epistemology that validates invention as an
extension of cultural survival. By recognizing this continuity, technological citizenship becomes more than
participation in modernity. It becomes a reclamation of African modes of knowledge production.
The Right to Invention
Building on postcolonial science discourse (Harding, 1998), we assert that invention is a democratic right and
a civic duty. This notion is critical for correcting global imbalances in who gets to create and validate
knowledge. In societies shaped by colonial technological dependence, asserting this right must begin with
children. Technological citizenship therefore demands an early pedagogy of invention. Early exposure to
creating scientific imagination as embedded in the CADP pedagogy and curriculum then affords the African
child the intellectual and mind power to develop the invention habit when they come of age as adults, and as
such the invention habit becomes a social and cultural pastime, and as is wont with human inclinations, the
invention habit then becomes difficult to break. Technicity is thus produced, which itself becomes a powerful
and unfailing source of the people’s pride and an indelible identity marker.
It then becomes necessary to recognize invention not only as an act of producing artefacts but as a practice of
self-definition. The African child who invents in speculative fiction is also inventing themselves as a
technological citizen, asserting identity, dignity, and agency through creative design – a lived expression of
technicity as identity. Their inventions become autobiographical extensions of their subjectivity, civic
declarations of their presence in a world that otherwise renders them peripheral. Thus, the right to invention is
simultaneously the right to identity, dignity, and sovereignty.
Postcolonial Science: Repositioning the African Child in the Global Technological Order
The global scientific regime often marginalizes Africa and renders African children invisible as contributors to
scientific imagination (Wa Thiong’o, 1986; Leach & Fairhead, 2002). STEM education in Africa, often
modeled on exogenous paradigms, does not prioritize local narratives, problems, or potentialities. In this
context, African Science Fiction becomes a powerful tool of resistance and repositioning (Okorafor, 2019). It
allows African children to reframe their identities from receivers of Western technological futures to
originators of an African technological-identity future. The CADP leverages this power by training children to
write speculative fiction that projects African inventors, scientists, and technocrats into alternate
technopolitical timelines.
We must highlight how global hierarchies of knowledge production systematically erase African voices,
producing what Fricker (2007) calls ‘epistemic injustice,’[
iv
] – the exclusion of certain groups from credibility
and participation in knowledge creation. Achieving epistemic justice therefore requires institutional
frameworks that value children’s speculative narratives as legitimate knowledge production within Africa’s
technoscientific future. International indices of innovation, patent production, and scientific publication
consistently present Africa as lacking. Yet these measures are predicated on epistemic infrastructures that
valorize Euro-American methods of knowledge validation.[
v
] When African children write science fiction,
they are not simply indulging in creative play. They are performing epistemic disobedience (Mignolo 2009).
They are rejecting the very parameters that mark them as deficient and instead offering alternative ways of
knowing, imagining, and designing futures – a deliberate challenge to the hierarchies that define whose
knowledge counts. Through speculative authorship, they produce new frameworks for thinking technology in
African terms.
Furthermore, the African child’s repositioning in global technoscience is inseparable from questions of
linguistic justice. Wa Thiong’o (1986) has shown that colonial languages function as epistemic filters, shaping
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RESEARCH AND INNOVATION IN SOCIAL SCIENCE (IJRISS)
ISSN No. 2454-6186 | DOI: 10.47772/IJRISS | Volume IX Issue XI November 2025
Page 222
www.rsisinternational.org
what is thinkable by the colonized. That is, colonial languages function as linguistic and epistemic barriers that
filter what Africans can imagine and express. Through authoring speculative narratives in indigenous
languages or Africanized English, African children can reclaim linguistic sovereignty, recover epistemic
justice, and expand the cognitive horizon of African futures, therein expanding Africa’s technological
imagination. Thus, postcolonial science is not only about the content of technological imagination but also
about the language through which that imagination is articulated.
Finally, situating African children within the global order requires us to confront the politics of futurity. Global
debates on artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and climate engineering seldom include African perspectives.
CADP-trained children enter these debates through anticipatory governance. Their stories speculate on
technologies before they exist and thereby insert Africa’s voice into the world’s technological future. This act
of speculative authorship[
vi
] becomes a counter-hegemonic[
vii
] intervention – a declaration that Africa will no
longer be a passive recipient of global technoscientific futures but a co-designer of planetary destinies.
