Repositioning Africa in the Global Social Marketing Dialogue: Evidence,Voice and Institutionalisation

Abstract

Keywords

Africa Behaviour Change social marketing institutionalisation

Introduction

One of the earliest applications of Social Marketing (SM) worldwide was Contraceptive SM that formed part of family planning programmes, which started in Egypt in 1978 (Chester, 1986), just a few years after the discipline of SM formally came into existence in 1971 (Kotler & Zaltman, 1971). Similarly, in Saradidi, Kenya, in 1980, family planning services were distributed by community members (Kaseje et al., 1987). Yet, half a century later, Africa’s pioneering role in shaping SM remains conspicuously absent from mainstream discourse, overshadowed by narratives centred on the Global North (Cateriano-Arévalo et al., 2022). While SM has matured into a discipline lauded for driving behaviour change across health, environment, and equity (Lee & Kotler, 2020), its academic lineage and documentation remain paradoxically incomplete. Africa, a continent grappling with intersecting crises of climate vulnerability, youth unemployment, and health inequities, has been relegated to the periphery of SM scholarship, its innovations understudied and its lessons untapped. This omission is not merely academic; it perpetuates a cycle where interventions designed for Lagos or Lusaka are too often informed by theories forged in London or Los Angeles.

While regional SM frameworks have been meticulously mapped in Europe, Asia, and the Americas (Truong et al., 2015), Africa’s contributions are reduced to footnotes, despite evidence of its formative role (Cateriano-Arévalo et al., 2022). This article therefore, seeks to answer the question: How can Africa overcome its marginalisation in social marketing by institutionalising local practices and asserting its unique contributions to the global scholarship? The article argues that Africa’s SM trajectory should not be a peripheral subplot but a vital counter-narrative, one that challenges assumptions about ‘best practices’ and redefines what it means to design interventions in the African context. Through a reflective synthesis of fragmented historical records, contemporary case studies, and practitioner insights, this article reconstructs SM’s evolution across Africa’s 54 nations. It then interrogates why its legacy remains eclipsed and how its future could better voice its own perspectives and lessons, and make stronger contributions to the global SM narrative. As a continental synthesis, the perspectives discussed in this article derive from a diverse but non-exhaustive set of national examples, acknowledging that the immense diversity across 54 countries cannot be captured uniformly.

As global challenges grow more complex, the lessons from Africa’s SM journey are not optional, but essential. However, to document these lessons, African SM scholars and practitioners are challenged to counteract the colonial biases that have siloed SM’s intellectual history (Truong & Dietrich, 2018) and develop a reconstructed narrative of Africa’s SM lessons and the importance of understanding these lessons from an African perspective to overcome the myriad of mistakes that have been made by western aid organizations developing SM campaigns based on western principles. A reflective, thematic synthesis of historical records, contemporary case studies, and academic and grey literature was used to map the SM development in Africa. The analysis is descriptive and interpretive rather than statistical. The article repositions Africa as a critical contributor rather than a peripheral observer. It presents practitioners and scholars with evidence of the SM work done and research conducted, but more importantly challenges these African SM stakeholders to reconstruct the African SM narrative, to unveil, document and correctly label the adaptive strategies for engaging communities on the African continent. For policymakers, this article also provides a roadmap to leverage SM in achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) amid competing crises.

This article begins by contextualising Africa’s socio-political and geographic landscape, then reflects on persistent challenges (e.g., inequality and climate fragility) that SM interventions confront, synthesises SM’s historical milestones, contemporary applications, and emerging research, and concludes with actionable imperatives for SM practitioners, academia, AfSMA, and policy stakeholders. Interventions in this article are considered as SM interventions if they encourage behaviour change which has social benefits, even if not specifically described as SM. The authors adopt the International Social Marketing Association (iSMA) definition that, in addition to the above, includes the six core SM concepts “setting of explicit social goals, citizen orientation and focus, value proposition delivery via the Social Marketing intervention mix, theory, insight, data & evidence informed audience segmentation, competition/barrier and asset analysis, and critical thinking, reflexivity, and being ethical” (iSMA, 2025).

