Citizen perspectives on the future of development cooperation
Key findings
- Across 38 African countries surveyed in 2024/2025, health (cited by 38% of respondents as one of their top three priorities) and unemployment (33%) are, on average, the most important problems Africans want their governments to address (Figure 1).
- o Unemployment is a greater priority for young adults and urban citizens than for older citizens and rural residents.
- o While unemployment has consistently been a top priority for government action over the past decade, health has surpassed it in the most recent survey results.2
- About six in 10 citizens (59%) across 38 countries prioritise government accountability, even if this slows decision making, over “getting things done” with less citizen involvement.
- The strength of this sentiment varies by country: Seychellois, Batswana, and Kenyans are the strongest proponents of government accountability, while fewer than half of citizens share this view in Angola, Mauritania, Mozambique, Congo Brazzaville, Chad, Côte d Ivoire, and Guinea.
- More than three-quarters (77%) of Africans expect elected officials to adhere to voters’ demands rather than their own ideas.
- o This perspective is most pronounced in Tanzania, Eswatini, and Kenya, and weakest in São Tomé and Príncipe, Comoros, and Senegal.
- o This view is also more prevalent among the educated and employed, and significantly stronger in East and Southern Africa than in North and West Africa.
- Demand for government accountability has been consistently high over the past decade, holding at around six in 10 since 2016/2018 across the 28 countries surveyed continuously during this period (Figure 2).3
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As the global development-cooperation system undergoes profound changes, a central question is whose priorities should shape what comes next. For African countries, this requires looking beyond governments and development institutions to the citizens whose lives development cooperation is ultimately intended to improve. How African countries navigate these changes, and whether their citizens’ priorities shape the response, will matter for development outcomes across the continent.
The Future of Development Cooperation Coalition (the Coalition) is a multi-stakeholder initiative working to reshape the global development-cooperation system. As part of the Coalition’s consultation process, the African Center for Economic Transformation (ACET), in its role as African co-host, convened consultations in Rabat and Kigali with policy makers, development partners, private-sector leaders, civil society, researchers, and young people (Future of Development Cooperation Coalition, 2026a, 2026b). These discussions surfaced recurring questions around country leadership and agenda-setting, institutional capability, accountability for outcomes, youth and human-capital development, regional integration, and the need to address structural power imbalances in the global development architecture.
Development-cooperation agendas are typically shaped by policy makers, practitioners, and international institutions. The Coalition’s consultations in Rabat and Kigali reflected broad expert consensus that cooperation efforts are often poorly aligned with national priorities and that effective cooperation must be grounded in what citizens themselves identify as urgent. To complement these consultations with systematic evidence on citizen priorities, ACET engaged Afrobarometer to analyse relevant findings from its Round 10 surveys.1
Drawing on 50,961 interviews across 38 African countries in 2024/2025, the analysis asks a simple but consequential question: How closely do the priorities emerging from policy and expert discussions align with what African citizens themselves say matters?
The overview below summarises headline findings across three guiding questions: What do African citizens want their governments to prioritise? Where do those priorities align with or challenge the priorities emerging from the Coalition’s consultations? And what do citizen perceptions suggest about the conditions most likely to support long-term development and transformation?
The findings complicate simple narratives about African preferences, particularly those related to development cooperation. Citizens often assess multiple global powers positively rather than sorting neatly into geopolitical camps; they express strong support for greater regional trade and integration; and they place considerable confidence in African institutions, even while awareness of initiatives such as the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) remains limited (Afrobarometer, 2026). Detailed findings follow, organised thematically.
What do African citizens want their governments to prioritise?
Afrobarometer surveys consistently show that citizens’ development priorities are concrete and immediate: Asked what they consider the most important problems their governments must address, they emphasise health, unemployment, cost of living, and basic services. At a moment when external health financing is contracting, citizens are placing greater priority on the capacity of their governments to provide adequate health services (Asunka, Dulani, & Yakubu, 2026). These citizen priorities overlap in substance with many of the concerns raised in the Coalition’s Rabat and Kigali consultations.
Concerns about health dominate in Guinea-Bissau, Uganda, and Liberia, while unemployment leads in Namibia, Lesotho, and Morocco. The rising cost of living is the top concern in Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire, water supply in Guinea and Chad, and food security in Malawi. Unemployment is felt more acutely by young adults and urban residents than by older and rural citizens.
