Westernization of African Design
Westernization of African Design
Breaking Free from Colonial Design Frameworks in African UX, Product, and Service Design
Summary
When you're taught design in Africa—whether at university, bootcamp, or through Western online courses—you're learning European problem-solving frameworks dressed up as universal truth.
Design education in Africa primarily reflects western values and priorities, with current pedagogical approaches shaped by colonial legacies. This isn't accident. It's structural. And it's killing your ability to design for the 83% of Africa's workforce in the informal economy.
The African Design Industry Report 2024-2025 shows 1,350,936 designers across 53 African nations, with Nigeria alone having 302,630 designers. Yet most of these designers are still applying Western frameworks to African problems. The result: beautiful interfaces that don't work for the people who actually need them.
This article breaks down exactly where Western design fails, why it fails, how it perpetuates colonial power structures, and what African designers are actually doing differently across UX, product, and service design.
What You Were Taught is Wrong
If you studied design in Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, or South Africa, here's what likely happened:
You learned Bauhaus principles (German, 1920s industrial modernism). You learned Swiss grid systems. You learned "form follows function." You learned that clean, minimal design is "professional" and "international," while maximalist, symbolic design is "cluttered" or "unsophisticated."
Then you looked at African design traditions and were told they were "craft," not "design." You were taught to revere Apple, Google, and Stripe's design systems while your grandmother's beadwork, your country's textile symbolism, and your community's spatial logic were treated as cultural artifacts, not design knowledge.
Colonial legacies deeply shaped African design education, causing curricula to reflect Western values and priorities at the expense of local knowledge. Many African designers were taught to revere European art and design principles while their own indigenous design knowledge was sidelined.
This is not neutral education. This is epistemic violence—the violent erasure of non-Western ways of knowing.
The Specific Problem: Design Thinking as Imperialism
Decolonizing design requires recognizing that design is not neutral and can reinforce existing power structures. Many design frameworks, from user-centered design to design thinking, while seemingly neutral, can inadvertently reinforce Western cultural values and assumptions about user needs and behaviors.
Here's the mechanism:
Design Thinking (the framework taught everywhere—Stanford d.School, IDEO, most bootcamps) assumes:
Users are rational and individualistic
Problem-solving is linear (empathize → define → ideate → prototype → test)
The designer is separate from the user (observer, not participant)
Technology and innovation are solutions
Efficiency and scalability are paramount
This doesn't match African contexts, where:
Users make decisions based on community relationships, not individual preference
Problem-solving is cyclical and involves collective wisdom, not individual insights
The designer is embedded in the community, not external
Solutions are often low-tech, adaptive, and rooted in existing social systems
Sustainability and belonging matter more than efficiency
Research on informal businesses in Kenya and South Africa shows that these economies operate upon and are held together by a social order built on cooperative arrangements, long-standing norms, values, and personal relationships that generate remarkably adaptive business practices. Yet current development-policy paradigms seek to replace informality with formal, Western-style economic arrangements, thereby endangering these local arrangements.
When you apply "Design Thinking" to an informal business in Kibera or Lekki, you're not solving their problem. You're trying to formalize them, extract them, and make them legible to Western capital. And you're calling it "innovation."
The Aesthetic Imperialism Problem
Where western design frame work fails in Africa
Clean and minimal design is treated as a global taste, while local aesthetics are seen as clutter, even when they carry meaning. Aesthetic universals exported globally show how choices made in one place ripple outward and shape another.
Let me be specific.
The Apple/Stripe Aesthetic: Lots of whitespace, sans-serif fonts, one primary action per screen, 3-5 color palette maximum, no cultural ornamentation.
This aesthetic was developed for:
Users with fast internet (bandwidth-conscious design)
Users fluent in minimalist Western aesthetics (cultural literacy)
Users on high-end devices with large screens
Users prioritizing speed of interaction over relationship-building
This fails in Africa because:
Whitespace isn't empty in Africa—it's wasteful. A merchant in Nairobi selling phone credit online expects visual density. Information architecture that leaves "whitespace" feels incomplete. In Ghana, designers use Adinkra symbols in branding and interior design. In Kenya and Tanzania, designers incorporate Swahili or Maasai elements into modern graphics. That's not clutter. That's cultural communication.
Minimalism erases trust signals. In markets with high fraud, users need to see evidence: agent logos, regulatory badges, payment method icons, trust indicators. Western minimal design hides these. This risks making design oppressive rather than inclusive. Universal design patterns that ignore cultural context become oppressive because they reinforce hierarchies of aesthetics—saying "Western is good, local is bad".
One action per screen assumes users are patient. Users paying for mobile data by the minute don't want to tap through 5 screens. In Nigeria and South Africa, SMEs operating in informal economies often lack data literacy and infrastructure. Digital tools require awareness and training, and users simply abandon products that demand too much friction.
The real-world impact: OPay and PalmPay don't use the Stripe aesthetic. They use dense information architecture, lots of payment method icons, agent logos, and regulatory badges everywhere. This isn't less sophisticated design. It's more contextually intelligent design. Users who've been defrauded before need to see that many trust signals.
Product Design: The "Needs Assessment" Trap
Western product design does something that sounds good but is actually colonial: it tells communities "I'm here to understand your needs and solve your problems."
Then it ignores what communities are already doing.
Current development paradigms that seek to replace informality with formal, Western-style economic arrangements risk undermining existing economic and social-welfare systems that fulfill crucial functions in the absence of the state. These local arrangements are held together by cooperative norms, values, and personal relationships.