The African Continent

Africa presents a unique context for SM, characterised by its vast geographical scale, unique political landscape, and distinctive demographic profile. The continent is home to 54 countries across five regions: Northern, Eastern, Western, Central, and Southern. Africa encompasses a wide range of climates and ecosystems, from the Saharan and Kalahari deserts to central rainforests and semi-arid grasslands (Britannica, 2022). This physical diversity is matched by varied political trajectories in the post-independence era, encompassing multi-party democracies alongside authoritarian and military regimes (Owusu, 1997), which shape the environment for policy implementation and social change. A defining feature of the contemporary African context is its demographic structure. With a population of approximately 1.55 billion, it is the world’s second most populous continent and is projected to reach 2.5 billion by 2050 (WorldOMeter, 2025). Crucially, Africa’s population is the youngest globally, with a median age of 19.7 years; nineteen of the world’s twenty youngest countries are African (WorldOMeter, 2025). This stands in stark contrast to regions such as Europe, where the median age is approximately 44 years (Eurostat, 2025). The youthfulness of the African population represents an opportunity for socio-economic development and market growth, but a challenge for amplified demands for education, healthcare, and employment. Moreover, as indicated in Figure 1, a life expectancy of 65 years and a high infant mortality rate of 47 deaths per 1,000 live births reflect systemic healthcare access gaps and a higher burden of communicable diseases, while an adult literacy rate of 67% directly influences the design and channels required for effective behaviour change communication (UNESCO, 2025; WorldBank, 2025). These figures stand in sharp contrast to regions such as Europe, where near-universal literacy (99%) and life expectancy of around 80 years (Eurostat, 2025; WorldBank, 2025) create a fundamentally different context for deploying SM initiatives. This reality of the African continent establishes a critical imperative for strategically designed, context-sensitive SM interventions aimed at influencing behaviour for social good across health, environmental, and social equality.

Figure 1.

Demographic statistics in Africa. Adapted from UNESCO (2025); WorldBank (2025); WorldOMeter (2025)

History of SM in Africa

While SM as a discipline in Africa only really found its feet in the 1990s, there is evidence of SM in Africa as early as the 1970s when Phil Harvey and Dr Tim Black, founders of PSI, ran a family planning initiative in Kenya (Andreasen, 2003). Contraceptive SM (CSM) projects, as they were called at the time, were started in Ghana and Kenya in the 1970s but did not continue into the 1980s (Sherris et al., 1985). Similar projects were launched in the late 1970s in Egypt (Chester, 1986; Sherris et al., 1985). The Global Polio Eradication Initiative was started in the late 1980s (GPEI, 2016), and condom SM campaigns, as they became known, became increasingly evident in Uganda, Kenya (Chapman et al., 2011), Morocco (Agha et al., 2006), Cameroon, Zimbabwe and Nigeria (Harvey, 2014), in the 1990s. At the same time, food fortification SM programmes were being developed by the National Nutrition Institute in Egypt (Gohar, 2024) and road safety programmes like the ‘Arrive Alive’ programme in South Africa (PmG, 1999). The application of SM has occured across the continent since 1978, addressing numerous social issues. There have also been a few contributions of African SM scholars to Social Marketing thinking such as Gohar’s feedback provided on the CDCynergy SM planning model (Gohar, 2024) and, more recently, the development of the 6 Step Core SM Planning Framework (Kamel & French, 2025).

Social Challenges in Africa and the Role of SM in Addressing These

Many countries on the African continent face the greatest global challenges, which are often interrelated. For example, Nyiwul (2021) found a significant but negative relationship between social inequality and climate change policy actions. SM has been applied to a wide array of issues, from curbing terrorist activities (Madu & Ogbuji, 2018) and human rights abuses (Odigbo et al., 2020) to corruption prevention (Olarewaju et al., 2021), to mention a few. The sections that follow discuss only some of these issues and some evidence of SM efforts to address these in Africa. Focus on the numerous issues and more comprehensive coverage of the evidence of SM addressing these issues in Africa, and which core principles specifically were included per programme or project, is beyond the scope of this article, but also reflects avenues for future research. Our primary intent is to showcase examples of SM initiatives in Africa that have remained largely undocumented.

