African Governments' Foreign Publics engagement: Public Diplomacy in African perspective

Scholars over the years have delved into the discourse of states’ foreign publics engagement in their foreign policy objectives. This analysis is done generally with the western perspective of public diplomacy with recent Asian scholarship evolving. As a result, this study aims to reflect on public diplomacy from an African perspective.  It analyses how African governments have engaged their foreign publics (foreign governments and their citizens) to attract foreign aid, tourism, and investments in their nation-building and development trajectory. The article explores African public diplomacy mechanisms such as diasporas, nation branding, cultural diplomacy, and many others. It also digests into some challenges confronting African governments in their public diplomacy campaigns, like lack of research, human and financial resources, and coherent foreign policy documents. The article’s findings demonstrate that although Africa generally has rich public diplomacy resources, these are not adequately harnessed in most African states’ foreign policy. This situation has led to poor foreign policy implementation by most African governments. It contributes to public diplomacy scholarship in general and African public diplomacy in particular, which scholars have underexplored. It concludes that scholars should delve into the exegesis of the rich African public diplomacy currencies.