The Interestingness Value of Including African Stories in Marketing and Public Policy Research

How many articles about an African context have you seen published in top business journals? Not many? Exactly! Africa is home to more than 1.5 billion people, 54 countries, and the world's youngest population. The continent provides diversity in marketing and public policy (e.g., solar energy services), successful brands with global imprints (e.g., MTN Group), and a globalizing consumer culture (e.g., migrant remittances). Africa also has many cases of policy-driven market innovations, including fintech (e.g., PayStack), healthtech (e.g., mPharma), and agtech (e.g., Hello Tractor), which often emerge amid scarcity and offer insights otherwise invisible in Western markets. Yet there is a dearth of research that tells Africa's stories, especially in major business journals, (un)intentionally excluding an entire continent from marketing and public policy theory and practice. This commentary addresses this exclusion of Africa and argues for the mutual “interestingness value” of including more African stories, voices, research, and contributions to marketing and public policy research.

What Is the Problem?

If you set aside African scholars working in Western institutions, there are thousands of scholars in Africa who conduct research on Africa. While there are notable examples of African-based scholars who frequently publish African research in top business journals, they are exceptions that prove the norm: Most research by African scholars does not end up in the top business journals. Why is this the case?

There are three main explanations offered. It is unclear how many papers on Africa are submitted to major business journals and what their acceptance rates are. However, scholars have noted the systemic exclusion of non-Western scholarship in major journals, including editorial boards and publishing norms that privilege Western institutions, theories, methods, contexts, training, and exposure (Bádéjọ et al. 2022; Ledgerwood et al. 2024). A second and related reason is that the major journals do not receive enough submissions of desirable quality from or about the continent. However, this is not due to a lack of intellectual capability, effort, or desire among African scholars to publish quality work. Rather, what counts as quality by the journals’ definitions is neither always well understood nor communicated widely beyond the gatekeeping tutelage of editors, reviewers, and Western-based scholars who tend to publish in these journals. To address these two challenges, scholars have called for decolonizing pathways in doctoral training and publication, diversifying editorial review boards, and developing institutional policies and practices to increase diversity in what the journals publish (Bádéjọ et al. 2022; Ledgerwood et al. 2024).

A third reason is the lack of local institutional support and incentives for scholars in Africa to target top business journals, which is itself revealing of the salience of top business journal publications in contexts often saddled with limited research support and high teaching loads and student numbers (Darbi et al. 2025). While addressing this issue is outside the remit of the journals and beyond our aims in this note, it is an opportunity for the top journals to better understand how they can align with the incentives and structural barriers that many African scholars face. Failing to do so risks pushing ineffective inclusive policies or accepting the status quo and perpetuating the exclusion of African stories from the journals.

We believe that addressing this (un)intentional exclusion of Africa can offer an opportunity for rethinking inclusion, not for its sake, but because of the immense value of African stories. In this note, we extend these insights and more recent calls to include more African data, stories, cases, and scholarly work (Francis and Mugabo 2025) by advocating for the interestingness value of African stories.

Is Africa (Not) Interesting?

Davis (1971) argues that great theories are not necessarily those that are correct, but rather those that are interesting. He argued that what makes a theory interesting is the extent to which it challenges, refutes, or makes us rethink taken-for-granted assumptions, beliefs, and truths. Interesting is novelty; it is insightful; it is engaging; it is the pivot of progress. This is what we call “interestingness value” or the value of interestingness. Does Africa pass this interestingness-value litmus test? With flying colors. Africa's context, with its diverse and distinct languages, peoples, consumer cultures, problems, resources, innovations, political systems, and public policies, is interesting. For major business journals dominated by Western research, examining any of these phenomena in any African country promises to excite the nonlocal reader while also offering insights that will challenge or at least provide significant boundary conditions and contrasts to what we already know from Western contexts.

Yet, focusing on Africa's interestingness can evoke mixed emotions and contradictory reactions for a reason. When European traders, missionaries, and later colonizers encountered African cultures, they found many aspects of them to be markedly different from their own. That was interesting! However, their response was imperialist and disparaging, discounting these cultures as inferior and uncivilized, and focusing on extracting aspects of their human and natural resources to develop their own continents (Nkrumah 1962). Society has made significant progress in the decades since. However, there persists a sense of unease and inappropriateness of an imperialist co-option and a neocolonial appropriation of going a-searching for Africa's exotic to placate the palates of a Western audience (Bonsu 2009). Where do we draw the line between inclusion for interestingness value and appropriation for interestedness value? The answer, as we will show, is to advocate for, engage with, and celebrate African stories with theoretical, practical, and policy interestingness value in ways that resist epistemic extraction and instead amplify locally grounded epistemologies.

The Interestingness Value of African Stories

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) has been under attack in the last few years, and we have seen many major firms reverse their DEI initiatives—that is, policies and strategies implemented to ensure fair treatment, access to opportunities, increased representation of diverse groups, and an inclusive culture that promotes belonging. Critiquing that is outside the scope of our commentary, but we cite it to urge caution not to uncritically laud or disparage this and other calls for the inclusion of non-Western voices, stories, and scholarship as a superficial DEI initiative—a tokenistic venture merely meant to signal diversity. We argue for the inclusion of African research that has a shared interestingness value for theory, practice, and public policy. We illustrate this value with the case of mobile money payment systems, which is a successful case of local solutions to local problems at the nexus of theory, practice, and policy that has had a significant impact on lives, businesses, and economies within and beyond Africa (see Suri [2017] for a review).