Environment

SM on the continent has been applied to a wide variety of behaviours affecting the environment, including downstream efforts such as encouraging sustainable consumption and conservation of scarce resources, as well as upstream efforts such as lobbying governments for climate resilience policies. For example, the Sustainable Wildlife Management programmes in Madagascar, the Republic of Congo and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) used SM to encourage consumption of locally bred livestock to reduce the consumption of unsustainable wild meat (Ntshila et al., 2023; Vanegas et al., 2023; Wright et al., 2023). These downstream campaigns also encourage households to farm their poultry and fish as an alternative food source, as well as to promote food self-sufficiency (Vanegas et al., 2023). SM has been used to promote the use of clean energy appliances (Diaz et al., 2023), to foster household waste separation (Issock et al., 2019), and to encourage water conservation in the Day Zero campaign in Cape Town, South Africa (Martinus & Naru, 2020). In 2019, an in-school SM interactive workshop in Egypt was developed to encourage children to conserve water and electricity as well as to stop littering (Kamel, 2024).

Inequality

Inequality in some parts of Africa includes not only gender and income inequality but also race, sexual orientation (Nyoni, 2020) and xenophobia (HSRC, 2021), rural-urban, access to health services (Boutayeb & Helmert, 2011; Ujewe & van Staden, 2021) and education, to mention as few. For example, in Egypt in 2012, the women’s citizenship initiative was launched, aiming at issuing national ID cards for Egyptian women to ensure access to social, economic and political rights (UNWomen, 2019) with a campaign slogan “Your ID, Your Rights” (Amin, 2012). Dr. Maya Morsy, Egypt’s current Minister of Social Solidarity, and former president of the National Council for Women and former UN Women Country Coordinator for Egypt, stated, “after a decade of hard work, Egypt issued one million ID cards for women by 2023 and we are still going on to reach more women in the most marginalized areas, empowering them to access their full citizenship rights” (Kamel, 2025).

The African Union has also implemented the ‘What African Women Want’ initiative as part of Agenda 2063 (AfricanUnion, 2022). While incorporating various upstream initiatives such as advocacy and institutional capacity building, the ‘What African Women Want’ initiative aims to transform social norms and behaviours around gender equality. In South Africa, the Anti-racism Network of South Africa campaign entitled “#UniteAgainstRacism” called South African citizens to take action against racism (ARNSA, 2019). Similar initiatives by the Independent Online News, such as “#RacismStopsWithMe” and “#RacismMustFall” campaigns, also called for individuals to stand up against racism and xenophobia in South Africa (IOL, 2016).

Health

SM has long worked to address the numerous health challenges facing Africa, such as communicable diseases like HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria, and pandemics like COVID-19, Ebola and Mpox, as well as non-communicable diseases, such as diabetes, micronutrient deficiencies, and obesity. For example, in South Sudan, during the rainy season of 2021, SM principles guided an integrated behaviour change campaign combining malaria education with insecticide-treated net (ITN) distribution in internally displaced persons (IDP) camps (Kilian et al., 2017). Messaging was delivered via megaphones, theatre, and mobile phone SMS in multiple local languages. Despite the humanitarian context, ITN usage increased by over 30% among households, demonstrating the feasibility of SM approaches in fragile and conflict-affected settings (Kilian et al., 2017). In Uganda, demand for long-lasting insecticidal nets (LLIN) through antenatal centres, school distribution, private-sector retail support, and community dialogues was generated using SM interventions. Notably, the LLIN usage rose from 89% to 96%, and the percentage of households willing to pay climbed from 74% to 79% (Ochieng, 2016). In Zambia, SM was used to address malaria prevention (Boit & El-Gayar, 2020) and HIV/Aids (Aja et al., 2020; Washington et al., 2017).