Afrobarometer data show that young people identify specific, addressable barriers to labour-market entry – particularly inadequate training and lack of experience – and that two-thirds think community leaders and organisations are failing to develop and promote young leaders (Lekalake, Sunderland, & Amewunou, 2025). These constraints are felt most strongly by young people actively seeking work, and somewhat more by urban and secondary-educated youth compared to their counterparts living in rural areas or with less formal education. Job creation is the investment young people most want government to prioritise, ahead of education, training, and business loans. When asked what kind of work they would prefer, more than half (54%) say they would rather start their own business than seek employment in the public (22%), private (11%), or nongovernmental (6%) sectors.
Citizens also report that common barriers for African women in the workforce are employer preferences for hiring men and skills gaps, followed by a lack of childcare and inflexible work arrangements (Okello, Adjadeh, & Cumanzala, 2026).
These findings add citizen-level specificity to the broader emphasis on youth empowerment and human capital that featured prominently in the Coalition’s consultations.
Where do these priorities align with or challenge the priorities emerging from the Coalition’s consultations?
Citizens and experts broadly agree on what matters – jobs, the economy, and opportunity. While citizens name what they need day to day, experts tend to focus on the systems intended to produce these outcomes, such as industrial policy, private-sector development, and structural diversification. The risk is that development cooperation is designed and communicated at a level citizens cannot see or feel.
Moving to broader issues of accountability and government responsiveness, which also featured prominently in the Coalition’s discussions, Afrobarometer data suggest that, when faced with a trade-off, most Africans favour accountability over speed of decision making. About six in 10 prioritise checks, consultation, and accountability even if these slow government action, while more than three-quarters say elected leaders should listen to and act on voters’ demands. The implication is that demands for more capable and effective states should not be read as a mandate for less accountable ones. Support for accountable governance is strongest among more educated and employed respondents, and is more pronounced in East and Southern Africa than in West and North Africa.
On international partnerships, China receives more positive assessments (62%) of its economic and political influence in Africa than the United States (52%) and the European Union (EU) (50%), with former colonial powers (41%), India (39%), and Russia (36%) trailing. These rankings suggest that citizens assess international partners primarily by perceived impact – visible economic engagement, infrastructure, trade – rather than by historical ties or stated intentions. Notably, views of different global powers generally move together rather than in competition: Citizens who rate one positively tend to rate others positively, too, suggesting that Africans do not see international partnerships as a choice between competing powers. This is consistent with the consultations’ emphasis on African agency in managing multiple partnerships simultaneously.
Citizen data indicate that the constraint on moving toward greater trade integration on the continent is not public appetite but implementation and awareness. In terms of positive influence, the African Union (AU) (55%) and regional economic communities (56%) are rated more highly than any external power except China, and they are widely seen as responsive to national interests. Support for free trade is a majority position in most countries (62% on average), and two-thirds of citizens favour promoting trade globally rather than confining it to their subregion or continent. Yet few are aware of the AfCFTA, the very framework designed to facilitate continental economic integration.
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While the findings show that citizens support free movement within their region, they continue to report difficulties crossing borders in practice. This gap between citizens’ aspirations and the realities they encounter underscores the urgent need to accelerate the operationalisation of the AU integration framework.
What do citizens’ experiences and preferences imply for the future design of development cooperation?
Taken together, citizen perceptions across a range of themes point to four key implications for how development cooperation should be designed and delivered:
- Accountability is the condition that citizens attach to legitimacy. Citizens do not just want services delivered – they want to be able to hold the institutions delivering them to account. Cooperation models that bypass this will lack public buy-in.
- Interest in emigration is a signal of dissatisfaction with governance, with direct implications for brain drain, particularly among African youth. Citizens who assess their government’s economic performance more positively are less likely to want to leave their country. This is especially pronounced among young and educated citizens – the people whom countries can least afford to lose. Improving domestic economic opportunity and governance may be as important to retaining skills and talent as any migration-specific intervention.
- Regional integration has public support but needs to become visible and practical. Citizens broadly support freer trade and movement, but awareness of continental initiatives remains low, and many still experience cross-border movement as difficult. Development cooperation can add value by helping translate regional commitments into visible improvements in mobility, trade, infrastructure, and economic opportunity.
- Citizens want partnerships, not patrons. Citizens appear comfortable engaging positively with multiple global powers rather than choosing a single external partner. We should avoid assuming that citizens want exclusive geopolitical alignment and instead support partnerships that preserve choice, agency, and room to pursue national interests.
Rorisang Lekalake Rorisang Lekalake is the director of analysis at Afrobarometer.
Edson Ntodwa Edson Ntodwa is a research analysis officer at Afrobarometer.
Yayra Azaglo Yayra Azaglo is research assistant for Afrobarometer.