Factors Influencing the Development of Psychology in Sub-Saharan Africa

Psychology is an ethnocentric science, cultivated mainly in the developed world and then exported to sub-Saharan Africa. The major facilitators or deterrents—local, international, and systemic—to its development pertain to the extent to which training, research, and practice are driven by Eurocentric theories, epistemologies, and methods, and how they undermine, ignore, or exclude folk psychology and local issues. Africa has her own frames of reference and social reality; these differ in some remarkable ways from the Euro-American. Efforts to indigenize psychology or to use it to solve the multiple problems Africa faces have merely begun, and need to be hastened. The eco-cultural framework, which compels sensitivity to local cultures and conditions, can promote the process of indigenizing psychology. A few contextualist or Afrocentric studies have yielded evidence pointing to the necessity for the reconsideration of Eurocentric conceptualization.