In response to previous epidemics such as Ebola in West Africa, the Centre for Disease Control (CDC) worked with local Ministries of Health, humanitarian aid agencies, international and local partners to develop national communication campaigns about protective behaviours and required behavioural changes such as the ‘Ebola Must Go’ campaign in Liberia and the ‘Ebola Big Idea of the Week’ campaign in Sierra Leone (Bedrosian et al., 2016). These campaigns required adaptation based on language differences, cultural sensitivities, and local role models, and effectively showed the application of SM in Francophone, low-resource settings such as Mali (TCI, 2014). The Zambian Government, similarly to many other Southern Saharan countries, used social media platforms like Facebook to communicate Covid-19 protocols, including facial mask wearing, frequent hand washing with soap, social and physical distancing, as well as staying at home, which played a critical role in fighting the further spread of the virus (Ding et al., 2020).

Dr. Azza Gohar, former Director of the National Nutrition Institute (NNI), former Health Care Management Consultant and Policy Advisor to the Ministry of Health and Social Marketing Consultant for UN Agencies, in Egypt, reports that “starting in the late 1970s and up till today, SM was, and is being used, to address various public health problems, from family planning, the control of childhood diarrheal diseases, staple food fortification to eradicating Poliomyelitis and the prevention and control of bilharzia (schistosomiasis)” (Gohar, 2024). A flour fortification programme to combat iron deficiency anaemia, which began with qualitative research in 1999, in conjunction with other stakeholders such as the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the World Food Program (WFP), was eventually scaled up to a “5-year national program to fortify with iron and folic acid the wheat flour” (Gohar, 2024). This programme reached more than 50 million people (Elhakim et al., 2012). The NNI also implemented SM programmes in Egypt with UNICEF to encourage the adoption of iodised salt and to improve the compliance with the school program for iron supplementation to improve students’ scholastic performance (Gohar, 2024).

While many health challenges still exist, SM campaigns have been applied to a variety of different health challenges such as family planning in Mozambique (Keys, 2016), tobacco prevention in Kenya and Zambia (Tavares et al., 2023), screen time among early childhood students as well as the use of social media and artificial intelligence by elementary students in Egypt (Kamel, 2025) and mental health stigmas in Ghana and Kenya (Potts & Henderson, 2021). Essendi and Ndimba (2023) describe how digital platforms providing real-time data and multi-sectoral stakeholders are utilised to increase the uptake of sexual and reproductive health programmes by adolescents across several African countries. The above paragraphs present just some examples of the extensive SM work carried out in Africa.

SM Research in Africa

The purpose of this section is to showcase the wide variety of SM research across various research foci, addressing different social and environmental challenges requiring behaviour change, as well as across numerous African countries. Appendix 1 presents this information. The table is not intended to be exhaustive, but in contrast to the numerous examples of SM application above, to highlight that despite research being conducted, there is a relative dearth of research published in SM-related journals and thus contributing to the global SM dialogue. The table includes mostly research specifically labelled as SM due to it being identified using SM search terms. What the table does not show is research specifically looking at behaviour change for social good, but which did not label the research as SM-related and, given the extent to which SM initiatives are often not labelled specifically as SM, there are likely to be many publications not actually identified in this search. What is not clear is whether the publication decisions by authors are made due to wanting to contribute to other dialogues, e.g. the focus on medically-related journals in the health theme, or whether this is due to perceived or real barriers to contributing to the global SM narratives. The table in Appendix 1 presents some examples of research evidenced in four main areas – health, environment, social and emergent contexts. It is not intended to be exhaustive.

In the health theme, research covers several areas from HIV/Aids to family planning, obesity, nutrition and more recently, vaccine uptake and from all regions of the continent. Publication avenues, however, show a bias towards public policy and health-related journals, rather than SM-specific journals.

In the environmental sustainability theme, some of the research topics include water conservation behaviours, a critically threatened resource in Africa, sustainable food and energy consumption and various forms of waste management, as examples. Again, the publishing avenues tend not to be SM publications but those related to the environment or management.

The social sustainability theme includes examples such as SM research on interventions to address illegal mining, women empowerment, binge drinking prevention and corruption to mention a few. Several emergent research foci were also prevalent such as citizen engagement, the uptake of health insurance and video game addiction which have all applied SM theories, concepts or frameworks.

