Who Speaks for African HCI? Mapping Authorship, Venues, and Epistemic Gaps of 10 Years of African HC

Abstract

African HCI research is increasingly vibrant, yet its narrative is still largely written from outside the continent. We analyzed 268 peer-reviewed papers published between 2014 and 2024, coding 1091 author–paper contributions by institutional location and venue. Sixty-five percent of contributions come from non-African institutions, and the African share is concentrated in Namibia, South Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria. Region-focused venues such as AfriCHI and ICTD regularly achieve majority African authorship, whereas mainstream HCI conferences rarely pass 30 percent. Our findings illuminate these patterns and frame “re-centring African wisdom” as a structural challenge that requires targeted changes in funding, editorial practice, and training pipelines ahead of AfriCHI 2025.

Citation

Houda Elmimouni, Khadijah D Mohammed, Hafeni Mthoko, Shaimaa Lazem, and Nicola J. Bidwell. 2025. Who Speaks for African HCI? Mapping Authorship, Venues, and Epistemic Gaps of 10 Years of African HCI Research. In The 5th Biennial African Human Computer Interaction Conference (Africhi 2025), November 4–8, 2025, Cairo, Egypt. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 14 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3757232.3757271