The Pedagogy of the Technological Child: The CADP Model
The CHILD-AUTHOR DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMME (CADP) is an educational and civic experiment
that develops child-authors of African Science Fiction. Their writing is not mere entertainment; it is a form of
speculative authorship, a pedagogy wherein children claim intellectual space in Africa’s technological story
and practice citizenship through imagination. The core strategies include:
• Recasting African Inventors as Scientistic Personae: Children learn to research African scientists,
inventors, and engineers and reimagine them as science-fictional heroes.
• Creating Intellectual Identities: Titles such as Child-Professor of STS provide identity platforms that
confer scholarly authority to children (Nwosu, 2025).
• Rewarding Storytelling as Technological Authorship: With structured cash awards and publishing
incentives, CADP, through public donations and sponsorships, rewards the ability to narrate technology
stories of Africa as a civic contribution.
CADP's pedagogy does not only aim at STEM proficiency. It cultivates speculative agency – the capacity to
imagine and evaluate technological possibilities before they exist. In doing so, it creates the intrinsic
motivation for children to pursue STEM proficiency as a tool for realizing their imaginative visions. The child
is trained to imagine technological solutions, national futures, and ethical dilemmas, thus operating as a
miniature science policy actor (Jasanoff, 2003).
It is necessary to understand CADP as both curriculum and counter-curriculum. As curriculum, it teaches
research and creative technological thinking. It systematically equips children with tools for researching,
conceptualizing, and narrating science and technology. As counter-curriculum, it is counter-hegemonic. It
challenges Western STEM pedagogies that prioritize rote memorization over creative speculation. The duality
of CADP’s pedagogical method lies in its ability to validate storytelling as a scientific act – a radical inversion
in a world where science and literature are often separated.
Moreover, CADP’s pedagogy represents an experiment in identity construction. The designation of "Child-
Professor of STS" is not a mere honorary title; it is a performative act that inscribes children into scholarly
networks typically reserved for adults, advancing epistemic justice by legitimizing their voices as knowledge
producers. In granting such titles, CADP destabilizes adultist hierarchies of knowledge and authorizes children
as legitimate producers of theory. This recognition is essential if technological citizenship is to move from
abstraction to lived practice.
Finally, the incentive structure of CADP (cash awards, publishing opportunities, and public recognition of
donors) function as motivational tools and a symbolic economy that values imagination as civic labour. It
democratizes innovation by turning technological imagination into a shared social responsibility – a step
toward restoring Africa’s technological sovereignty through collective participation. The incentive structure of
CADP signals to children, parents, and communities that technological imagination is a civic duty and not an
indulgence. In this sense, CADP is crafting a new political economy of childhood in Africa – one that values
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RESEARCH AND INNOVATION IN SOCIAL SCIENCE (IJRISS)
ISSN No. 2454-6186 | DOI: 10.47772/IJRISS | Volume IX Issue XI November 2025
Page 223
www.rsisinternational.org
and validates the child’s creativity in technological imagination as an important resource for national
development.
CADP Pilot Initiatives: Demonstrating the Pedagogy in Practice
The operational principles of the CHILD-AUTHOR DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMME (CADP) have been
progressively validated through small-scale pilot initiatives designed to test its pedagogical and civic
propositions. These pilot activities demonstrate how speculative authorship can cultivate invention literacy,
civic ethics, and technological imagination among African children. These include:
The Darling FM Radio Partnership
Through the sponsorship of Senator Dr. Eze Ajoku, OFR, Darling 107.3 FM in Owerri hosts a weekly
broadcast titled “CHILD-AUTHOR DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMME – A Social Movement on African
Technological Nationalism.” This platform provides children with opportunities to narrate their science-fiction
stories to a public audience, transforming literary creativity into civic participation. The radio sessions also
function as early civic laboratories where children articulate ethical, environmental, and national questions
surrounding technology.
The NoiseMaster Story Prototype
Among the most illustrative case studies is the NoiseMaster story – a speculative narrative that imagines a
device capable of silencing sound while amplifying thought. The story-frame produced for child participants to
weave into full stories, engages issues of surveillance, privacy, and freedom of expression. It demonstrates
how CADP’s narrative pedagogy enables children to participate in anticipatory governance by imagining
ethical boundaries for future technologies.
The Child-Professor of Science and Technology Studies (STS)
This designation institutionalizes scholarly identity for outstanding child-authors. Supervised by an Academic
Moderator from a university, the Child-Professor of STS certification links creative authorship with academic
inquiry, four levels deeper than the Child-Author Proficiency Certificate. Each award is endowed with
₦100,000, publicly funded through donor sponsorships. The model redefines early academic recognition as a
civic instrument for technological citizenship.
