The role of people as individual and collective agents in making a difference to societal outcomes, also in the COVID-19 era: African insights Norma R.A. Romm University of South Africa Yiannis Laouris Futur
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Abstract
This chapter elucidates how ten young adults (in their 20s to mid-30s) from various African countries have experienced their individual and collective agency as impacting social and ecological outcomes in their societies. The chapter also considers how their agency has been crucial during the COVID-19 pandemic. It details how they regard themselves as having developed through experiences starting in their early childhood, which led them to recognize the need to become proactive in helping others deal with challenges. It recounts how they chose to seek out exposure for their personal growth and capacitation, with a view to making a social contribution in various fields in which they could become influential. The chapter points to their accounts of some of these contributions. The participants' stories were elicited (September 2021) through an open-ended set of questions which they were requested (by Romm and Laouris) to answer. The questions were intended to draw out what these participants consider their most outstanding contributions (individual or collaborative) to African society; what factors/assets/experiences enabled them to make such contribution(s); and what important learnings had “stayed” with them from what was called Re-Invent Democracy in the Digital Era project organized in 2015-2017 by the Future Worlds Center (of which the second author is the CEO), in which they participated. Further to their creating answers on the “questionnaire” form, we held a Zoom conversation (September 27th, 2021), in which they clarified their answers and lent more detail to them. The chapter focuses on some of the insights that we have harvested from these elucidations – which we argue are relevant to continued theorizing around the pertinence of social network theory in the digital era and its application/adaptation to African contexts and beyond.
Citation
Romm, N. R., Laouris, Y., Abdallah, A., Akomea, B. G. O., Ehagi, D., Gondwe, J., ... & Wairimu, R. Chapter Six The role of people as individual and collective agents in making a difference to societal outcomes, also in the COVID-19 era: African insights.
