The Anthropologist in the Room: Reflections on an Unsettled Year

Being in charge of partnerships at a think tank is a daunting task on a normal day. It involves managing a web of relationships with funders, experts, collaborators, and policy stakeholders, all while helping to keep the organisational engine running. 2025 was not a normal day. It was a year where the landscape of international cooperation didn't just shift, it became unsettled. And as I think of the year, I find myself relying on my anthropological training to make sense of things.

I spent much of the last year traveling between Europe, North America, and across the African continent. Everywhere I went, I witnessed a deep disconnect as debates struggled to keep up. At the African Climate Summit, climate adaptation was again high on the African agenda — and rightfully so. In DC, where the agenda on the priorities in development financing is often decided, despite the polite diplomatic language, critical things were often left unsaid. Or perhaps, like the adaptation agenda in Africa, have been said so often before that the only thing left to do was to actually do it.

Throughout the year, it felt as if we were in the middle of something momentous. On the funding side, we watched the dismantling of USAID, a shift that suddenly placed Germany in the spotlight as the largest funder of international development. Simultaneously, Germany was grappling with its own internal reckoning with what “cooperation” actually means — consider the “Bike Lanes in Peru” debate. This has led to a review of development priorities and significant budget cuts.

For an organisation like APRI, this wasn't just political noise. It signalled how the definition of partnership is being rewritten.

Against this backdrop, I found myself reflecting on the inertia that is so present in the development and foreign policy space. There is often a mismatch between, on the one hand, the feverish breaking news cycle, packaged statements of the Global North, the language of philanthropists and, on the other, the actual, nuanced needs of nations in the Global South.

This is where I see the role of a modern think tank evolving. We are called to question the foundations that underpin the relationships between nations, and think beyond our role of publishing policy analysis.

As an African think tank with offices in Berlin and Abuja, we have always seen ourselves as interpreters between Africa and Europe, and increasingly, between Africa and the world. I’ve found it helpful to extend this metaphor to my own role.

As a trained anthropologist — and often the "non-expert" in a room full of specialists — I am positioned to look at policy debates from breadth before depth. I instinctively want to understand the whys behind our assumptions.

In a moment when everything feels reactively urgent, this “anthropologist’s lens” is a provocation to pause. It challenges us to ground our work in an inclusive reality, to approach the position of our​​ interlocutors with curiosity, and always, to encourage criticality in how we work, not just what we work on.

The validity of this approach was proven to me during our landmark Global South Peer-Learning Workshop that took place in Abuja, Nigeria, in April 2025. By bringing together over 150 stakeholders including delegates from South Africa, Senegal, Indonesia, and Vietnam to share JETP experiences with Nigerian counterparts, we created a space for peer exchange that responded to real needs and bypassed traditional ‘capacity building’ models. It was a rare case of Global South countries coming together to share from their experiences — without that sharing being mediated by a Global North country.

This year, APRI will enter its fifth year. As we do so, we rely more than ever on our network of partners, fellows and local experts to help us navigate these shifts. The world is grappling to make sense of this moment and our job is to ensure that as we build these bridges, they are grounded in the realities of the future.

About the Author

Simoa Nangle

In her role as Head of Executive Office, Simoa leads strategic partnership development at APRI. She ensures a high-performing executive function, facilitates the implementation of organisational priorities across teams and is a key liaison for APRI's stakeholders. Her background includes communication, brand governance and partnership roles in the CleanTech sector in Sub-Saharan Africa and Germany. Simoa holds a BA from the University of Cape Town and an MA from HMKW Berlin.