Sociology and its imperatives for human development in Africa

By Bolaji Ogunfemi

A great many people will agree that the individual is to society what people are to human development. Society comprises clusters of individuals while human development is positive change in the lives of people. Development academics, practitioners, and researchers have roundly highlighted human capital as crucial to a country’s journey on the path to development. This could not have been clearer than when teaching a university module on Individual and Society. Its one broad focus is to scan societal problems using sociological imagination from various sociological perspectives. In the course of the teaching and research, it became clear that, being one of the most popular modules in the discipline of Sociology, its utility as a conceptual receptacle for engaging problems of social development in modern African society is undeniable.

Sociological imagination of development issues

Sociological imagination is the linking of individual experiences with the larger society. It seeks to relate personal troubles affecting individuals with public issues that require societal intervention. Africans are still faced with numerous welfare challenges, although it would be disingenuous to ignore the fact that progress is being made, albeit slowly.

Development matters peculiar to the continent, including urbanisation, industrialisation, population growth, inequality, migration, healthcare, and food security, are seemingly personal troubles but are also embedded in a larger social context. The continent’s burgeoning youth population continues to grow without corresponding expansion in shared prosperity through industrialisation and employment. According to the ILO’s Global Employment Trends for Youth 2024, three in four young people in sub-Saharan Africa lack secure work, and Africa’s youth labour force is projected to grow by 76 million by 2050, while all other regions face a contraction in young workers. Rapid urbanisation as a public concern has created widening inequality, generated insecurity, and frustrated access to already decaying infrastructure.

Communicable and non-communicable diseases continue to pose enormous challenges across the continent, compounded by chronically low budgetary commitments to the health sector. Africa CDC reported in April 2025 that more than two decades after the Abuja Declaration, only three countries, Rwanda, Botswana, and Cabo Verde, have consistently met or exceeded the 15 per cent national budget target for health, whilst over 30 African Union member states remain well below the 10 per cent benchmark, with some allocating as little as 5–7 per cent. Addressing these issues requires acknowledging them as encounters between social structures and individual interactions in everyday life, and that is precisely where sociology has something urgent to say to development.

Sociological explanations for Africa’s development dilemma

Sociological thought concerns the various theories or lenses through which society and its issues are understood, and a systematic manner of observing individuals within society. Four sociological perspectives underlie explanations of the predicament facing Africans and the threats to their freedom, dignity, and self-realisation.

The conflict perspective, enshrined in the narrative of inequality, is premised on the exploitation, immiseration, and alienation of the people, thereby producing the inevitability of clashes between social groups. In the face of relative economic growth owing to capitalism, the gap between the haves and the have-nots continues to widen. The latter are increasingly compelled to sell their labour to the wealthy owners of the means of production and the politicians who enable them. Oxfam’s latest analysis found that just four of Africa’s richest billionaires hold $57.4 billion in wealth, more than the combined wealth of 750 million people. The Commitment to Reducing Inequality Index 2024 further reveals that in sub-Saharan Africa, the top 10 per cent of wage earners capture two-thirds of all labour income, while the bottom 50 per cent takes just 3.3 per cent. The conflict lens demands that development actors ask who benefits from existing arrangements and who is structurally excluded.

The functionalist perspective maintains that the people are the lifeblood driving development. They are both the means and the outcomes of all development endeavours. There can be no people without development, and no development without the people. Each are critical parts of an engine oiling one another to achieve a stable, equitable, and progressive society. Where institutions fail to perform their functions, whether schools, health systems, or labour markets, the entire social organism suffers. The 2024 Africa Sustainable Development Report, published jointly by UNDP, the UN Economic Commission for Africa, and the African Development Bank, found that Africa is on track to reach fewer than three of the 32 SDG targets assessed, with setbacks recorded for eight of them, a damning verdict on the failure to invest sufficiently in the institutions that underpin human development.

Symbolic interactionism advocates for a better understanding of the divergences in people’s social, economic, and personal situations in conditioning relations between and among them. Its central focus is explaining the dynamics in inter-personal and inter-group relations through structures or institutions such as education, religion, bureaucracy, and law. Wellbeing, as a concept that closely captures the spirit of this perspective, strongly relates to happiness and life satisfaction. When institutions communicate messages of exclusion or indignity, whether through discriminatory access to education or unequal treatment before the law, they shape how individuals relate to one another and to the state, and in so doing, either enable or constrain development.