Example: A Western designer sees informal merchants in Dagoretti Corner, Nairobi, and thinks "these people need digital payment systems." So they build a mobile payment app. The app fails because the merchants already have payment systems—they trust each other, settle daily, and their informal ledger is reliable.
The designer missed the actual "need": the merchants don't need digital payments. They need visibility to customers outside their neighborhood. They need a way to show product catalogs to customers who've heard about them via word-of-mouth but can't visit in person.
The assumption in Western product design: "What's not formal doesn't exist. What's not digital isn't real."
The reality in African informal economies: The systems work. They're just invisible to outsiders. Before you design "solutions," you need to understand the existing solutions and ask: "What's missing? What breaks? What could be better?"
This requires participatory design, not needs assessment. It requires you staying for six months, not weeks.
Service Design: The Systems Erasure Problem
The World Bank characterizes the informal economy as "low productivity, resulting in low and irregular earnings," treating it as a problem to be solved. But this ignores that the informal economy comprises nearly 83% of employment in Africa and operates on existing social orders that are remarkably adaptive.
Western service design treats informal systems as broken. African service design should treat them as sophisticated.
Example: Kenya's informal public transport system (matatus).
Western designers see:
No centralized ticketing system (problem)
No standardized routes (problem)
No official pricing (problem)
Cash-only (problem)
So they build formal solutions: digital ticketing, GPS tracking, standardized routes. These fail because they ignore what matatus actually do well:
Route flexibility (adapt to demand in real-time)
Social knowledge (drivers know every neighborhood)
Community trust (you know your driver)
Job creation (thousands of micro-entrepreneurs)
Affordability (competition keeps prices low)
Good service design would ask: "How can we make these strengths visible while addressing real breakpoints?" Maybe that's GPS only when the driver wants it. Maybe that's a lightweight ticketing system that doesn't force standardization. Maybe that's mobile money integration without replacing trust-based payment.
This requires understanding the service ecology—not imposing a Western service blueprint.
How AI Models Export Western Bias Globally
Western-centric datasets produce AI models that reproduce existing bias. These models are then exported as if they were universal solutions, reinforcing unequal power dynamics when applied globally.
Here's the mechanism:
AI is trained on Western data (mostly American, some European). The models learn Western aesthetics, Western categorization schemes, Western ideas of what constitutes "high quality."
These biases are exported to Africa via apps, tools, and frameworks. When you use Figma, you're using a design tool trained on Western interfaces. When you use ChatGPT for copywriting, it's trained on English internet text (which is 63% American).
African designers then use these tools, unknowingly accepting Western bias as "best practice."
Some artists and designers are working to create AI models trained specifically on indigenous art forms and non-Western design traditions. The goal is not to reject Western tradition, but to recognize and celebrate the multiplicity of design approaches that exist worldwide.
A concrete example: If you ask an AI to "generate a modern, professional website for a Kenyan SME," it will generate something that looks like a Stripe or Shopify template. Clean, minimal, English-language, vertical scrolling. It won't generate something that uses Swahili, visual density, horizontal scrolling, or local payment methods—because those weren't in the training data.
This is why African designers must be skeptical of "AI-generated" design. It's encoding Western aesthetics at scale.
Language as a Design Problem
Africa is highly multilingual, with most Africans speaking several languages, often including a regional language used for higher education. A survey of African UX researchers in Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, and Tanzania found that nearly half have a linguistic repertoire of more than one language, and some have three or more.
Yet most digital products are English-only. This isn't a language problem. This's a design problem.
Example: M-Pesa originally worked in English. When Safaricom added Swahili, usage skyrocketed among first-time users. Not because Swahili speakers suddenly wanted M-Pesa. But because they could understand it. They could trust it. It felt like it was made for them.
English-only design is design that says "this is for educated, cosmopolitan users." It erases everyone else.
Good design in Africa means:
Local language first (not English with translation)
Scripts that work in local languages (not just Latin alphabet)
Metaphors rooted in local experience (not Western metaphors)
The Decolonization Movement
African design is in the midst of a dynamic renaissance. All across the continent—from Accra's bustling creative tech hubs to Nairobi's maker spaces and Lagos' design studios, a new generation of designers are redefining what it means to create in an African context. These creatives are merging the past and present, drawing on cultural heritage while mastering modern tools.
But this isn't romanticization. It's strategic.
One major conversation in the present is the decolonization of design—essentially, unlearning the notion that "good design" is synonymous with Western design, and instead centering African perspectives, needs, and narratives.
How It Manifests: Design Education Transformation
Integrating indigenous knowledge and cultural practices into contemporary design education is vital for a more inclusive, contextually relevant, and globally resonant African design practice. By broadening what is taught and valued—for example, teaching Adinkra symbology alongside Bauhaus principles, or incorporating African philosophies of aesthetics and ergonomics—the aim is to produce designers confident in their own cultural capital.
Real examples:
1. Design Without Borders (Uganda/Kampala) Design Without Borders Africa designs people-centered innovations, partnering with communities across Africa to create contextually rooted products, services, and solutions. This isn't design thinking exported to Africa. This is design thinking from Africa, rooted in community participation.
2. African Design Centre The African Design Centre's mission is to empower leaders who will design a more equitable, just, and sustainable world—with the understanding that designers must be proximate to the lived experience and identities of the communities they design for.
