For decades, Public Relations practice across Africa has largely been shaped by theories, frameworks, and professional standards developed outside the continent. While these models have contributed significantly to the growth of the profession, questions are increasingly being raised about their relevance in addressing Africa’s unique cultural, social, and economic realities.
The panel featured three distinguished voices representing academia, corporate communications, and agency practice: Aggie Patricia Turwomwe, Founder of Agile Media Africa; Mabel Adeteye, Head of Brands and Marketing Communications at WEMA Bank; and Fuseini Iddrisu, Lecturer at the Department of Public Relations, University of Media, Arts and Communication (UniMAC).
For Aggie Patricia Turwomwe, the conversation begins and ends with context. According to her, communication strategies often fail when models developed elsewhere are transplanted into African communities without sufficient consideration for local realities.
Contextualisation, she argued, is not merely a desirable principle but a prerequisite for effective communication. “If we don’t contextualise messages, we can’t tell stories that truly represent people or execute effective campaigns.”
While acknowledging the ambition involved in developing a continent-wide framework for Public Relations, Turwomwe believes it is both achievable and necessary, provided it embraces Africa’s diversity rather than attempting to standardise it.
“A framework for Africa shouldn’t necessarily be uniform across all countries because of our diversity. It must be flexible enough to accommodate different cultures, experiences, and ways of telling African stories,” she noted.
From the corporate communications perspective, Mabel Adeteye emphasised the importance of audience understanding in developing impactful communication strategies.
For Adeteye, successful campaigns are built on a deep appreciation of the people they seek to influence. While global best practices remain valuable, they should serve as guides rather than templates.
“We must learn from global best practice, but in doing so, we must focus on our own customers—the people we serve and communicate with,” she said.
She explained that effective communication requires practitioners to balance audience behaviour, professional experience, available communication channels, emerging trends, and organisational objectives.
Adeteye also cautioned against overreliance on technology at the expense of cultural understanding. “Technology can never replace culture; it can’t replace the understanding of the people and the way they want to be communicated with.”
If practitioners are redefining how communication is executed, then academic institutions must equally reconsider how future professionals are trained.
This was the position advanced by Fuseini Iddrisu, who argued that many Public Relations models currently taught and applied across Africa remain deeply rooted in Western cultural assumptions.
According to him, meaningful change must begin in the classroom. “Academics and industry leaders must explore a PR framework that truly represents African cultures, diverse identities, and accommodates our many nuances.”
Iddrisu called for African-centred theories and case studies to be integrated into university curricula so that emerging practitioners are exposed to these perspectives from the earliest stages of their professional development.
Perhaps his most thought-provoking contribution was the assertion that Africa’s communication traditions already embody many of the principles that contemporary Public Relations theory seeks to explain.
“Africans had their own understanding of Public Relations practice, and interestingly, it is not quite different from what we now know as Public Relations globally,” he observed.
His comments challenged participants to rethink the assumption that communication excellence must always be imported, suggesting instead that Africa possesses rich indigenous knowledge systems that can inform and strengthen modern practice.
The future of Public Relations in Africa, the panelists argued, lies in striking the right balance between global standards and local realities—developing approaches that are authentically African, responsive to the continent’s diversity, and competitive on the global stage.
