I co-authored a study examining ten years of African HCI research. Not only to celebrate growth, but to ask a harder question: who is driving it?
We analysed authorship, institutional location, and publication venues. We analysed authorship, institutional location, and publication venues across 268 peer-reviewed papers and 1,091 author contributions between 2014 and 2024. We presented this work at AfriCHI 2025.
The data revealed something worth sitting with. African HCI is growing. Regional spaces like AfriCHI are strengthening local research communities. But non-African institutions still account for a majority of contributions. Representation is expanding, yet influence remains uneven.
Being included is not the same as having equal influence over what gets studied, and how.
The issue is not only numerical representation, it is structural. Funding systems, editorial norms, and training pipelines shape whose voices become durable.
That matters beyond academia. Who defines research questions shapes what problems get noticed. What gets noticed shapes what gets built. What gets built either works for people, or it does not.
This connects directly to why I do the work I do. Exclusion does not begin at the interface. It begins earlier in who gets to define the problem in the first place.
Read the full paper → Who Speaks for AfricanHCI?