3. Nairobi Design Week (Theme: "We Are The Ancestors") Nairobi Design Week celebrates 10 years of centering community in design. The 2025 theme "We Are The Ancestors" features designers working across graphic design, product innovation, architecture, type design, digital UX/UI, and social impact design—all rooted in African context.
Look at who's being showcased:
Framework Designs: "Merges innovative engineering with refined Kenyan design"
Ceramica Africa: "Timeless African craftsmanship meets contemporary design"
Liquid Lemn: "Blends East African flair with bold, gender-fluid fashion where stripes, sustainability, and self-expression collide"
These designers aren't trying to be "international." They're unapologetically local.
How It Manifests: Product Design Intelligence
At Design Week Lagos 2025, emerging Nigerian designers created objects drawing from community-rooted traditions. Richard Aina's Teriba Chair bridges heritage and modernity: "The interlaced spines that support the backrest represent harmony, the interdependence of community and structure." Joan Eric Udorie's Bantu Stool abstracts woven and carved motifs into fluid curves, embedding traditional spatial logic into modern objects.
This is not decoration. This is structural design that carries cultural knowledge.
How It Manifests: Service Design for Informal Economies
Community groups like Kenyan women's group SATUBO help train up the next generation of artisans and provide skills training to provide rural women with a viable source of income and preserve ancient skill sets. Initiatives like MESH (launched 2021) empower young people in the informal economy through training and financial services, enabling private sector companies to co-create new distribution models by partnering with informal players.
These are service design solutions that don't formalize the informal. They strengthen it.
How to Decolonize your Design Pratice
Principle 1: Recognize Power Dynamics:
Acknowledge that design is not neutral and can reinforce existing power structures. Designers must be aware of their own biases and privileges. This is not about guilt—it's about clarity. Where does your design framework come from? Who benefits when you apply it?
Practical application:
Don't use "best practices" from Silicon Valley. Ask: "Best for whom? In what context?"
Question every Western framework you use. Why grid systems? Why sans-serif? Why whitespace? Why vertical scrolling?
Document your assumptions. If you assume users want "minimal" design, ask: "Based on what evidence? For which users?"
Principle 2: Center Marginalized Voices
Prioritize the perspectives and experiences of communities that have been historically excluded from design processes. This involves actively seeking out and listening to these voices, not extracting them.
This is not user research. User research extracts data. Co-design includes communities in decision-making.
Practical application:
Spend 6+ months in community, not 2 weeks
Hire from the community you're designing for
Share design decisions, not just design artifacts
Ask "What would you design?" not just "What do you need?"
Pay community members for their time and knowledge
Principle 3: Value Diverse Knowledge Systems
Recognize that Western design knowledge is not the only valid or valuable form of design expertise. Other cultures possess rich design traditions and practices.
Practical application:
Learn indigenous design traditions, not as inspiration, but as methodology
Study how your grandmother organizes space. That's spatial design knowledge.
Study how your community solves problems without technology. That's service design knowledge.
Study symbolism and color in your culture. That's brand design knowledge.
Principle 4: Promote Equity and Justice
Strive to create designs that are equitable and contribute to social justice. This means considering the potential impacts of design on different communities and working to mitigate harm.
Practical application:
Ask: "Who is excluded by this design?" Not after launch—before.
Design for the person with slowest internet, lowest literacy, least data, most constraints.
If a design requires formal documentation, it excludes 70% of Africa.
If a design requires English, it excludes 60% of Africa.
Make offline-first, not online-first.
Principle 5: Decolonization is a Posture, Not a Checklist
Decolonial design is not a checklist you complete once. It is a shift in posture that moves from efficiency toward equity and from assumptions toward context.
This means: You will never be done. Every project requires you to unlearn something, question something, and rebuild something.
The Economics of Decolonial Design
Why Western Design Fails Economically in African Contexts
In Nigeria and South Africa, informality is a major limiting factor in platform integration. SMEs operating outside formal financial and regulatory systems often lack the documentation or compliance capability to onboard onto digital platforms. Conversely, Kenya's more inclusive approach, characterized by grassroots digital literacy programs and simplified onboarding, demonstrates that informality need not be a barrier to innovation.
The difference:
Western approach: "Formalize first, then onboard." Result: most SMEs excluded.
African approach: "Onboard first, support as they formalize." Result: inclusion.
This isn't just ethics. It's economics. Studies using the UTAUT framework investigated barriers to technology adoption among informal businesses in South Africa, finding that infrastructure-related challenges, including inadequate access to electricity and expensive power supplies, are significant barriers. Limited infrastructure and high Internet access costs further complicate the situation.
When you design only for connected, formal users, you're designing for maybe 20% of Africa. When you design for offline, informal users, you're designing for the market.
Why Decolonial Design is More Profitable
The United States Agency for International Development announced a $3.5 million investment in Nigeria's creative industry, designed to elevate the country's creative sector to global standards. World Usability Day Lagos 2024 was the first held in Africa, with keynote speaker from Apple and Kodak inspiring participants to create culturally relevant and empathetic design.
Decolonial design isn't fringe. It's becoming the requirement for scale in African markets.
Companies like OPay, PalmPay, and M-KOPA that design for African contexts (not despite them) have scale that makes them valuable. They're not trying to be "international." They're succeeding because they're intensely local.
The Resistance you will face
"But Isn't That Just Local Design? Won't It Not Scale?"