The Public Sponsorship Model
CADP’s civic economy is sustained through public participation. Each accepted story attracts a
₦20,000/₦30,000 reward slot funded by individual or corporate donors, fostering a sense of collective
ownership of Africa’s intellectual future. This decentralized funding system transforms creative writing into a
shared national enterprise where citizens directly invest in the technological imagination of children.
Collectively, these initiatives operationalize CADP’s theory of change, which is transforming narrative
imagination into structured civic and economic practice. They illustrate that the African child is not a passive
learner but an active inventor, theorist, and citizen in the making.
These pilot initiatives confirm the theoretical architecture proposed in this paper, namely technological
citizenship can be cultivated through narrative, mentorship, and civic recognition. The transition from
imagination to invention literacy within CADP illustrates how philosophy translates into pedagogy and policy.
By situating children as legitimate producers of speculative knowledge, the programme enacts a postcolonial
reclamation of technicity as both identity and practice. The Child-Professor of STS initiative, the NoiseMaster
prototype, and the public sponsorship model collectively demonstrate that African Technological Nationalism
need not await adulthood or elite institutions; it can be incubated in children’s authorship spaces. In doing so,
CADP bridges theory and application, transforming technological nationalism from an abstract ideal into a
participatory, child-driven civic movement.
The lived outcomes of these pilot initiatives reveal that technological imagination, when institutionally
nurtured, matures into civic nationalism. It is within this transformative movement, from authored story to
social ideology, that the child becomes both the conscience and catalyst of African Technological Nationalism.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RESEARCH AND INNOVATION IN SOCIAL SCIENCE (IJRISS)
ISSN No. 2454-6186 | DOI: 10.47772/IJRISS | Volume IX Issue XI November 2025
Page 224
www.rsisinternational.org
Figure 1: Conceptual model of “The African Child as a Technological Citizen” illustrating how childhood and
indigenous epistemologies enable speculative imagination, which CADP mediates into invention literacy and
technological agency, producing technological citizenship that drives African Technological Nationalism and
pan-African creative economies.
This is a flow diagram showing Childhood leading to Speculative Imagination, then to Invention Literacy,
Technological Agency, and Technological Citizenship, which support African Technological Nationalism and
Pan-African industries. CADP and Digital Ecosystems act as contextual influences.
This conceptual model visualizes the developmental continuum by which the CHILD-AUTHOR
DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMME (CADP) mediates the transformation of African childhood into
technological citizenship. Beginning from the cultural and ancestral lineages of African childhood, speculative
imagination emerges as the generative source of invention literacy and technological skills. Through structured
pedagogy (viz. authorship, mentorship, and recognition) CADP converts imagination into civic technological
agency. This agency matures into technological citizenship, defined by rights, responsibilities, and ethical
engagement with science and technology. From this foundation arises African Technological Nationalism,
representing both the civic consciousness and the institutional goal of reclaiming technological sovereignty.
The model also situates CADP within digital ecosystems and Pan-African creative economies, indicating
feedback loops between imagination, production, and policy. Together, these relationships affirm that Africa’s
technological future is authored, imagined, and enacted by its youngest citizens.
African Technological Nationalism and the Child
African Technological Nationalism denotes a cultural and political commitment to build and localize
technological capacity as an expression of national sovereignty (Akinwale 2010). If the nation is a techno-
political project, then the child must be its earliest contributor, embodying technological citizenship in practice
rather than waiting for adulthood. The lived experiments of CADP already suggest that the dreams of
technological independence are first rehearsed in story form before they materialize in policy or production.
The African child-author thus becomes a symbolic frontier where the dreams of technological independence
are rehearsed and refined. The stories these children write are not mere fiction – they are imaginative
blueprints for national development, cultural pride, and scientific autonomy. In this view, child-authorship is
not extracurricular; it is proto-citizenship. It prepares the child to participate in creating future technological
economies and to lead and reimagine them.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RESEARCH AND INNOVATION IN SOCIAL SCIENCE (IJRISS)
ISSN No. 2454-6186 | DOI: 10.47772/IJRISS | Volume IX Issue XI November 2025
Page 225
www.rsisinternational.org
African Technological Nationalism cannot remain the exclusive preserve of policymakers and engineers alone;
it must be democratized through socialization and social construction. African Technological Nationalism must
move beyond elites and become a democratic culture nurtured through education and community life. When
African children participate in this technological nationalism, it evolves into a counter-hegemonic movement
that resists dependence on imported science and embeds technological innovation in everyday civic identity.
Through training children to participate in this nationalism, CADP ensures that the future technological
sovereignty of Africa is not contingent on a narrow elite (that may be oligarchic or subservient to comprador
forces of technological imperialism) but is cultivated as a mass civic identity, a social movement of the masses.