The post-modernist perspective explains contemporary African society as characterised by forces of globalisation and the influence of social institutions on people’s lives. In development parlance, it focuses on the pursuit of individual freedom and how modernisation and bureaucracies have promoted or limited it, often at the expense of the broader society. As individuals evolve and societies develop, so does their understanding of development, as criteria and benchmarks are continuously renegotiated. Societies should be permitted to define what constitutes a good standard of living within the context of individuals’ own perceptions of what basic conditions must be met.

The reality of this approach is illustrated with striking clarity among the Dinka and Nuer ethnic communities of South Sudan, where cattle ownership serves as the primary measure of wealth and social standing, a framework entirely rational within that context but invisible to externally imposed development metrics. A sojourn in the country opens the eyes to how profoundly value systems shape development realities on the ground.

Some individuals will inevitably depend on external support to overcome poverty, the elderly, the disabled, those dispossessed by conflict or climate shock. Yet the social processes that create the conditions for development determine their access to that support. Any economic, socio-cultural, or environmental transformation must have individuals at its core. Prescriptions for how economies, societies, and environments should be transformed also start and end with people.

The case for human infrastructure

If people are so fundamental to development, a critical question follows: why is Africa not more purposefully investing in what might be called human infrastructure?

Physical infrastructure, roads, ports, power grids, attracts enormous attention from governments and donors alike. The African Development Bank estimates that Africa invests only 4 per cent of its GDP in infrastructure, compared with 14 per cent in China, and that bridging the infrastructure gap could increase GDP growth by an estimated 2 percentage points a year. Yet the continent’s greatest deficits are not only in concrete and steel but in the capabilities, institutions, and social systems that determine whether people can participate in, contribute to, and benefit from development. At the AfDB’s 2024 Annual Meetings, the Bank’s Director of Human Capital, Youth and Skills Development argued that “a healthy, productive and innovative workforce is essential for Africa’s transformation” and that investing in people’s businesses and skills is as critical as building physical assets. Human infrastructure encompasses the quality of education systems, the robustness of public health, the strength of social protection, and the architecture of civic participation.

Sociological analysis compels a rethinking of development priorities on the following grounds:

• Invest in capabilities, not just growth rates — Economic growth that bypasses the majority is sociologically incoherent. Africa’s real GDP is forecast to grow at around 3.8–4 per cent, yet this pace falls well short of the 7 per cent annual growth needed to meet SDG targets, and even that growth has not translated into proportionate reductions in poverty or inequality. Governments and donors must measure prosperity by its distribution, not its aggregate.
• Strengthen social institutions — Schools, health systems, legal frameworks, and community organisations are not peripheral to development; they are its architecture. Neglecting them produces the structural exclusion that all four sociological perspectives, in different ways, describe.
• Centre local knowledge — The post-modernist insight is practical as much as philosophical. Development frameworks designed without the participation of the people they affect, ignoring local epistemologies and value systems, routinely fail. The Dinka and Nuer example is not an academic curiosity; it is a warning.
• Address inequality structurally — The conflict perspective reminds us that poverty in the midst of growth is not an accident; it is a product of political choices. Oxfam’s Commitment to Reducing Inequality Index 2024 warns that Africa faces a double inequality crisis: extreme inequality alongside weak government commitment to fight it, with four in five countries cutting budget shares for education, health, and social protection since 2022.
• Build social cohesion — Symbolic interactionism highlights that development is not only about material conditions but about how people relate to one another and to their institutions. Societies fractured by distrust, discrimination, or elite capture cannot sustain development gains.

The UNDP’s Africa launch of the 2023/24 Human Development Report noted that with a median age of 19.7 years, Africa is the world’s youngest continent, and that realising its demographic dividend requires investing urgently in education, skills development, and job creation, particularly for women and youth. The 2030 Agenda’s commitment to leaving no one behind is not merely an aspiration; it is a sociological imperative. Africa’s development trajectory will be determined not only by its infrastructure gap but by whether it invests, with equivalent urgency, in the human systems that make development meaningful, sustainable, and just.