Colonial Thinking Is a Strategic Liability

Why Europe’s inherited view of Africa makes it overlook the partners it increasingly needs

During a slow morning in the office I have a conversation with my colleague about why our work on implementing modern digital solutions in Cameroon is not easily recognized as an opportunity to contribute to Europe’s own digital sovereignty.

Many people working in European embassies, international cooperation or German public administrations can readily imagine European technology being introduced in Cameroon. They understand a project in which European experts provide advice, finance implementation or support African institutions in adopting a digital solution. It is considerably harder to communicate the reverse possibility: that a sophisticated technology emerging from cooperation in Africa could contribute to Germany’s or Europe’s own objectives.

I consider colonial thinking a strategic liability for Europe. The problem is not limited to inappropriate language or unequal behaviour in individual meetings. It concerns the categories through which institutions recognise knowledge, technology and capability. When these categories associate Europe with innovation and Africa with need, they restrict the range of partnerships that Europe is able to imagine. As Europe searches for new alliances, technological capabilities and ways to reduce its dependencies, this restriction has practical consequences.

International cooperation has changed

Any contemporary discussion of colonial continuities in international cooperation should begin by acknowledging how much has changed. Some postcolonial and post-development critiques emerged in a very different historical context. Fanon wrote during the struggle against formal colonialism. Said published Orientalism in 1978, Spivak’s essay Can the Subaltern Speak? appeared in 1988, and much of the post-development literature was formulated in the early 1990s. At that time, development cooperation was often more explicitly based on the assumption that Western institutions possessed the knowledge, models and expertise required to modernise other societies.

International cooperation today cannot simply be described as the unchanged continuation of this model. There has been sustained reflection on ownership, participation, power, localisation and partner orientation. In many of the projects in which I work, our government partners determine the priorities, chair the governing structures and take the central decisions. Our role is to support processes led by the institutions with which we cooperate. National experts are not merely consulted at the end of a planning process. They design systems, manage implementation and decide how technologies are used.

German development policy itself now speaks much more clearly about reciprocity and agency. The BMZ’s Africa Strategy commits Germany to conducting a dialogue with Africa rather than about Africa, supporting African priorities and treating African countries and organisations as political partners.

These changes are real. An account that describes everyone working in international cooperation as unaware of colonial history or committed to paternalistic forms of assistance would be inaccurate and unfair. Many colleagues think carefully about their position, invest considerable effort in building trust and genuinely want partner institutions to lead. The formal principles, working methods and language of cooperation have evolved substantially.

The remaining problem is therefore more subtle. Colonial relationships do not persist because nothing has changed. They persist within institutions and practices that have changed considerably. They become visible in assumptions about whose expertise is considered universal, where innovation is expected to originate and what role a country is imagined to play in a partnership.

The continuities are found in what we can imagine

In everyday cooperation, one rarely encounters someone openly claiming that European experts are inherently more capable than African experts. The hierarchy operates in less explicit ways. An international consultant may still be trusted more readily than a national specialist making the same recommendation. A concept developed in Europe is more easily understood as a potentially global model, while a concept developed in Cameroon is classified as a local solution. European knowledge travels under the label of expertise; African knowledge frequently remains attached to its context.

This is why reading postcolonial theory remains valuable for people from the so-called Global North who work in the so-called Global South. Its practical contribution is to make these patterns easier to recognise. Said showed how representations of other societies helped Europe define itself as modern, rational and advanced. Fanon examined how power shapes identity and the perception of one’s own capabilities. Spivak questioned whether people can truly be heard when the institutions and conceptual language through which they speak have already been defined by others. Achille Mbembe has argued that Africa must be recognised as a place from which knowledge and theory emerge, rather than primarily as an object to be analysed.

These ideas matter because professional decisions depend on perception. Institutions finance the opportunities they are able to recognise. They recruit the experts they consider credible and build alliances with actors they regard as capable of contributing something important. When the established mental model casts one partner primarily as a provider of solutions and another primarily as the location of problems, it influences project selection long before any explicitly unequal behaviour takes place.

The result is a still rather one-directional understanding of cooperation. Technology is expected to move from North to South, together with capital, institutional models and technical expertise. Partner countries contribute knowledge of their own context, access to users and implementation capacity. They are much less frequently imagined as places from which technologies, institutional models or forms of expertise relevant to Europe might emerge.

This perspective does not mean that poverty, institutional weakness or infrastructure deficits are imaginary. These conditions are real and addressing them remains necessary. The distortion begins when they become the dominant description of a country or an entire continent. If African societies are primarily viewed through what they lack, their existing capabilities and their potential contributions to common strategic objectives become difficult to see.

A practical example from open-source technology

The development of the open-source data platform we implement in Cameroon offers one example of how this works. It began with the need to share epidemic-surveillance data between countries in the IGAD region. GIZ, IGAD and the technology company Speedykom developed the Regional Pandemic Analytics Tool, known as REPAN. The platform allowed data analysts and subject-matter specialists to create data pipelines and configure dashboards without having to write conventional software code. This was important because it put the people who understood the data and the operational questions in control of the system’s evolution.