In this sense, technological nationalism becomes a cultural project, inseparable from literature, language, and
everyday life.
The child as a technological nationalist is both a dreamer and a strategist. Through fiction, they test the
boundaries of what is possible, rehearsing scenarios of energy independence, biomedical innovation, and
digital sovereignty. These stories become laboratories of thought where national policy options are simulated
long before they reach parliaments. Thus, the African child is not only educated into technological nationalism
– they are authoring it, scripting its trajectories in imaginative registers that prefigure material reality.
African Technological Nationalism, when viewed through the lens of child authorship, takes on an ethical
dimension grounded in epistemic justice, ensuring that African children’s imaginations and inventions are
recognized as credible contributions to scientific knowledge and public ethics. It resists the reduction of
technology to instrumental utility and insists that African technological futures must embody values of justice,
sustainability, and communal well-being. Children, with their acute sensitivity to fairness and collective
flourishing, are uniquely positioned to articulate such ethical orientations.
Historical Lineages of African Childhood and Technology
The positioning of the African child as a technological citizen cannot be understood without reference to
historical lineages of childhood and technology on the continent. In pre-colonial African societies, children
were active participants in technological life. Apprenticeships, initiation schools, and household crafts trained
them early in metallurgy, herbal science, and agricultural innovation (David 1998). These systems embedded
invention within ethics and communal responsibility – a model of technological citizenship long before the
term existed. The apprenticeship model was not only vocational training but also a pedagogical system that
linked technological knowledge to ethical responsibility and communal well-being.
Colonial education disrupted this continuum. By privileging literacy in European languages and sidelining
indigenous epistemologies, colonial schooling constructed the African child as a blank slate upon which
Western knowledge was to be written (Fanon, 1967). By privileging European languages and dismissing
indigenous epistemologies, colonial education produced an epistemic infrastructure (Harding 1998) that placed
high value on Western knowledge while silencing African systems. The African child was thus re-imagined as
an empty vessel awaiting the inscription of Western canon. African children were redirected from
apprenticeship in indigenous technics to clerical roles in colonial administration. This reconfiguration severed
the child’s direct relationship with indigenous technologies and reoriented them toward consumption of
imported artefacts.
Post-colonial policies have rarely repaired this rupture. Modernization agendas focused on industrial growth
but neglected to restore children’s connection to Africa’s indigenous technicity – the idea that creativity and
tool-making are integral to human identity. Reclaiming these lineages is essential for epistemic justice and for
grounding technological citizenship in African heritage.
To frame the African child as a technological citizen today is therefore to recover what was dislocated by
colonial epistemologies. It is to assert that the child’s place in technology is not novel but ancestral and that
innovation has always been part of African childhood, though suppressed by structures of domination. Re-
establishing this continuity transforms CADP’s work into a pedagogical and counter-hegemonic act, a de-
colonial resistance.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RESEARCH AND INNOVATION IN SOCIAL SCIENCE (IJRISS)
ISSN No. 2454-6186 | DOI: 10.47772/IJRISS | Volume IX Issue XI November 2025
Page 226
www.rsisinternational.org
Comparative Global Models of Child Technological Citizenship
To further situate the African child within the discourse of technological citizenship, it is instructive to
examine comparative global models. In Finland, education policy has long emphasized inquiry-based learning,
coding in early childhood curricula, and civic participation in technological debates (Sahlberg, 2011). South
Korea, after the devastation of war, invested heavily in child-centered STEM education, producing a culture
where technological literacy is tied to national identity (Kim, 2005). India’s IT revolution also mobilized the
energy of its youthful population through policy incentives for coding, mathematics, and digital
entrepreneurship (Nayar, 2010).
These models demonstrate that the child can serve as a cornerstone of national technological transformation.
Yet the African case demands caution. To mimic these models without adaptation would replicate the
dependency that African Technological Nationalism seeks to resist. African pathways must be culturally
grounded, drawing from indigenous epistemologies and speculative traditions while selectively learning from
global practices. The CADP embodies this hybrid approach: while recognizing the value of early authorship as
practiced in some global contexts, it uniquely frames speculative writing as a form of technological agency
rooted in African identity.
In this sense, comparative models are not templates but mirrors, reflecting both the possibilities and the
dangers of child-centered technological pedagogy. The challenge is to craft an African model of technological
citizenship that resists the homogenization of global educational paradigms while asserting Africa’s epistemic
sovereignty.
