Resilience, Artificial Intelligence and Female Agency: A Decolonial Analysis of Digitalisation in Angola
Keywords:
digitalisation, female agency, informal economy, decoloniality, Angola, algorithmic informality.Abstract
Angola's economy is undergoing rapid digitalization, often presented as a driver of modernization and economic resilience. This article examines whether digital tools promote structural transformation in the economic power of Angolan women or merely optimize their insertion into a persistently unequal system. Drawing on documentary research and a systematic literature review, the analysis combines statistical data from international organizations with theoretical frameworks from decolonial African feminism, namely Nnaemeka's Nego-feminism (2004), Ogundipe-Leslie's Stiwanism (1994), and Oyewumi critique (1997) of Western categories of social organization. The findings show that tools such as WhatsApp, Mobile Money, and AfriGPT expand women's capacity for action in the informal economy, yet these operational gains do not alter the structural conditions governing access to credit, social protection, and institutional recognition. The case of the zungueiras illustrates this paradox: digital visibility coexists with structural precarity and algorithmic invisibility produced by systems built on formal parameters foreign to African economic logics. It is concluded that digitalization in Angola operates under a paradigm of efficiency without transformation, and that truly resilient growth models require public policies that value informality and dismantle documentary hierarchies.
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