It is interesting to note that only a small proportion of the research identified in this section is actually published in journals focused on SM. This supports the findings by Truong et al. (2015), looking at the countries of focus and countries of authors of articles published in the two primary journals focused on SM: Social Marketing Quarterly and the Journal of Social Marketing. These authors identify some factors affecting the limited internationalisation of SM, such as research needing to be in English. This may be an avenue for future research to identify why SM researchers in Africa have either not submitted to, or not been accepted for, publication in these journals. As mentioned above, this research specifically sought research that applied a SM lens or at least provided SM recommendations. Given that much of the SM work isn’t specifically labelled as SM in addition to the findings of Cateriano-Arévalo et al. (2022) that much of the research from the Global South, although consistent with SM practice, remains unrecognised as such, this under-representation of the African voice in SM narratives is perhaps understandable but needs rectification. The fact that many of the emergent research examples surfaced in the Inaugural African Social Marketing Association Conference Book of Abstracts is encouraging, as it may indicate that once given an appropriate platform, SM researchers in Africa are beginning to work together to synthesise and articulate the specifically-African SM lessons and establish the African SM narrative. Such synthesis and reflection on the unique lessons from African SM research and practice that reflect not just broadly African perspectives but the nuanced adaptations required to SM practice across the numerous African countries, cultures and socio-economic circumstances within Africa, will help to develop and present the African SM narrative.

Social Marketing Education and Training

Despite SM being a powerful lever for behaviour change, its formal integration into education and training across Africa remains sporadic, limited and uneven. This gap is particularly striking given the continent’s pressing social and public health challenges, which are highly amenable to SM interventions. While efforts have been made, these appear fragmented and lack a coordinated strategic vision for building long-term SM capacity.

The prevailing fragmentation of educational initiatives, which are often dependent on individual champions or short-term donor projects, reflects a systemic failure to embed SM as a core, cross-disciplinary competence within public health, development, and policy curricula (Truong et al., 2015).

The examples of integration, while valuable, highlight this peripheral status. Egypt’s early partnership with the WHO to embed SM in nutrition training (Gohar, 2024) and contemporary workshops for younger audiences (Kamel, 2025) reveal a longstanding yet isolated recognition of its utility. Elsewhere on the continent, SM has begun to appear within academic programmes, albeit inconsistently. In South Africa, the University of KwaZulu-Natal includes an eight-credit SM module within the undergraduate marketing curriculum (Ellis, 2024), while the University of Nigeria embeds SM as a core module in the final year of its marketing programme (Obeta, 2025). The University of Botswana offers it as an elective within business administration (UB, 2022), and the University of the Witwatersrand’s School of Public Health in South Africa includes SM in a short course on social and behaviour change communication (Wits, 2021).

While the continent’s developmental issues demand sustained behaviour-change strategies, the systematic cultivation of the corresponding SM expertise is absent from most national education and public-sector capacity-building agendas. This marginalisation of the SM educational programme as a niche or elective subject, rather than a foundational skill, ultimately disadvantages public sector planners, NGO practitioners and community leaders who cannot get access to an important toolkit for driving evidence-based social change. Compounding this issue is the frequent mismatch between standardised pedagogical models and local contexts. Effective SM education in Africa, therefore, requires developing inherently adaptive frameworks that integrate indigenous knowledge and community-co-created methodologies, moving beyond the transfer of generic models (Asher, 2025). The problem of marginalisation is further evidenced by the implicit and often uncredited way SM is taught at some institutions. For instance, elements of SM are embedded without formal labelling in core modules such as the Open University of Mauritius’ Business and Society module, a core course in its Marketing Management programme, which incorporates elements of SM without labelling them as such (Ramkalawan, 2025). Similarly, Nelson Mandela University in South Africa offers a short programme on social mobilisation (NMU, 2022), and the Centre for Behaviour Change and Communication, in partnership with USIU-Africa in Kenya, delivers online short courses for professionals, spanning behaviour change and communication tools, including SM (CBCC & USIU-Africa, 2023). While these cases indicate demand for flexible, practitioner-oriented SM training, the lack of formal recognition may hinder broader institutional and policy support. We view this structural marginalisation as a result of the dominance of donor-driven project cycles over long-term capacity building, the scarcity of localised teaching materials and case studies, and the absence of SM from national accreditation frameworks for professions in public health and development.