The African Child in Digital Ecosystems
Today’s African child lives within digital ecosystems that both empower and constrain. Online spaces – social
media, coding clubs, and gaming platforms – offer arenas for practicing technological agency and creativity.
Many young Africans have already leveraged platforms such as YouTube, TikTok, and open-source coding
forums to showcase innovations and imaginative narratives (Nyabola, 2018). These ecosystems thus serve as
informal pedagogical sites, extending beyond the classroom into spaces of peer-to-peer learning and global
visibility.
Yet digital ecosystems are not neutral. The infrastructures of Big Tech are deeply enmeshed in algorithmic
colonization[
viii
] – the reproduction of power asymmetries through data extraction, surveillance capitalism, and
AI bias are stark examples (Couldry & Mejias, 2019). African children engaging in these spaces often do so
within architectures designed to commodify their creativity rather than nurture their technological citizenship.
The digital public sphere thus risks transforming African children into users whose intellectual labour fuels
global capital rather than domestic technological sovereignty.
The CADP represents a counter-digital pedagogy. By embedding speculative authorship into child
development, it trains children to understand digital technologies and to think, narrate, and theorize them. A
child who writes about algorithmic injustice or who imagines alternative African AI systems is already
practicing technological resistance. In this way, CADP ensures that the African child enters digital ecosystems
as a critical citizen and not as a colonized subject.
Narrative as Technology
Narrative itself must be recognized as a form of technology. In African societies, oral traditions have
historically functioned as epistemic machines – transmitting memory, organizing social norms, and rehearsing
cosmological futures (Vansina, 1985). Storytelling is thus not ancillary to technological imagination but
constitutive of it. Through narrations, communities produced and reproduced knowledge systems that guided
material inventions, from iron smelting to architecture.
Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism inherit this logic, treating narrative as a technology of speculative world-
making. The CADP, by institutionalizing child-authored narratives, transforms storytelling into an explicit
instrument of technological nationalism. Children’s stories become laboratories of thought, prototyping
devices, social systems, and ethical frameworks. The act of writing speculative fiction thus parallels the act of
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RESEARCH AND INNOVATION IN SOCIAL SCIENCE (IJRISS)
ISSN No. 2454-6186 | DOI: 10.47772/IJRISS | Volume IX Issue XI November 2025
Page 227
www.rsisinternational.org
engineering: both involve constructing systems, testing possibilities, and embedding values in form.
Narrative as technology also challenges the dichotomy between science and literature. It suggests that
imagination is itself a technical act, a form of design thinking that precedes invention, linking creativity
directly to technological citizenship. The African child, by crafting science fiction, is therefore simultaneously
producing art and also performing civic technics, embedding themselves within the continuum of African
technological identity.
Civic Technological Ethics Through the Eyes of the Child
The ethical dimension of technology has too often been monopolized by adult experts in philosophy, law, or
policy. Yet children possess a distinctive ethical imagination characterized by acute sensitivity to fairness,
justice, and community (Hart, 1992). When African children narrate speculative futures, they are
simultaneously interrogating the ethical boundaries of those futures. Recognizing this perspective advances
epistemic justice by admitting children’s moral reasoning into the governance of science.
The CADP’s training already demonstrates this. For example, the development of the NoiseMaster story – a
device that silences sound and amplifies thoughts – engages fundamental ethical questions about privacy,
surveillance, and freedom of expression. Children who imagine such devices are effectively participating in
anticipatory governance, exercising civic ethics for futures still in design.
This ethical imagination is critical in domains such as artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and climate
engineering, where Africa’s voice is often marginalized. In embedding children’s ethical reflections into public
discourse, CADP ensures that technological futures are grounded in values of justice, sustainability, and
communal well-being. The African child as a technological citizen thus emerges as an inventor and also as a
moral philosopher of technoscience.
The Economics of Child Technological Citizenship
Recognizing the African child as a technological citizen also requires re-evaluating economic value. A child’s
speculative story is not play but intellectual property – creative capital with measurable, long-term potential for
Africa’s innovation economy. In an era where storytelling fuels industries such as film, gaming, and virtual
reality, African children’s narratives represent an untapped reservoir of creative capital (Deuze, 2007).
CADP already models this civic economy through cash awards, publication pathways, and public
sponsorships. Each incentive signals that technoscientific imagination itself is productive labour contributing
to the continent’s knowledge economy. Yet the larger challenge is to construct an ecosystem where child-
authored stories seed new industries. A speculative narrative may inspire a film adaptation, a video game, or a
design prototype. Each story becomes a low-cost research prototype, illustrating how narrative as technology
can generate real economic outcomes. By treating children’s authorship as the foundation of creative
economies, African states can transform what is often dismissed as play into engines of technoscientific
development, an entry point for technological entrepreneurship and civic innovation – an act of counter-
hegemony against predatory global markets.
