A high-stakes session on economic justice has concluded with African delegates issuing an uncompromising demand for former colonial powers to pay reparations for centuries of exploitation that continue to trap working women at the bottom of a ‘rigged’ global economic system.
The discussions, held during a regional forum on Economic Justice and Alternatives to the Global Economic Order, brought together labour activists, economists, and political organisers who linked the daily struggles of Africa’s working women directly to historical crimes that remained unpaid and unacknowledged.
Participants reached a unanimous conclusion that real development across the African continent could not proceed without substantial reparations from England, Belgium, France, the United States, Germany, and other nations that built their wealth on African exploitation.
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They cited the enduring impact of slavery, systematically plundered natural resources, and centuries of cheap African labour that enriched Western economies while leaving African nations structurally impoverished.
They also argued that it was not only an historical matter but a current one, as those colonial arrangements continued to shape the wages, working conditions, and life prospects of African women today.
Associate Professor with the Department of Labour and Human Resource Studies, University of Cape Coast (UCC), Akua Opokua Britwum, provided a systematic analysis of how international financial architecture directly determined the economic reality facing working women across Africa.
She outlined the mechanisms through which lending conditions imposed by international financial institutions, currency manipulation, and multinational corporate interests shape wages, job security, and access to essential public services for women who already face the steepest barriers in labour markets.
Prof. Britwum stated that these were not neutral economic forces, but deliberate policy choices embedded in international financial rules that kept African economies tied to extractive models.
“In these arrangements, African nations remain suppliers of raw materials and cheap labour while importing finished goods and sophisticated services, leaving women workers trapped at the bottom of global value chains,” she said.
She noted that multinational corporations operating in Africa maintained wage structures that assumed women workers have male breadwinners at home, justifying poverty wages that cannot support independent survival.
“These assumptions persist even as women increasingly serve as primary or sole income earners for their households,” she said, saying, repairing this damage required resource transfers on a scale commensurate with the theft.
Prof. Britwum also called for unconditional resource transfers that African nations could invest in industrialization, infrastructure, education, healthcare, and social protection systems central to the needs of working women.
The session closed with concrete commitments to coordinated political action across the continent with delegates agreeing to strengthen connections between labour movements, women’s organisations, and anti-imperialist political formations to build a unified front capable of forcing the reparations question onto the international agenda.
GNA
