Monopsony and African Development: Structural Constraints, Curricular Silences, and Policy Implications

Monopsony, defined as the concentration of buyer power in the hands of a few dominant firms, constitutes a critical yet systematically neglected structural constraint shaping African development trajectories. While African development education and policy training routinely emphasize domestic inefficiencies, monopolistic distortions, and governance failures, they rarely address the external dynamics of buyer concentration that govern the continent’s participation in global commodity markets. This article examines this analytical and curricular gap through a qualitative documentary research design integrating political economy frameworks, global value chain analysis, and case studies of cocoa (West Africa), cobalt (Democratic Republic of Congo), and crude oil (Nigeria and Angola). The findings demonstrate that concentrated buyer power suppresses producer incomes, limits industrial upgrading, and reinforces dependency, while neoliberal curricula reproduce domesticist narratives that obscure structural constraints. The study concludes by outlining implications for curriculum reform, policy capacity-building, and African-centered knowledge production, aimed at strengthening the continent’s ability to confront buyer dominance and pursue equitable, sovereign development.