With an estimated half a billion users, mobile money is interesting for how it integrates and transforms multiple cultural, economic, and policy spheres. In terms of practical interestingness value, in one swoop, mobile money circumvented the wicked problem of providing financial services to unbanked populations in Africa who could not access formal financial services. With mobile money, regardless of credit rating, property ownership, income, and literacy levels, millions of people could exchange money, get access to credit and electronic wallets, and pay for services electronically without needing a bank account, all through their mobile phones. This inclusive financial technology contrasts with the goals of banking systems in developed countries, which focused instead on improving access to traditional banking services.

The grassroots practices that birthed mobile money also have theoretical interestingness value, especially when examined through the lens of local cultural systems and theories. Such examination shows how bottom-up innovation can emerge from cultural systems and practices. In this case, the development of mobile money was tied to rural–urban migrant remittance practices, which were driven by cultural expectations of caring for aged parents and extended family members, consistent with the wealth-in-people concept of being a person of consequence in many African cultures (Appau and Crockett 2023). These practices also relied on trust systems within communities, invoking cultural values like Ubuntu (“I am because we are”), which provided the foundation for subsequent formal mobile money systems (Rodima-Taylor 2022). Insights into related cultural value systems provide theoretical tools not only to understand these contexts but also to rethink popular Western concepts such as value regimes and innovation diffusion theories.

Finally, there is a public policy interestingness value in the successful public–private collaboration to scale and formalize mobile money systems. The success of the first mobile money payment system developed in Kenya, M-Pesa, was based on a rare collaboration between competing firms, local and international governments that provided funding and policy frameworks, and third-party firms like IBM that provided additional infrastructure. Mobile money demonstrated the power of mobile phone technology to improve financial inclusion in ways not then obvious to policy or practice, even in developed countries, and became influential in promoting mobile banking and related innovations globally.

Importantly, the success of mobile money showcases an endogenous African story of homegrown innovation that offered solutions, rather than a story of deficit, aid, and conflicts often associated with Africa (Francis and Mugabo 2025). Like the success of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, the success of mobile money offers the sort of interestingness value that we advocate prioritizing in major business journals, because its global amplification, theoretical explication, and diffused replication around the world celebrate Africa and benefit the adopter as well as the journal and its audience.

So many other African stories with strong interestingness value also could benefit African and global audiences if similarly examined and shared. For instance, Africa has some of the largest segments of informal, small-scale businesses or microentrepreneurs in the world, and they offer a lot of interestingness value for research. As an example, Anderson, Chandy, and Zia (2018) won an award for their randomized controlled trial study of 852 microenterprise firms in South Africa. Their research showed that microentrepreneurs who received marketing skills training improved their business performance by increasing sales, whereas those who received financial skills training improved their performance through cost efficiency. Another study in Egypt shows how (not) having formal property rights influences how microentrepreneurs (grocery retailers) engage in marketing innovation practices (Hassan et al. 2023). These two studies highlight the impact of exogenous gaps, risks, and opportunities that microentrepreneurs in Africa often face, but also show the practical, theoretical, and policy interestingness value of examining and telling these stories. Other underexplored cases include the global diffusion of Afrobeats music and North African street food, the emergence of “Detty December” cultural festivities in West Africa, and the entrepreneurial influences and cultural remittances of African diasporas across various African countries. These examples are interesting!

If major journal editors truly appreciate the interestingness value of African stories, then they will be more open to developing policies that deliberately seek to include them and help interested scholars overcome some of the barriers we noted previously. To that end, we have one recommendation. We suggest that the major business journals, including JPP&M, develop a presubmission paper development initiative that allows scholars from African and other non-Western universities to presubmit their papers and receive peer review from a member of the editorial board and another reviewer with context and/or domain expertise. This review will provide the authors with feedback to improve the paper to better meet the journal's quality bar for later submission through the journal's regular submission process. This recommendation should not replace current efforts, such as paper development workshops for scholars in these contexts by some journal editors, but complement them.

Additionally, scholars in Africa must recognize the theoretical, practical, and policy interestingness of their contexts when positioned for top business journals, and proactively build capacity and connections by engaging and collaborating with journal editors and other African scholars who have successfully published African research in these outlets. African scholars in Western-based universities with such capacities could also seek to strengthen the capacity of colleagues in African universities through intellectual remittance, including training, collaboration, advocacy, and exposure.

African stories do not need to be told in the major business journals to have legitimacy, but major business journals need to intentionally make it their public policy to seek, support, and include these stories for the journals’ legitimacy as “world-class.” Rather than expecting only scholars who want to tell these stories to meet a singular, historically Western-derived quality bar, journals should also ask how they might rethink and broaden what counts as rigor, theoretical contribution, and methodological excellence. This may involve recognizing different forms of evidence (e.g., field-embedded, institutional, or community-engaged data), valuing contextually grounded theorizing alongside abstraction, and appreciating contributions that extend theory through institutional specificity rather than universal generalization. Such diversity does not dilute standards; rather, it strengthens them by ensuring that the criteria of excellence are sufficiently plural to capture the richness of global market realities. That too is interesting!