The platform supported the sharing and analysis of COVID-19 data across more than seven countries and contributed to epidemic-management activities during outbreaks of Ebola and Mpox. Cameroon’s One Health Platform subsequently adapted the code to pilot the Cameroon One Health Information System. Following initial training, analysts from different government sectors could progressively connect data sources and automate analyses themselves.

This was not a European product deployed unchanged in Africa. It evolved through problems, experiences and contributions spread across several African institutions and countries. Its self-service architecture reflects a clear institutional objective: government analysts should be able to develop the system without remaining permanently dependent on international consultants or a single software company.

This experience is relevant far beyond epidemic surveillance. European public administrations also struggle to integrate fragmented data, establish data spaces, create reusable analytical infrastructure and prepare public-sector information for secondary use and artificial intelligence. They also face dependence on a small number of proprietary technology providers. An open-source architecture that gives public institutions control over their code, infrastructure, service providers and data therefore addresses a problem that exists in Europe as well as in Africa.

Yet the origin of the platform affects how it is perceived. When it is presented as a result of development cooperation in Cameroon or East Africa, it is usually evaluated as a solution for African public institutions. It may be considered useful for replication in other partner countries. The possibility that it could contribute to European public digital infrastructure is more difficult to introduce into the conversation.

This difficulty cannot be explained by a technical assessment because the technical assessment has often not yet taken place. The platform is categorised before its architecture, governance model or potential uses are examined. Its development context becomes a signal that determines the direction in which knowledge is expected to travel.

Open-source software should make a different model of cooperation possible. Improvements financed or developed in one country can benefit users in many others. Work undertaken in Cameroon can strengthen a system used in Europe.

Germany’s Sovereign Tech Agency already applies an important part of this logic. It invests globally in open-source software components that support Germany’s and Europe’s competitiveness and capacity for innovation. Its work recognises that critical digital infrastructure is maintained by international communities and that sustaining it is a shared responsibility. Germany benefits when developers and organisations in other countries contribute to the same technologies on which German businesses and public institutions depend.

International cooperation could contribute much more systematically to this shared investment. It can support implementation in demanding operational environments and bring new users and contributors into open-source communities. These are valuable resources for technological development, especially when Europe cannot and should not finance every layer of its digital infrastructure alone.

So far, however, the connection remains weak. The European Technological Sovereignty Package presented in June 2026 gives open source a more central role in strengthening Europe’s digital autonomy. Its Open Source Strategy seeks to develop and scale European alternatives to proprietary technologies and strengthen open-source ecosystems across European public and private sectors. This is an important policy development, although its central geographical and institutional frame remains Europe.

Programmes managed through international cooperation support digital transformation and digital sovereignty in partner countries, but they are generally presented as interventions for those countries. The technological-sovereignty agenda and the international-cooperation agenda therefore continue to operate largely alongside one another. One aims to strengthen European capabilities. The other aims to strengthen capabilities abroad. There is still no strong institutional framework for jointly financing open technologies that serve the interests of Europe and its international partners.

What the contrast with the Sahel reveals

The conceptual divide becomes particularly visible when European priorities are compared with the way Africa is discussed within development policy. Europe increasingly describes the world through geoeconomics, technological competition, supply-chain security and strategic autonomy. The EU wants to develop sovereign capabilities in cloud infrastructure, artificial intelligence, semiconductors and open source. African countries, however, often enter the policy discussion through a very different vocabulary.

In the Sahel, BMZ programmes understandably address severe and immediate problems. Current programme descriptions emphasise hunger, poverty, forced displacement, climate vulnerability, fragile institutions and the need to strengthen resilience and social protection. These are genuine challenges affecting millions of people. But the revealing issue is the contrast between the two policy frames. Europe appears as an actor pursuing technological sovereignty and positioning itself in a changing geopolitical economy. Africa appears primarily as a region in which poverty must be reduced and crises contained.

The distinction is not absolute. The BMZ also supports economic cooperation, digital transformation and African-led initiatives. Yet the persistence of these dominant frames influences where new initiatives are located and which policy instruments are considered appropriate. When Germany discusses technological sovereignty, the relevant partners are usually assumed to be European companies, research institutions, public administrations or technologically advanced states. When it discusses cooperation with the Sahel or much of sub-Saharan Africa, poverty reduction and resilience remain the natural starting points.

Looking at these policy fields together makes the inherited perspective easier to see. Africa continues to be conceptualised primarily as a poor continent requiring assistance, even as Europe says that it needs more partners, larger technological communities and shared investments to compete in a geoeconomic world. The capabilities that African institutions could contribute to technological alliances remain outside the main field of vision.

This does not mean that the decision to invest in poverty reduction is itself colonial. The problem lies in allowing poverty to define the entire relationship. Countries can face severe poverty and still possess excellent engineers, strong public institutions in particular sectors, ambitious entrepreneurs, important research communities and technologies from which Europe could benefit. These realities coexist.