This approach also resonates with the African Union’s call for knowledge economies under Agenda 2063 (AU,
2015). Child-authorship, properly institutionalized, aligns with this vision by ensuring that intellectual capital
emerges early and is distributed widely. The African child, therefore, becomes a technological citizen, an
economic agent whose creativity fuels continental technological growth.
Pan-African Futures: Child Citizenship Beyond Borders
The framing of the African child as a technological citizen must transcend national boundaries. Pan-
Africanism, historically concerned with political liberation and cultural unity, must now embrace technological
independence as a continental project. The CADP provides a model for such integration by envisioning cross-
border collaborations among child-authors. Picture Nigerian, Kenyan, and South African children co-writing
speculative prototypes – stories that imagine continental energy networks, shared digital currencies, or
cooperative African AI systems. Such narratives would not only promote cross-cultural solidarity but also
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RESEARCH AND INNOVATION IN SOCIAL SCIENCE (IJRISS)
ISSN No. 2454-6186 | DOI: 10.47772/IJRISS | Volume IX Issue XI November 2025
Page 228
www.rsisinternational.org
prefigure material infrastructures of Pan-African integration – an imaginative rehearsal of political economy
where design, ethics, and solidarity merge. The diaspora, too, would play a crucial role. African children in
Europe, the Americas, and Asia would serve as epistemic bridges, linking global experiences to African
futures while resisting assimilationist erasure.
This vision supports the African Union’s Agenda 2063, which envisions “an integrated, prosperous, and
peaceful Africa” (AU, 2015). Embedding child-authors in Agenda 2063 transforms it from a top-down policy
framework into a civic movement authored from below. In this way, Pan-African futures are not abstract
projections but lived practices of child technological citizenship.
Towards a New Social Contract with the African Child
The recognition of the African child as a technological citizen culminates in the call for a new social contract.
Historically, the child has been treated as a ward of the state, a future adult-in-waiting. This paradigm must
shift toward recognizing the child as a co-author of national destiny in the present.
Such a contract demands philosophical realignment, political recognition, and institutional reform.
Philosophically, it requires acknowledging that children possess epistemic rights: the right to narrate, to invent,
and to critique technological systems. Politically, it requires integrating child-authored texts into policy
deliberations, treating them as legitimate contributions to national debates. Institutionally, it requires
embedding CADP within universities, parliaments, and innovation hubs, thereby ensuring that children’s
voices are not relegated to extracurricular margins but positioned at the center of civic life.
In short, the new social contract must affirm that to build Africa is to build its children as active technological
citizens whose imaginations and inventions constitute the foundation of sovereignty itself.
Recommendations and Policy Implications: Institutionalizing Technological Citizenship
To recognize the African child as a technological citizen is to rethink the architecture of education policy. The
following recommendations are acute:
Integrate CADP into Public School Curricula: Treat science fiction writing as part of national science
education (UNESCO, 2017).
Fund Technological Imagination: Establish national awards for child-authors of African
technoscientific stories.
Establish Intellectual Titles: Institutionalize designations like Child-Professor of STS to validate and
elevate child scholarship.
Build Child-Tech Forums: Create annual platforms where children can present speculative solutions to
national challenges before policymakers.
It is essential to recognize that institutionalizing technological citizenship requires curricular adjustments and
structural reforms in governance. Ministries of Education must collaborate with Ministries of Science and
Technology to jointly steward child authorship initiatives. Likewise, funding mechanisms must move beyond
donor-dependence to include national budgetary allocations, thereby signaling that child-centered
technological imagination is a state priority and not only an NGO experiment.
Additionally, there is a need for transnational collaboration. The African Union could institutionalize a
continental prize for child-authors of science fiction, thereby embedding technological citizenship within the
broader framework of Pan-African integration. Such initiatives would not only validate African children’s
speculative agency but also harmonize national efforts into a continental movement.
