Let’s Congratulate our 2025-26 Susan Ford Dorsey Innovation Africa Fellow Awardees!

Mpho Molefe is a PhD candidate in the English Department. Her project begins from the premise that nationalist narratives prioritizing citizenship as the single metric for belonging minimize the ways in which the effects of South Africa’s settler colonial past persist in the form of sharp economic disparities and white dominance in landownership. Her dissertation,“Provisional Belonging in Post-Apartheid South African Literature,” is a study of post-apartheid novels (1998-2018) that represent the country’s settler colonial past in the nineteenth century. She argues that select novels offer an alternative way of thinking about belonging that she terms “provisional belonging.” Rather than considering belonging in terms of arrival, the temporal sense of “provisional” as “temporary” or “in place of a better alternative” invites us to conceptualize belonging in terms of process and navigation. Such an approach is necessary because of the forms of unbelonging kept openly in view alongside the connections to land and community that one might hold. Provisionality thus marks a particular kind of ontological stance, or unique way of being in the world as one connects to it. Rather than a sense of belonging that is permanent or naturalized, this tentative form of belonging is characterized by feelings of hesitation, or sometimes of apology. It is associated not with unequivocally claiming a right to land, but with seeking permission from or otherwise acknowledging prior occupants in both their embodied and spirit forms. Provisionality embraces a nonlinear form of time consciousness, one that enables the continued acknowledgement of former dispossessions even as new ties to South Africa are being formed. The sense of “provisional”as temporary asserts that it has been centuries since a settled sense of belonging was possible in South Africa, or, perhaps, anywhere.

Anirudh Sankar is a PhD candidate in the Economics Department. His research investigates how the modes of learning available to African farmers—particularly whether they are conceptual or rooted in “black-box” approaches—influence their productivity, adaptive capacity, and broader welfare. This inquiry is driven by a recognition that small-scale agricultural decision-making is complex, multidimensional, and fraught with uncertainty — and the way farmers learn plays a fundamental role in how they navigate it. A key issue is farmers’ choice of technologies, which includes anything from seeds to mechanized irrigation. These technologies interact in complicated ways with each other and with ambient soil and weather conditions,and economists consider African farmers’ choice of technologies to be far from the production frontier (Suri and Udry, 2006). Although farmers face a variety of financial constraints, such as savings and credit frictions, one leg of the problem is purely informational (Macgruder, 2018). Randomized experiments with tomato farmers in Eastern Uganda will investigate the causal impacts of providing a conceptual understanding over a traditional “black-box” understanding of an important technology for tomato growth: fertilizers. 800 small-scale tomato farmers are randomly assigned to receive either detailed mechanistic explanations about nutrient-soil-crop interactions, or conventional prescriptive recommendations about fertilizer use. The next phase of the project will follow up with our farmer participants at their households, to discover whether their conceptual training transformed their input choice, yield, and profits on their own plots. Ultimately, this research agenda seeks to position African farmers as active protagonists in, and not passive recipients of, a sustainable process of structural transformation.