Furthermore, a desktop analysis of Africa’s top 20 marketing universities by EduRank revealed no public-facing evidence of SM courses on their websites (van Niekerk, 2024), suggesting a persistent invisibility of the field. Compounding this, the near-total absence of government-led or NGO-driven SM capacity development initiatives points to systemic underinvestment in behaviour change infrastructure. Still, the recent increase in SM scholarship across the continent signals emerging momentum. The challenge lies in transforming this academic interest into coherent, institutionalised education and training pathways that can support Africa’s growing need for behaviourally informed policy and practice. To address this challenge, AfSMA has begun delivering ‘Introduction to SM’ webinars to marketing departments at universities in Africa to mobilise them to embed SM formally into their marketing curricula and research. The fundamental challenge, however, is to shift from awareness-raising to structural integration.

Institutionalising Social Marketing in Africa

The mobilisation of SM academics and practitioners in Africa under the umbrella of the African Social Marketing Association (AfSMA) was the first milestone in institutionalising SM in Africa. Figure 2 presents the important milestones in AfSMA’s development.

(1) Inception (2017): Conceptualisation and preliminary discussions regarding a continental SM body during the 5^th World Social Marketing Conference (WSMC)

(2) Foundational Phase (2020-2022): Continental mobilisation via LinkedIn; branding (naming and logo design); and appointment of the interim Board.

(3) Inaugural Milestone (2023): Convening of the 1st African Social Marketing Association Conference in South Africa.

(4) Formalisation (2024-2025): Completion of legal registration and establishment of institutional banking structures in Zambia.

(5) Institutionalisation (2026): 2nd Conference (Egypt); transition to a paid membership model; and the inaugural Board elections.

Figure 2.

Timeline of the establishment of the African Social Marketing Association (AfSMA)- 2017 to 2026

The first African Social Marketing Association Conference (AfSMAC2023) held in April of 2023 in Johannesburg, South Africa, brought together more than 160 participants from Africa and around the world under the theme ‘The Future is Fusion’ (Issock & Ellis, 2023). AfSMAC2026 is taking place in Cairo, Egypt, in 2026. The AfSMA was formally registered in Zambia on 18th February 2025, and is affiliated with the International Social Marketing Association (iSMA). This has placed Africa on the map among other regional or continental associations such as the Social Marketing Association of North America (SMANA), the Latin American Social Marketing Association (LAMSO), the European Social Marketing Association (ESMA), the Australian Association of Social Marketing (AASM), the Pacific Northwest Social Marketing Association (PNSMA) and the Asian Social Marketing Association (ASMA), which are all affiliated to the iSMA.

Another achievement is the pioneering of the translation of the global consensus definition of SM into different languages. The initiative came out of Africa, specifically Egypt, where the English definition was translated into Arabic language in September 2023. This was endorsed by the iSMA Board and published on the website. This initiative has inspired iSMA to translate the definition into many other languages, now reaching 17 languages (iSMA, 2025).

Evidently, there are many examples of SM on the African continent, many of which have a long history. However, what is apparent is that many of these were not specifically labelled as SM. This may explain why SM is still perceived to be nascent in Africa, hence the need to collate SM evidence and label it as such, and more importantly, fortify Africa’s contribution to SM scholarship and practice.

Among the challenges that still remain to be addressed is the low popularity of the discipline and the numerous misconceptions about what SM is (Kamel, 2024). Across the continent, SM often faces an identity crisis, being mistakenly narrowed to social media promotion or broadened to include general social entrepreneurship and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). However, rather than accepting this global ambiguity, African social marketers are actively institutionalising the discipline. This transition involves rigorously positioning SM as a specialised marketing branch dedicated to behavioural influence, thereby transforming it from a misunderstood label into a potent tool for addressing complex continental crises.