African design remains underrepresented on the world stage by certain metrics. Recent world design rankings show very few African countries in top positions—with only South Africa and Egypt making modest showings in global design award rankings, and the rest of the continent scarcely visible.
But here's the thing: Those rankings are Western metrics measuring Western criteria.
OPay scaled to 50 million users. Not by winning design awards. By designing for Nigerians.
Scale doesn't mean "looks like Apple." Scale means "works for your user at their income level, in their context, with their infrastructure."
"But If I Design Locally, Won't I Be Limited?"
No. You'll be specific. And specificity scales.
When M-Pesa went from Kenya to Tanzania, they didn't redesign. They localized. Swahili instead of English. Similar but not identical cultural references. Same principles.
When OPay went to Ghana and Senegal, same approach.
You're not limiting yourself to Kenya forever. You're building from a specific context with strong principles that can travel.
"But Western Design Is More Professional."
Modernism's ongoing influence in design has resulted in interfaces that are sterile and lack emotional depth, frequently failing to resonate with consumers on a cultural level. This design legacy has contributed to the spread of a homogenized global look that values uniformity over embracing many cultural perspectives.
"Professional" just means "familiar to Western eyes." That's not a compliment. That's a constraint.
African design is professional. It's intentional. It's informed by deep cultural knowledge. It's just not familiar to the people judging design awards.
What you Should Starting Now
For UX/UI Designers
Stop using Western design systems as templates. Figma's templates are great for learning, but they're Western. Design your own.
Design for slow internet first. Stripe, Figma, and Apple assume fast bandwidth. You design for 3G users.
Use color and visual density intentionally. Whitespace isn't virtue. Information architecture that serves users is.
Prioritize trust signals over minimalism. Regulatory badges, agent logos, payment methods visible. Make the system trustworthy, not sterile.
Learn the symbolism in your culture. Adinkra symbols mean things. Maasai patterns mean things. Use them intentionally or don't use them at all.
For Product Designers
Stop doing "needs assessment." Spend 6 months understanding existing systems before you design solutions.
Co-design with communities. Not user research. Co-design.
Design for the informal economy, not against it. Don't try to formalize. Strengthen existing systems.
Build for daily-income users. Payment flexibility, offline access, agent integration, instant confirmation.
Test with people earning less than $5 per day. Not focus groups. Real users. Real usage.
For Service Designers
Map existing service ecosystems before redesigning. What social contracts exist? What relationships? What informal rules?
Design to strengthen, not replace. If a community has working informal systems, your job is to make them more visible/efficient, not formalize them.
Involve the entire service ecosystem in design. Not just end users. Agents, community leaders, informal networks.
Design for resilience, not just efficiency. In volatile contexts, redundancy and flexibility matter more than optimization.
Conclusion
Decolonizing your design practice isn't about being "culturally sensitive" or "inclusive." Those are minimum standards. It's about being competent for your context. If you're designing in Kenya and using Western frameworks, you're not being professional. You're being incompetent. You're ignoring the reality of your users, their infrastructure, their social structures, and their economics.
Being a designer in Africa means being rooted in Africa, not in somebody else's paradigm. This is the time to reclaim creative direction, to value homegrown design languages as equal to any other, and to bolster confidence in unique perspectives.
The designers winning right now—OPay's team, PalmPay's team, M-KOPA's team, Safaricom's team—aren't rebelling against Western design. They're ignoring it. They're building for Africans, with African principles, using African knowledge systems.
And they're scaling.
That's your model. That's your competition. That's your standard.
Stop trying to be "international." Start being excellently local. The world will notic
References
Rahul Bhattacharya (March 2024) - "Reimagining Design: Decolonization, Cultural Inclusivity and the Future of User Experience Design"
Yaw Ofosu-Asare (2024) - "Decolonising Design in Africa: Towards New Theories, Methods, and Practices" (Routledge)
Mohebat Ahmadi (September 2025) - "When UX meets digital colonialism: Rethinking design beyond borders"
AIF (January 2025) - "Colour Outside the Lines: Decolonizing Design"
Fashion Sustainability Directory (February 2025) - "Decolonizing Design Methodologies"
dEX Design Conference (August 2025) - "The Evolution of Design in Africa: The Past, Present, and AI-Driven Future"
DeWitt Prat et al. (2024) - "Decolonizing LLMs: An Ethnographic Framework for AI in African Contexts" (EPIC Proceedings)
Bothello & Weiss (2024) - "Strengthening Africa's Urban Informal Economies" (Stanford Social Innovation Review)
World Economic Forum (October 2024) - "Informal economy and sustainable growth in emerging markets"
African Design Industry Report 2024-2025
Nairobi Design Week 2025 Programming
Design Week Lagos 2025 - "Five next-gen Nigerian designers"
BusinessDay (November 2024) - "Africa takes center stage in global design conversation"
African Business (May 2025) - "Meet the African designers taking on fast fashion"
Stimson Center (March 2024) - "Africa's Future: Rethinking Development Based on the African Experience"
Carnegie Endowment (September 2024) - "Reimagining Global Economic Governance: African and Global Perspectives"
SAJIM (October 2024) - "The barriers to technology adoption among businesses in the informal economy in Cape Town"
IJBES (2025) - "Platform-Enabled Growth and Digital Inclusion in Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa"
APRI (September 2025) - "Youth inclusion in green technology in Africa"
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Westernization of African Design
Westernization of African Design
Westernization of African Design
Westernization of African Design
Breaking Free from Colonial Design Frameworks in African UX, Product, and Service Design
Summary
When you're taught design in Africa—whether at university, bootcamp, or through Western online courses—you're learning European problem-solving frameworks dressed up as universal truth.