Finally, policy frameworks must address inclusivity. Technological citizenship must be extended to children in
rural areas, marginalized communities, and those with limited access to digital infrastructure. To achieve this,
CADP-inspired initiatives must adopt hybrid pedagogies that blend low-tech storytelling (oral traditions,
handwritten manuscripts) with high-tech platforms (digital publications, virtual reality narratives). Only then
can the African child’s technological citizenship be genuinely democratic and representative.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RESEARCH AND INNOVATION IN SOCIAL SCIENCE (IJRISS)
ISSN No. 2454-6186 | DOI: 10.47772/IJRISS | Volume IX Issue XI November 2025
Page 229
www.rsisinternational.org
CONCLUSION: A DECLARATION FOR THE FUTURE
Africa’s future will not be decided solely in laboratories, boardrooms, or parliaments. It will also be imagined
in the minds of its youngest citizens. The African child is already a bearer of cognitive, creative, and civic
capacities to engage in technological nation-building. To train them is to build the continent. To neglect them
is to inherit a future shaped elsewhere.
“It is always better to train children than to repair adults.” – Prof Charles Chukwuma Soludo, Governor of
Anambra State (2024).
The above statement by Soludo requires framing it as a declaration of urgency. Fixing African children for
technological mentation and citizenship means positioning the African Continent for technological
sovereignty. The recognition of African children then as technological citizens is not optional – it is rather
imperative. Without this recognition, Africa risks perpetuating cycles of dependence, importing technologies
and also the imaginaries that underwrite them. By contrast, investing in child technological authorship and
technological citizenship offers a pathway towards intellectual sovereignty, cultural resilience, and economic
independence.
This declaration therefore calls upon policymakers, educators, parents, and communities to embrace the
African child as a co-author of the continent’s destiny. It calls upon universities to reconfigure their epistemic
hierarchies, making room for child-authored texts within scholarly canons. It calls upon industries to treat
child-authored speculative narratives as resources for innovation design. Above all, it calls upon Africa itself to
look at its children not as problems to be solved but as visionaries to be listened to.
The African child is not waiting to become a citizen – they already are. What remains is for society to
recognize, institutionalize, and celebrate their technological citizenship.
REFERENCES
1. African Union (AU). (2015). Agenda 2063: The Africa We Want. Addis Ababa: African Union
Commission.
2. Akinwale, A. A. (2010). Technological development in Nigeria: The Nigerian machine tools industry
experience. Journal of Sustainable Development in Africa, 12(5), 129-139.
3. Brey, P. (2005). The epistemology and ontology of human-technology relations. In H. Harbers (Ed.),
Inside the politics of technology (pp. 69–84). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
4. Couldry, N., & Mejias, U. (2019). The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and
Appropriating It for Capitalism. Stanford University Press.
5. David, N. (1998). The Archaeology of African Metallurgy. Journal of Archaeological Research, 6(2),
147–198.
6. Deuze, M. (2007). Media Work. Cambridge: Polity Press.
7. Fanon, F. (1967). Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press.
8. Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford University Press.
9. Guston, D. (2014). Understanding Anticipatory Governance. Social Studies of Science, 44(2), 218–242.
10. Harding, S. (1998). Is Science Multicultural? Postcolonialisms, Feminisms, and Epistemologies. Indiana
University Press.
11. Hart, R. (1992). Children’s Participation: From Tokenism to Citizenship. UNICEF.
12. Jasanoff, S. (2003). Technologies of humility: Citizen participation in governing science. Minerva, 41(3),
223–244.
13. Kim, D. (2005). The development of Korean higher education in the 20th century. International Journal
of Educational Development, 25(5), 597–614.
14. Leach, M., & Fairhead, J. (2002). Science, policy and uncertainty: The case of the MRC/UVRI trial on
HIV and breastfeeding in Uganda. Africa, 72(1), 83–103.
15. Mazrui, A. (1997). The African renaissance: A triple legacy of skills, values and gender. Development
Policy Management Forum.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RESEARCH AND INNOVATION IN SOCIAL SCIENCE (IJRISS)
ISSN No. 2454-6186 | DOI: 10.47772/IJRISS | Volume IX Issue XI November 2025
Page 230
www.rsisinternational.org
16. Mignolo, W. D. (2009). Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and Decolonial
Freedom. Theory, Culture & Society, 26(7-8), 159–181. SAGE Publications.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276409349275
17. Nayar, P. K. (2010). An Introduction to New Media and Cybercultures. Wiley-Blackwell.
18. Nsamenang, A. B. (1992). Human Development in Cultural Context: A Third World Perspective. Sage
Publications.
19. Nwosu, T. I. (2025). Making World Leaders Out of African Children: The CADP Vision. Internal
Working Paper.
20. Nyabola, N. (2018). Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics: How the Internet Era is Transforming
Politics in Kenya. Zed Books.
21. Okorafor, N. (2019). Africanfuturism Defined. [Blog post].
22. Piaget, J. (1950). The Psychology of Intelligence. Routledge.
23. Sahlberg, P. (2011). Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland?
Teachers College Press.