A notable challenge that has emerged in recent times is the unprecedented, abrupt suspension of U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) funding across Africa, which has destabilised health SM initiatives. For example, critical programs reliant on USAID’s infrastructure, including tuberculosis and HIV interventions in sub-Saharan Africa, face operational paralysis (Zumla et al., 2025). Concurrently, nutrition-focused SM campaigns, which integrated food aid with maternal health education to mitigate famine and child stunting, have been disrupted (Anfaal et al., 2025). This crisis highlights a sustainability paradox: while donor funding accelerates SM scalability, overdependence creates fragility. The withdrawal erodes decades of partnership between social marketers and funding agencies, compounding immediate humanitarian risks. Stakeholders report health workers struggling to address service gaps amid rising public scepticism. These disruptions highlight the urgent need to diversify funding mechanisms to safeguard SM’s role in addressing Africa’s complex social challenges.

Africa’s SM community is well-positioned to translate recent milestones into durable, system-level gains that advance both continental priorities and the global field. Therefore, AfSMA’s mobilisation and legal registration, pan-African convenings, and emerging curricular integration are not only timely but constitute enabling infrastructure. Going forward, by leveraging a substantive evidence base demonstrating SM’s effectiveness against ‘wicked’ problems in health, environment, and inequality, academics and practitioners can pursue four mutually reinforcing strategies.

First, AfSMA can steward a continent-wide programme to clarify disciplinary boundaries and values, establish shared taxonomies and reporting templates, and curate open repositories of African case studies. This will render visible, dispersed practice, facilitate cross-country synthesis, and accelerate evidence to policy translation. Second, African SM stakeholders, particularly scholars and practitioners, need to reflect on their uniquely African lessons and develop an African SM narrative. This may require a more concerted effort to enter the established SM publication avenues and/or the development of an African SM publication platform. Synthesis and reflection on the African SM research that has been conducted to determine the unique challenges and contributions is needed. Again, AfSMA has the potential to drive this unification, synthesis and reflection, as well as articulation and presentation of the African narrative in global platforms.

Third, embedding SM across traditional marketing, public health communication, advanced short courses, executive education, and cross-border mentorships will build a pipeline of specialists capable of designing, evaluating, and scaling interventions under resource constraints. Partnerships with industry actors through CSR programmes can extend this capacity and align corporate social marketing with current social issues.

Fourth, in the face of donor volatility due to the recent USAID and other donor funding cuts, blended financing that couples public budgets with private and philanthropic resources, anchored in SDG and national development plans, can stabilise delivery and institutionalise SM within programme architectures. Moreover, through AfSMA’s affiliation with iSMA and collaboration with peer associations, African scholars and practitioners can contribute contextual insight, participatory methods, and frugal innovation to the global SM field, consolidating an institutionally anchored discipline that addresses Africa’s ‘wicked’ problems while materially strengthening worldwide efforts to achieve equitable, sustainable behaviour change.

Conclusion

Social Marketing (SM) in Africa is at a critical juncture. Despite a decades-long legacy of addressing ‘wicked problems’, from family planning to climate resilience, its impact remains obscured by fragmented documentation and persistent mislabeling. While the establishment of the African Social Marketing Association (AfSMA) and the growth of regionally grounded research signal a shift toward institutionalisation, systemic barriers like donor dependency and a lack of practitioner-policymaker coordination threaten long-term sustainability. To unlock SM’s full potential, Africa must prioritise four imperatives.

(1) Enhance Visibility and Clarity: African SM interventions need to be systematically identified and labelled as SM. Rigorous documentation and open-access repositories are also essential to counter misconceptions, such as conflating SM with social media marketing or subsidised product distribution, and establish a cohesive disciplinary identity.

(2) Articulate an African Narrative: Consolidate uniquely African lessons and context-specific insights to develop a coherent narrative that challenges dominant Global North framings and informs global theory.

(1) Institutionalise: Embed SM within national SDG strategies and public policies. This requires lobbying for government funding and fostering private-sector partnerships to diversify resources beyond traditional aid and build funding resilience. Leverage AfSMA for cross-country collaboration and knowledge exchange.

(3) Invest in Human Capital: Expand SM education through standardized curricula and certifications tailored to the continent’s linguistic and cultural diversity.