Design education in Africa primarily reflects western values and priorities, with current pedagogical approaches shaped by colonial legacies. This isn't accident. It's structural. And it's killing your ability to design for the 83% of Africa's workforce in the informal economy.
The African Design Industry Report 2024-2025 shows 1,350,936 designers across 53 African nations, with Nigeria alone having 302,630 designers. Yet most of these designers are still applying Western frameworks to African problems. The result: beautiful interfaces that don't work for the people who actually need them.
This article breaks down exactly where Western design fails, why it fails, how it perpetuates colonial power structures, and what African designers are actually doing differently across UX, product, and service design.
What You Were Taught is Wrong
If you studied design in Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, or South Africa, here's what likely happened:
You learned Bauhaus principles (German, 1920s industrial modernism). You learned Swiss grid systems. You learned "form follows function." You learned that clean, minimal design is "professional" and "international," while maximalist, symbolic design is "cluttered" or "unsophisticated."
Then you looked at African design traditions and were told they were "craft," not "design." You were taught to revere Apple, Google, and Stripe's design systems while your grandmother's beadwork, your country's textile symbolism, and your community's spatial logic were treated as cultural artifacts, not design knowledge.
Colonial legacies deeply shaped African design education, causing curricula to reflect Western values and priorities at the expense of local knowledge. Many African designers were taught to revere European art and design principles while their own indigenous design knowledge was sidelined.
This is not neutral education. This is epistemic violence—the violent erasure of non-Western ways of knowing.
The Specific Problem: Design Thinking as Imperialism
Decolonizing design requires recognizing that design is not neutral and can reinforce existing power structures. Many design frameworks, from user-centered design to design thinking, while seemingly neutral, can inadvertently reinforce Western cultural values and assumptions about user needs and behaviors.
Here's the mechanism:
Design Thinking (the framework taught everywhere—Stanford d.School, IDEO, most bootcamps) assumes:
Users are rational and individualistic
Problem-solving is linear (empathize → define → ideate → prototype → test)
The designer is separate from the user (observer, not participant)
Technology and innovation are solutions
Efficiency and scalability are paramount
This doesn't match African contexts, where:
Users make decisions based on community relationships, not individual preference
Problem-solving is cyclical and involves collective wisdom, not individual insights
The designer is embedded in the community, not external
Solutions are often low-tech, adaptive, and rooted in existing social systems
Sustainability and belonging matter more than efficiency
Research on informal businesses in Kenya and South Africa shows that these economies operate upon and are held together by a social order built on cooperative arrangements, long-standing norms, values, and personal relationships that generate remarkably adaptive business practices. Yet current development-policy paradigms seek to replace informality with formal, Western-style economic arrangements, thereby endangering these local arrangements.
When you apply "Design Thinking" to an informal business in Kibera or Lekki, you're not solving their problem. You're trying to formalize them, extract them, and make them legible to Western capital. And you're calling it "innovation."
The Aesthetic Imperialism Problem
Where western design frame work fails in Africa
Clean and minimal design is treated as a global taste, while local aesthetics are seen as clutter, even when they carry meaning. Aesthetic universals exported globally show how choices made in one place ripple outward and shape another.
Let me be specific.
The Apple/Stripe Aesthetic: Lots of whitespace, sans-serif fonts, one primary action per screen, 3-5 color palette maximum, no cultural ornamentation.
This aesthetic was developed for:
Users with fast internet (bandwidth-conscious design)
Users fluent in minimalist Western aesthetics (cultural literacy)
Users on high-end devices with large screens
Users prioritizing speed of interaction over relationship-building
This fails in Africa because:
Whitespace isn't empty in Africa—it's wasteful. A merchant in Nairobi selling phone credit online expects visual density. Information architecture that leaves "whitespace" feels incomplete. In Ghana, designers use Adinkra symbols in branding and interior design. In Kenya and Tanzania, designers incorporate Swahili or Maasai elements into modern graphics. That's not clutter. That's cultural communication.
Minimalism erases trust signals. In markets with high fraud, users need to see evidence: agent logos, regulatory badges, payment method icons, trust indicators. Western minimal design hides these. This risks making design oppressive rather than inclusive. Universal design patterns that ignore cultural context become oppressive because they reinforce hierarchies of aesthetics—saying "Western is good, local is bad".
One action per screen assumes users are patient. Users paying for mobile data by the minute don't want to tap through 5 screens. In Nigeria and South Africa, SMEs operating in informal economies often lack data literacy and infrastructure. Digital tools require awareness and training, and users simply abandon products that demand too much friction.
The real-world impact: OPay and PalmPay don't use the Stripe aesthetic. They use dense information architecture, lots of payment method icons, agent logos, and regulatory badges everywhere. This isn't less sophisticated design. It's more contextually intelligent design. Users who've been defrauded before need to see that many trust signals.
Product Design: The "Needs Assessment" Trap
Western product design does something that sounds good but is actually colonial: it tells communities "I'm here to understand your needs and solve your problems."
Then it ignores what communities are already doing.
