Imani Alpha

Imani Alpha is a Pan African-based storyteller, strategist, and development practitioner working at the intersection of narrative power, inclusive policy, and futures thinking.  His work centers on how stories, institutions, and partnerships shape who is seen, who is protected, and whose futures are made possible.

 

He is the Founder and Creative Director of Ukumbini, an Afrofuturist think tank and storytelling lab grounded in Afrocentric, decolonial, and feminist methodologies. Through Ukumbini, Alpha designs what he thinks of as narrative infrastructure: multimedia strategies, ethical storytelling frameworks, participatory research, and cultural artifacts that connect lived realities to policy, funding, and institutional reform across Africa. This work treats storytelling as a system; something that can shift imagination, redistribute power, and sustain movements over time.

 

Previously, Alpha served as Global Advocacy Lead at Hivos Foundation, where he coordinated cross-country advocacy and donor-facing narratives on LGBTQIA+ rights, safety, and economic justice across multiple regions. That role built on a longer trajectory across the tech, policy, and impact investment ecosystems, where he has worked closely with governments, donors, private-sector actors, and civil society to design more inclusive approaches to innovation and economic development.

 

Earlier in his career, he worked at the intersection of digital innovation and public policy, helping to build communities of practice around govtech, entrepreneurship, and inclusive economic growth. In those spaces, he learned how technical systems, capital flows, and policy language often obscure the lived realities of the communities they are meant to serve; and how storytelling can function as a bridge. Across innovation and impact investment contexts, he focused on affirmative approaches that treated care as infrastructure: intentional partnership design, targeted capacity building for marginalized entrepreneurs, and narrative strategies that legitimized voices historically excluded from decision-making.

 

Alongside this work, Alpha serves on the board of the National Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (NGLHRC) in Kenya, contributing to governance, strategic oversight, and public positioning at a time of both legal recognition and heightened political risk. This proximity to litigation, cultural work, and community care continues to inform how I understand institutional change as something fragile, contested, and constantly rebuilt as opposed to it being a linear progress.

 

Across my career, I have moved between strategy and story, convening and creation; building coalitions, shaping partnerships, and holding space for communities of practice to imagine themselves as agents of change rather than beneficiaries of systems they did not design.

 

My work is guided by a simple insistence: that inclusive futures are not accidental. They are built through intention, collaboration, imagination, and care.

Fellowship Project: Narrative Infrastructure and Queer Futures examines the transnational digital, political, and religious networks that produce and circulate anti-gender rhetoric across Africa. Rather than viewing social conservatism as organic, it frames it as a deliberate mobilization of the un-African trope to legitimize civic exclusion and deny economic, social, and cultural rights.

 

Drawing on Foucault’s analysis of power and Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics, the study investigates how anti-rights narratives operate as technologies of governance, transforming discourse into legislative barriers, institutional neglect, and conditions of anticipatory violence. Critiquing liberal-democratic models of assimilation, it advances Queer Afrofuturism, grounded in Ubuntu, as a policy-design methodology reimagining sovereignty through bodily autonomy, collective care, and communal resistance.

 

It bridges human rights and digital governance to advance Narrative Justice and envision systems beyond inclusion.