The path forward requires multisectoral investment. Governments must formally recognize SM as a development tool, while development partners should shift toward locally anchored ecosystems. By centering African innovations, from food fortification in Egypt to conservation in the DRC, SM can transcend its historical peripherality. In doing so, Africa will move from piecemeal initiatives to a robust, continent-wide movement, emerging as a global beacon of equitable, context-driven practice.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental Material - Repositioning Africa in the Global Social Marketing Dialogue: Evidence, Voice and Institutionalisation

Supplemental Material for Repositioning Africa in the Global Social Marketing Dialogue: Evidence, Voice and Institutionalisation by Debbie Ellis, Lucy Nyundo, Menna Kamel, Paul Issock in Social Marketing Quarterly.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

ChatGPT, an AI language model from OpenAI, was used to assist in summarising text. The AI-generated text was reviewed and refined by the authors to ensure accuracy and coherence. The final content reflects the original thought and intellectual contributions of the authors. Thanks are given to the contributors of material for this paper: Lucy Chabala Kawesha, Duncan K. Musumba, Sonayon Adeniyi Ajose, Robert Kanwagi, Jackie Namara, and Daudi David Ochieng.

ORCID iDs

Debbie Ellis

Lucy Nyundo

Paul Blaise Issock Issock

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Ethical Considerations

There is no primary data collected for this article, so no Ethical clearance was obtain or informed consent documents distributed.

Data availability statement

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analyzed during the current study.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Author Biographies

Debbie Ellis is a Marketing Professor in the School of Commerce at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. She has over 30 years of consulting, teaching, supervision and research experience. Debbie is the President of the African Social Marketing Association (AfSMA). She reviews and is on the editorial board for numerous international journals including Business Strategy & Development, Health Marketing Quarterly, the Journal of Consumer Behavior, the Journal of Cleaner Production and Sustainable Development. She has published numerous articles and book chapters and performed various roles at local and international conference including conference chair, track chair, reviewer and presenter. Her primary areas of research interest include sustainable consumption, social marketing, wellness, behavior change, eco-consumers, young consumers and consumer knowledge. Debbie is also part of the Human Nature Africa Collective addressing social challenges such as mental health and wellness through the reciprocal relationship with nature.

Lucy Nyundo is an academic and practitioner dedicated to leveraging marketing knowledge, techniques, and research to address complex societal challenges and drive socioeconomic development. Her multidisciplinary work spans the health, tourism, and energy sectors, focusing primarily on designing evidence-based interventions within Sub-Saharan Africa. By integrating rigorous formative research with behavioural science, Lucy develops culturally resonant strategies to tackle deep-seated social problems, including reproductive health disparities. She specialises in using data-driven insights to dismantle barriers to adoption, ensuring interventions are both scalable and sustainable. A frequent collaborator with academics, policymakers, and commercial experts, she effectively bridges the gap between academic theory and practical application. Her work demonstrates how marketing-led solutions serve as a vital catalyst for systemic change and long-term developmental progress. Through her commitment to social marketing, Lucy continues to influence policy and practice to foster improved social and economic outcomes.

Menna Kamel is the Founder and CEO of Insan Social Marketing Company, Egypt's first social marketing firm. A Social Marketing and Social & Behavior Change (SBC) consultant, she is Founding and Board of Directors (BOD) member of the International Social Marketing Association (iSMA) and the African Social Marketing Association (AfSMA), and leads the Egypt Country Chapter for the African Society for Social and Behavior Change (AS-SBC). Menna worked with UN agencies, NGOs, and the Egyptian government, developing communication and social marketing strategies. A Presidential Leadership Program graduate and top of her MBA class at the American University in Cairo (AUC). She also holds a Bachelors in Business Administration with highest honors from AUC with a concentration in marketing and minor in psychology. The “Digital Wellbeing Program” is her companys flagship program focusing on SBC to support parents, educators, children and adolescents to attain a healthy wellbeing through her 3S's model.

Paul Blaise Issock Issock is an Associate Professor in the Department of Marketing at the University of the Witwatersrand. His research expertise spans social marketing, sustainable marketing, corporate social responsibility, and transformative consumer research, with a focus on driving positive behavioural and societal change. His teaching philosophy bridges theory and practice, equipping students with critical thinking, data-driven decision-making, and practical problem-solving skills. Beyond academia, Paul serves as a research consultant, providing strategic insights, marketing research, and data analysis advisory services to organisations across the public and private sectors.

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