Current development paradigms that seek to replace informality with formal, Western-style economic arrangements risk undermining existing economic and social-welfare systems that fulfill crucial functions in the absence of the state. These local arrangements are held together by cooperative norms, values, and personal relationships.
Example: A Western designer sees informal merchants in Dagoretti Corner, Nairobi, and thinks "these people need digital payment systems." So they build a mobile payment app. The app fails because the merchants already have payment systems—they trust each other, settle daily, and their informal ledger is reliable.
The designer missed the actual "need": the merchants don't need digital payments. They need visibility to customers outside their neighborhood. They need a way to show product catalogs to customers who've heard about them via word-of-mouth but can't visit in person.
The assumption in Western product design: "What's not formal doesn't exist. What's not digital isn't real."
The reality in African informal economies: The systems work. They're just invisible to outsiders. Before you design "solutions," you need to understand the existing solutions and ask: "What's missing? What breaks? What could be better?"
This requires participatory design, not needs assessment. It requires you staying for six months, not weeks.
Service Design: The Systems Erasure Problem
The World Bank characterizes the informal economy as "low productivity, resulting in low and irregular earnings," treating it as a problem to be solved. But this ignores that the informal economy comprises nearly 83% of employment in Africa and operates on existing social orders that are remarkably adaptive.
Western service design treats informal systems as broken. African service design should treat them as sophisticated.
Example: Kenya's informal public transport system (matatus).
Western designers see:
No centralized ticketing system (problem)
No standardized routes (problem)
No official pricing (problem)
Cash-only (problem)
So they build formal solutions: digital ticketing, GPS tracking, standardized routes. These fail because they ignore what matatus actually do well:
Route flexibility (adapt to demand in real-time)
Social knowledge (drivers know every neighborhood)
Community trust (you know your driver)
Job creation (thousands of micro-entrepreneurs)
Affordability (competition keeps prices low)
Good service design would ask: "How can we make these strengths visible while addressing real breakpoints?" Maybe that's GPS only when the driver wants it. Maybe that's a lightweight ticketing system that doesn't force standardization. Maybe that's mobile money integration without replacing trust-based payment.
This requires understanding the service ecology—not imposing a Western service blueprint.
How AI Models Export Western Bias Globally
Western-centric datasets produce AI models that reproduce existing bias. These models are then exported as if they were universal solutions, reinforcing unequal power dynamics when applied globally.
Here's the mechanism:
AI is trained on Western data (mostly American, some European). The models learn Western aesthetics, Western categorization schemes, Western ideas of what constitutes "high quality."
These biases are exported to Africa via apps, tools, and frameworks. When you use Figma, you're using a design tool trained on Western interfaces. When you use ChatGPT for copywriting, it's trained on English internet text (which is 63% American).
African designers then use these tools, unknowingly accepting Western bias as "best practice."
Some artists and designers are working to create AI models trained specifically on indigenous art forms and non-Western design traditions. The goal is not to reject Western tradition, but to recognize and celebrate the multiplicity of design approaches that exist worldwide.
A concrete example: If you ask an AI to "generate a modern, professional website for a Kenyan SME," it will generate something that looks like a Stripe or Shopify template. Clean, minimal, English-language, vertical scrolling. It won't generate something that uses Swahili, visual density, horizontal scrolling, or local payment methods—because those weren't in the training data.
This is why African designers must be skeptical of "AI-generated" design. It's encoding Western aesthetics at scale.
Language as a Design Problem
Africa is highly multilingual, with most Africans speaking several languages, often including a regional language used for higher education. A survey of African UX researchers in Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, and Tanzania found that nearly half have a linguistic repertoire of more than one language, and some have three or more.
Yet most digital products are English-only. This isn't a language problem. This's a design problem.
Example: M-Pesa originally worked in English. When Safaricom added Swahili, usage skyrocketed among first-time users. Not because Swahili speakers suddenly wanted M-Pesa. But because they could understand it. They could trust it. It felt like it was made for them.
English-only design is design that says "this is for educated, cosmopolitan users." It erases everyone else.
Good design in Africa means:
Local language first (not English with translation)
Scripts that work in local languages (not just Latin alphabet)
Metaphors rooted in local experience (not Western metaphors)
The Decolonization Movement
African design is in the midst of a dynamic renaissance. All across the continent—from Accra's bustling creative tech hubs to Nairobi's maker spaces and Lagos' design studios, a new generation of designers are redefining what it means to create in an African context. These creatives are merging the past and present, drawing on cultural heritage while mastering modern tools.
But this isn't romanticization. It's strategic.
One major conversation in the present is the decolonization of design—essentially, unlearning the notion that "good design" is synonymous with Western design, and instead centering African perspectives, needs, and narratives.
How It Manifests: Design Education Transformation
Integrating indigenous knowledge and cultural practices into contemporary design education is vital for a more inclusive, contextually relevant, and globally resonant African design practice. By broadening what is taught and valued—for example, teaching Adinkra symbology alongside Bauhaus principles, or incorporating African philosophies of aesthetics and ergonomics—the aim is to produce designers confident in their own cultural capital.
Real examples:
1. Design Without Borders (Uganda/Kampala) Design Without Borders Africa designs people-centered innovations, partnering with communities across Africa to create contextually rooted products, services, and solutions. This isn't design thinking exported to Africa. This is design thinking from Africa, rooted in community participation.
2. African Design Centre The African Design Centre's mission is to empower leaders who will design a more equitable, just, and sustainable world—with the understanding that designers must be proximate to the lived experience and identities of the communities they design for.