When European institutions are able to perceive only one side of that reality, colonial thinking becomes a plausible part of the explanation. The historical division between developed actors and countries to be developed continues to structure policy choices, even when the language has become more respectful and partner governments exercise considerable agency within individual projects.

Mutual interest is not exploitation

International cooperation has often been reluctant to speak openly about European interests. This reluctance has an understandable origin. In a relationship marked by large differences in financial resources, institutional power and access to markets, the pursuit of self-interest can easily become exploitative. Development organisations therefore tend to present their work as being exclusively concerned with the needs and priorities of partner countries. Wanting something in return can appear morally questionable, as though any benefit for the financing country would necessarily come at the expense of the country receiving support.

Yet expecting cooperation to produce benefits for both sides is not in itself exploitation. Exploitation begins when one actor uses its greater power to appropriate value, impose conditions or restrict the other side’s choices without offering a fair return. Mutual interest describes something different: partners identify an area in which their priorities converge, negotiate their respective contributions and create value that neither could produce as effectively alone. This requires transparency about interests, safeguards against the misuse of power and genuine influence over the objectives and governance of cooperation. It does not require one side to pretend that it has no interests of its own.

The refusal to discuss mutual interest can itself produce a distorted form of partnership. When European institutions insist that cooperation is mainly about helping others, partner countries remain positioned as recipients. The donor continues to define the overarching purpose and the sectors in which cooperation is possible. Partner institutions may then exercise agency, but mainly within a frame that has already been established by the financing side. They can lead implementation and define priorities within a health, education or poverty-reduction programme, while having little influence over the prior decision that the relationship should be organised around development assistance rather than technological, industrial or economic cooperation.

This helps explain why the progress made in partner-led implementation has not yet fully transformed the relationship between donors and recipients. Partners increasingly steer projects, chair governance structures and make operational decisions. Nevertheless, the donor often retains the power to determine what kind of partnership is being offered in the first place. The recipient leads within a framework whose fundamental purpose and political category have already been defined elsewhere.

A more equal relationship would begin by identifying areas of genuine mutual benefit. This would allow partner countries to influence not only the design of individual projects but also the overarching priorities of cooperation. It would make it possible to discuss what Cameroon, Germany and Europe each want from a relationship, what capabilities they can contribute and where their interests overlap. Such a discussion would be more political and at times more difficult than the language of assistance, but it would also take the agency of all partners more seriously.

Digital technology is a natural area in which these priorities can converge. Cameroon and other African countries want greater control over their data, stronger digital infrastructure, more local technological capacity and less dependence on proprietary foreign vendors. Germany and Europe want to reduce technological dependencies, strengthen open digital infrastructure and develop alternatives to dominant commercial platforms. These objectives are closely related. Open-source technologies developed and maintained through international partnerships can contribute to digital sovereignty on both sides.

The different conditions under which technology is developed can become a complementary strength. The cost of employing qualified developers in Cameroon is generally lower than in Germany, creating possibilities for building and maintaining software more efficiently.

Many African institutions also operate under stronger cost constraints than their European counterparts. This can make them more willing to adopt open-source technologies that have not yet reached the polish, support structures or institutional maturity of established commercial products. This creates the conditions for African countries to become a dynamic centre of open-source development and implementation. The continent has a growing population of developers, rapidly expanding digital markets, substantial demand for affordable public-sector technologies and governments seeking greater technological sovereignty.

This would represent a different model of international cooperation. Its starting point would no longer be a donor identifying a problem in a recipient country and financing a solution. Partners would identify a shared problem, recognise their complementary capabilities and invest together in a common capability. Europe’s search for technological sovereignty offers an opportunity to build such relationships.

Overcoming colonial thinking

This is where postcolonial thinking becomes a strategic asset. It encourages institutions to examine why they assign particular roles to particular countries, why some forms of expertise are recognised more readily than others and whether an opportunity is being overlooked because it emerged in a place not traditionally associated with high-end innovation.

Much has already changed in international cooperation. But the broader categories through which cooperation is organized remain quite the same. Europe is still commonly imagined as the source of technology, finance and strategic direction, while African countries are approached primarily through their development needs.

Reading postcolonial theory can improve the questions decision-makers ask. Instead of separating international cooperation from European strategic interests, they can look for investments that create shared assets and strengthen capabilities on both sides.

Europe will need more of these partnerships. Its ambitions in technological sovereignty exceed the resources European governments can mobilise alone, while open-source infrastructure depends on global communities of developers, institutions and users. International cooperation already connects Europe with precisely these potential contributors. Yet this opportunity will remain underused as long as the underlying assumption is that Europe provides the technology while its partners provide the development context.

Colonial thinking today is rarely expressed as a direct claim of European superiority. It is more often visible in the limited roles that institutions are able to imagine for their partners and in the assumption that knowledge and strategic value flow mainly in one direction. Overcoming it means recognising Africa not only through poverty, fragility or institutional needs, but also as a source of technology and expertise.

This is not an exercise in moral self-reproach. It is part of seeing the world more accurately and identifying the partnerships Europe increasingly needs. In a more competitive and multipolar world, that has become a strategic necessity.