24. Simondon, G. (1958). Du Mode d’Existence des Objets Techniques. Aubier.
25. Stiegler, B. (1998). Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Stanford University Press.
26. Vansina, J. (1985). Oral Tradition as History. University of Wisconsin Press.
PROJECT PARTNERS
ENDNOTES
i
. A theory of childhood that imbricates innovation, speculative imagination, and civic scientific
agency. This implies an understanding or perception of child upbringing that brings together
innovation, imagination, and civic participation in science. The triad of innovation, speculative
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RESEARCH AND INNOVATION IN SOCIAL SCIENCE (IJRISS)
ISSN No. 2454-6186 | DOI: 10.47772/IJRISS | Volume IX Issue XI November 2025
Page 231
www.rsisinternational.org
imagination, and civic scientific agency expresses how invention and creative thinking are inseparable
from civic life. Sheila Jasanoff (2003) introduced the idea of technologies of humility. According to
this notion, science and technology should integrate ethical reflection, imagination, and public
participation. Within CADP, this means that children’s imaginative storytelling is not isolated from
civic responsibility; it is a structured rehearsal for national innovation. Each child’s story becomes a
micro–policy experiment where technological ideas and civic ethics merge. This amplifies African
Technological Nationalism’s goal of embedding innovation within social conscience and communal
responsibility.
ii
. Anticipatory regimes governance implies early participation in thinking about how future technologies
should be governed. The term anticipatory governance (Guston, 2014) describes the practice of
engaging citizens early in the social and ethical deliberation of emerging technologies. It shifts
governance from reaction to anticipation. In CADP, children’s speculative stories are treated as
anticipatory interventions—fictional rehearsals of technologies that do not yet exist but may shape
Africa’s future. Thus, children act as early policymakers, raising ethical and social questions before
technologies are built. The term anticipatory regimes governance in the original text can be simplified
to express this participatory foresight function.
iii
. Technicity as identity – This is the idea that being human already includes being technological.
Philosophers of technology such as Gilbert Simondon (1958) and Bernard Stiegler (1998) argue that
technicity (the quality of being technological) is not external to humans but part of human identity.
Simondon sees humans and machines as co-evolving beings: technology extends human capacities
while humans give meaning to technology. Stiegler expands this by describing technics as humanity’s
memory and future—the prosthetic extensions through which thought and culture are transmitted. For
CADP, this means that the African child is born technological, not merely trained to use technology.
Authorship and invention are therefore natural expressions of selfhood, not foreign impositions.
iv
. Epistemic justice – The equitable recognition of diverse ways of knowing, especially non-Western or
marginalized knowledge systems, in the production and validation of knowledge (Fricker 2007).
Within CADP, it means giving African children’s imaginative and cultural knowledge equal status
with Western scientific narratives.
v
. Epistemic infrastructures that valorize Euro-American methods of knowledge validation. This
implies knowledge systems that favour Western ways of deciding what counts as science. Sandra
Harding (1998) and other postcolonial theorists have shown that global science operates within
epistemic infrastructures—the institutional, linguistic, and cultural frameworks that determine what
qualifies as valid knowledge. These infrastructures have historically privileged Euro-American
epistemologies, marginalizing African ways of knowing. Within the CADP framework, correcting
this imbalance is part of epistemic justice: training African children to produce, narrate, and validate
their own scientific and imaginative knowledge on equal footing with Western standards. This
transforms African childhood into a site of epistemic production rather than consumption.
vi
. Speculative authorship – A creative practice in which storytelling becomes a method of exploring
possible futures and testing technological ideas before they exist. It links literary imagination with
civic design and invention.
vii
. Counter-hegemonic – Actions or ideas that resist dominant global or colonial ideas of knowledge,
technology, or culture. CADP’s approach is counter-hegemonic because it challenges dependence on
imported scientific paradigms.
viii
. Algorithmic colonization means digital systems that reproduce global inequalities through biased data
and control of information. Algorithmic colonization refers to how digital infrastructures (search
engines, social media algorithms, and AI systems) reproduce colonial power by extracting data from
users in the Global South and reinforcing Western epistemic dominance. Nick Couldry and Ulises
Mejias (2019) describe this as data colonialism: the appropriation of human life through data
extraction and algorithmic control. In the CADP framework, teaching African children to understand,
critique, and imagine alternatives to these systems transforms them from data subjects into digital
citizens. Their speculative stories become counter-algorithms. They become narrative interventions
against digital exploitation.