3. Nairobi Design Week (Theme: "We Are The Ancestors") Nairobi Design Week celebrates 10 years of centering community in design. The 2025 theme "We Are The Ancestors" features designers working across graphic design, product innovation, architecture, type design, digital UX/UI, and social impact design—all rooted in African context.
Look at who's being showcased:
Framework Designs: "Merges innovative engineering with refined Kenyan design"
Ceramica Africa: "Timeless African craftsmanship meets contemporary design"
Liquid Lemn: "Blends East African flair with bold, gender-fluid fashion where stripes, sustainability, and self-expression collide"
These designers aren't trying to be "international." They're unapologetically local.
How It Manifests: Product Design Intelligence
At Design Week Lagos 2025, emerging Nigerian designers created objects drawing from community-rooted traditions. Richard Aina's Teriba Chair bridges heritage and modernity: "The interlaced spines that support the backrest represent harmony, the interdependence of community and structure." Joan Eric Udorie's Bantu Stool abstracts woven and carved motifs into fluid curves, embedding traditional spatial logic into modern objects.
This is not decoration. This is structural design that carries cultural knowledge.
How It Manifests: Service Design for Informal Economies
Community groups like Kenyan women's group SATUBO help train up the next generation of artisans and provide skills training to provide rural women with a viable source of income and preserve ancient skill sets. Initiatives like MESH (launched 2021) empower young people in the informal economy through training and financial services, enabling private sector companies to co-create new distribution models by partnering with informal players.
These are service design solutions that don't formalize the informal. They strengthen it.
How to Decolonize your Design Pratice
Principle 1: Recognize Power Dynamics:
Acknowledge that design is not neutral and can reinforce existing power structures. Designers must be aware of their own biases and privileges. This is not about guilt—it's about clarity. Where does your design framework come from? Who benefits when you apply it?
Practical application:
Don't use "best practices" from Silicon Valley. Ask: "Best for whom? In what context?"
Question every Western framework you use. Why grid systems? Why sans-serif? Why whitespace? Why vertical scrolling?
Document your assumptions. If you assume users want "minimal" design, ask: "Based on what evidence? For which users?"
Principle 2: Center Marginalized Voices
Prioritize the perspectives and experiences of communities that have been historically excluded from design processes. This involves actively seeking out and listening to these voices, not extracting them.
This is not user research. User research extracts data. Co-design includes communities in decision-making.
Practical application:
Spend 6+ months in community, not 2 weeks
Hire from the community you're designing for
Share design decisions, not just design artifacts
Ask "What would you design?" not just "What do you need?"
Pay community members for their time and knowledge
Principle 3: Value Diverse Knowledge Systems
Recognize that Western design knowledge is not the only valid or valuable form of design expertise. Other cultures possess rich design traditions and practices.
Practical application:
Learn indigenous design traditions, not as inspiration, but as methodology
Study how your grandmother organizes space. That's spatial design knowledge.
Study how your community solves problems without technology. That's service design knowledge.
Study symbolism and color in your culture. That's brand design knowledge.
Principle 4: Promote Equity and Justice
Strive to create designs that are equitable and contribute to social justice. This means considering the potential impacts of design on different communities and working to mitigate harm.
Practical application:
Ask: "Who is excluded by this design?" Not after launch—before.
Design for the person with slowest internet, lowest literacy, least data, most constraints.
If a design requires formal documentation, it excludes 70% of Africa.
If a design requires English, it excludes 60% of Africa.
Make offline-first, not online-first.
Principle 5: Decolonization is a Posture, Not a Checklist
Decolonial design is not a checklist you complete once. It is a shift in posture that moves from efficiency toward equity and from assumptions toward context.
This means: You will never be done. Every project requires you to unlearn something, question something, and rebuild something.
The Economics of Decolonial Design
Why Western Design Fails Economically in African Contexts
In Nigeria and South Africa, informality is a major limiting factor in platform integration. SMEs operating outside formal financial and regulatory systems often lack the documentation or compliance capability to onboard onto digital platforms. Conversely, Kenya's more inclusive approach, characterized by grassroots digital literacy programs and simplified onboarding, demonstrates that informality need not be a barrier to innovation.
The difference:
Western approach: "Formalize first, then onboard." Result: most SMEs excluded.
African approach: "Onboard first, support as they formalize." Result: inclusion.
This isn't just ethics. It's economics. Studies using the UTAUT framework investigated barriers to technology adoption among informal businesses in South Africa, finding that infrastructure-related challenges, including inadequate access to electricity and expensive power supplies, are significant barriers. Limited infrastructure and high Internet access costs further complicate the situation.
When you design only for connected, formal users, you're designing for maybe 20% of Africa. When you design for offline, informal users, you're designing for the market.
Why Decolonial Design is More Profitable
The United States Agency for International Development announced a $3.5 million investment in Nigeria's creative industry, designed to elevate the country's creative sector to global standards. World Usability Day Lagos 2024 was the first held in Africa, with keynote speaker from Apple and Kodak inspiring participants to create culturally relevant and empathetic design.
Decolonial design isn't fringe. It's becoming the requirement for scale in African markets.
Companies like OPay, PalmPay, and M-KOPA that design for African contexts (not despite them) have scale that makes them valuable. They're not trying to be "international." They're succeeding because they're intensely local.
The Resistance you will face
"But Isn't That Just Local Design? Won't It Not Scale?"
