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An organization’s message design during crises is crucial to maintaining its legitimacy. This study extends the framing theory to analyze the strategies used by Ghana’s and Nigeria’s central banks to build discursive legitimacy during their respective financial crises. It also helps to decolonize our understanding of how central banks respond to crises and preserve their license to operate using evidence from two African countries. 

The article analyzed 28 statements, ranging from one to 13 pages, issued by the two central banks in their efforts to respond to and manage the crises, using a qualitative frame-analytical approach.

The two central banks emphasize four similar but nuanced frames: stability and resilience in the financial sector; consumer protection and interest; national interest and sovereignty and technological efficiency and inclusion. These findings suggest that, although a shared foundational narrative exists, each country’s central bank employs unique legitimation strategies that align with its socio-economic context. 

This study offers practitioners, researchers and students some valuable insights into how public relations technicians in Africa develop crisis response messages during financial emergencies. It also highlights findings that show the reflective situational and cultural factors shaping the content of crisis statements. This study advances broader discussions of discursive legitimation during financial crises and crises more broadly, while also helping overcome the limitations of geographical viewpoints in crisis studies.

This study examines how feminist activists in Ghana and Nigeria utilize digital media to challenge gender inequality and reframe public discourse. Drawing on African feminist theory and employing Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA), the research examines case studies of digital activism campaigns, online discourse, and health advocacy initiatives that mobilize resistance against gender-based oppression. Data were collected through scraping of social media posts on digital feminist discourses via screen captures and archiving. Findings show that Ghanaian and Nigerian feminists strategically use digital media to amplify women’s voices, confront sexual violence, and advocate for reproductive and health rights. These communicative practices disrupt patriarchal discourses, reimagine African womanhood as politically active and self-defining, and facilitate intercultural communication by translating global gender justice narratives into localized forms of resistance. Overall, the study demonstrates how feminist resistance in these contexts is historically grounded, socially transformative, and expands African feminist scholarship by highlighting digital media as a tool for agency, solidarity, and social change.

Despite a growth in scholarship on feminist and gender advocacy in Ghana, little attention has been paid to how non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have leveraged digital platforms to communicate. Using African technocultural feminist theory (ATFT), we analyse NGOs’ digital communications, paying attention to how they use these platforms to define their organizational identities while challenging gender stereotypes. We argue that although NGOs use digital platforms to communicate, their praxis may not necessarily be accessible to the communities with which they work; these platforms enable them to share their women’s empowerment programmes with other stakeholders while bringing awareness to issues affecting marginalized people in these communities. This study presents practical strategies for effectively communicating gender advocacy in the Ghanaian context and beyond.