By Fatuma Ingabire and Oliver Song
Economic sovereignty—at its core—is a nation’s ability to finance, produce, and engage in cooperative economic relationships with others according to its own priorities. While the idea may appear technical, its implications are deeply human: it shapes opportunity, institutional resilience, and the agency of future generations.
The Sovereignomics Seminar
In the Fall of 2025 at the Harvard Center for International Development, we—Fatuma Ingabire, an Ed.M candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and Oliver Song, an MPP candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government—joined peers from across Harvard to explore what economic sovereignty means in practice. Rather than debate abstract policy issues and strategies, the seminar, led by Dr. Gomez Agou, pushed us to move from rhetoric to structured analysis.
The seminar began with a simple but uncomfortable question: What does it actually mean for a country to be economically sovereign today? For African states navigating debt distress, climate shocks, digital dependence, and geopolitical competition, “sovereignty” does not and cannot simply mean having a flag and a seat at the UN. It means the ability to set national priorities—and to deliver on them—without being structurally constrained by the interests of other countries. This question framed everything we explored over the course of the seminar.
As the seminar progressed, we immersed ourselves in a structured analysis using a key economic sovereignty assessment tool developed by Dr. Agou Gomez: The GAS Triangle. This framework provides a systematic way to assess and understand the economic sovereignty of a country. We used the GAS Triangle to understand how economic sovereignty actually shows up within a country’s systems and choices.
The GAS Triangle breaks economic sovereignty into three interconnected pillars with 34 indicators.
- fiscal and financial sovereignty
- productive and trade sovereignty
- knowledge and human-capital sovereignty
Working as “country analysts,” we applied these pillars and indicators to four African countries -- Botswana, Cameroon, Ethiopia, and Senegal. This exercise made the complexity tangible. Ethiopia’s fiscal constraints, Senegal’s industrial dynamics, and Botswana’s reliance on commodity cycles illustrated how deeply historical, political, and social forces interact to shape a country’s economic agency. Sovereignty is not a yes/no label or condition—it is a dynamic landscape.
The seminar also surfaced a second major theme: the sovereignty–cooperation paradox. The class explored and debated this critical tension at the heart of development practice: if countries become more sovereign—more able to say “no”—does that undermine cooperation? Or could greater sovereignty enable more balanced, durable forms of cooperation? Through discussion and examples, we challenged the assumption that sovereignty and integration sit at opposite ends of a spectrum. We agreed that only countries that feel they have real choices can enter partnerships as equals. Sovereignty, in this view, is not about isolation; it is the foundation for fair cooperation in a shared world.
Key Insights from the Seminar
Across our different backgrounds, several insights resonated with both of us:
First, sovereignty is dynamic and multidimensional. A country can be strong in one pillar and dependent in another. Singapore may be sovereign in some areas, but still constrained in others. Senegal may excel in some forms of cooperation but face structural limits in others. This nuance matters for policy: instead of generic calls for “self-reliance,” governments can strategically target the most binding sovereignty constraints.
Second, agency and dependency coexist. African policymakers are not passive responders to global forces and structures. They improvise, negotiate, and strategically leverage geopolitical competition to advance national priorities. Yet, their room for maneuver is undeniably shaped by legacies and constraints—from colonial-era infrastructure patterns to today's credit-rating systems and trade rules. Recognizing and understanding this coexistence challenges simplistic narratives of either victimhood or full autonomy. The economic sovereignty lens does not romanticize state power, but it insists that agency is real and must be acknowledged. It reminds us that policymakers operate in a space where strategy is possible but structure still matters—and that meaningful cooperation has to take both into account.
Third, cooperation itself can be redesigned. The sovereignty–cooperation paradox led us to reflect on and ask whether initiatives such as aid, investment, or climate finance expand a country’s future choices or lock it into narrow economic paths. Are conditionalities and technical assistance truly building local capabilities and agency? The paradox is not just theoretical. It is a design problem for every policy practitioner. That is, it requires policymakers to shift their goal from simply achieving an outcome to ensuring that the process of achieving it also expands the country's agency and capacity to make future choices. The sovereignty-cooperation paradox can be a core lens for assessing success for local and international policymakers.
Personal Reflections and Takeaways
For Oliver, as an aspiring policymaker, he attended this seminar while also taking the core Policy Design and Delivery (PDD) course. At first, he struggled to see how the Sovereignomics framework could be applied in practical, grassroots policy work. It was during a PDD lecture on monitoring and evaluation that it clicked for him: the framework can serve as a structured monitoring and evaluation tool, particularly well-suited to assessing the long-term effectiveness of policy interventions. Instead of measuring success only in GDP growth or project disbursements, we can ask: Does this intervention increase a country’s ability to choose its own development path? We can highlight when “cooperation” is asymmetrical and show how rebalancing it might actually make partnerships more resilient.
For Fatuma, an educator, one takeaway became especially clear: sustainable economic sovereignty begins with educated and capable people. Every conversation, dataset, and country case reaffirmed the critical role of human capital. Quality and accessible education is not simply a social good—it is a core pillar of national economic sovereignty. Without a skilled, informed citizenry capable of producing knowledge, leading institutions, and innovating in local contexts, economic independence is almost impossible.
Though we entered the seminar from different disciplines—education and public policy—we left with a shared understanding. Sovereignty is not static, and it is not singular. It is shaped by institutions, by people, and by the networks of cooperation in which countries operate. As emerging practitioners, we both carry forward the same central lesson: building a future where nations can meaningfully choose their own paths requires strengthening capabilities at home and redesigning cooperation abroad.
Miguel Reyes