African design remains underrepresented on the world stage by certain metrics. Recent world design rankings show very few African countries in top positions—with only South Africa and Egypt making modest showings in global design award rankings, and the rest of the continent scarcely visible.
But here's the thing: Those rankings are Western metrics measuring Western criteria.
OPay scaled to 50 million users. Not by winning design awards. By designing for Nigerians.
Scale doesn't mean "looks like Apple." Scale means "works for your user at their income level, in their context, with their infrastructure."
"But If I Design Locally, Won't I Be Limited?"
No. You'll be specific. And specificity scales.
When M-Pesa went from Kenya to Tanzania, they didn't redesign. They localized. Swahili instead of English. Similar but not identical cultural references. Same principles.
When OPay went to Ghana and Senegal, same approach.
You're not limiting yourself to Kenya forever. You're building from a specific context with strong principles that can travel.
"But Western Design Is More Professional."
Modernism's ongoing influence in design has resulted in interfaces that are sterile and lack emotional depth, frequently failing to resonate with consumers on a cultural level. This design legacy has contributed to the spread of a homogenized global look that values uniformity over embracing many cultural perspectives.
"Professional" just means "familiar to Western eyes." That's not a compliment. That's a constraint.
African design is professional. It's intentional. It's informed by deep cultural knowledge. It's just not familiar to the people judging design awards.
What you Should Starting Now
For UX/UI Designers
Stop using Western design systems as templates. Figma's templates are great for learning, but they're Western. Design your own.
Design for slow internet first. Stripe, Figma, and Apple assume fast bandwidth. You design for 3G users.
Use color and visual density intentionally. Whitespace isn't virtue. Information architecture that serves users is.
Prioritize trust signals over minimalism. Regulatory badges, agent logos, payment methods visible. Make the system trustworthy, not sterile.
Learn the symbolism in your culture. Adinkra symbols mean things. Maasai patterns mean things. Use them intentionally or don't use them at all.
For Product Designers
Stop doing "needs assessment." Spend 6 months understanding existing systems before you design solutions.
Co-design with communities. Not user research. Co-design.
Design for the informal economy, not against it. Don't try to formalize. Strengthen existing systems.
Build for daily-income users. Payment flexibility, offline access, agent integration, instant confirmation.
Test with people earning less than $5 per day. Not focus groups. Real users. Real usage.
For Service Designers
Map existing service ecosystems before redesigning. What social contracts exist? What relationships? What informal rules?
Design to strengthen, not replace. If a community has working informal systems, your job is to make them more visible/efficient, not formalize them.
Involve the entire service ecosystem in design. Not just end users. Agents, community leaders, informal networks.
Design for resilience, not just efficiency. In volatile contexts, redundancy and flexibility matter more than optimization.
Conclusion
Decolonizing your design practice isn't about being "culturally sensitive" or "inclusive." Those are minimum standards. It's about being competent for your context. If you're designing in Kenya and using Western frameworks, you're not being professional. You're being incompetent. You're ignoring the reality of your users, their infrastructure, their social structures, and their economics.
Being a designer in Africa means being rooted in Africa, not in somebody else's paradigm. This is the time to reclaim creative direction, to value homegrown design languages as equal to any other, and to bolster confidence in unique perspectives.
The designers winning right now—OPay's team, PalmPay's team, M-KOPA's team, Safaricom's team—aren't rebelling against Western design. They're ignoring it. They're building for Africans, with African principles, using African knowledge systems.
And they're scaling.
That's your model. That's your competition. That's your standard.
Stop trying to be "international." Start being excellently local. The world will notic
References
Rahul Bhattacharya (March 2024) - "Reimagining Design: Decolonization, Cultural Inclusivity and the Future of User Experience Design"
Yaw Ofosu-Asare (2024) - "Decolonising Design in Africa: Towards New Theories, Methods, and Practices" (Routledge)
Mohebat Ahmadi (September 2025) - "When UX meets digital colonialism: Rethinking design beyond borders"
AIF (January 2025) - "Colour Outside the Lines: Decolonizing Design"
Fashion Sustainability Directory (February 2025) - "Decolonizing Design Methodologies"
dEX Design Conference (August 2025) - "The Evolution of Design in Africa: The Past, Present, and AI-Driven Future"
DeWitt Prat et al. (2024) - "Decolonizing LLMs: An Ethnographic Framework for AI in African Contexts" (EPIC Proceedings)
Bothello & Weiss (2024) - "Strengthening Africa's Urban Informal Economies" (Stanford Social Innovation Review)
World Economic Forum (October 2024) - "Informal economy and sustainable growth in emerging markets"
African Design Industry Report 2024-2025
Nairobi Design Week 2025 Programming
Design Week Lagos 2025 - "Five next-gen Nigerian designers"
BusinessDay (November 2024) - "Africa takes center stage in global design conversation"
African Business (May 2025) - "Meet the African designers taking on fast fashion"
Stimson Center (March 2024) - "Africa's Future: Rethinking Development Based on the African Experience"
Carnegie Endowment (September 2024) - "Reimagining Global Economic Governance: African and Global Perspectives"
SAJIM (October 2024) - "The barriers to technology adoption among businesses in the informal economy in Cape Town"
IJBES (2025) - "Platform-Enabled Growth and Digital Inclusion in Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa"
APRI (September 2025) - "Youth inclusion in green technology in Africa"
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