The UN's International Decade for People of African Descent

On December 23, 2013, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 68/237, proclaiming the years 2015 through 2024 the International Decade for People of African Descent. The Decade was formally launched the following year, on December 10, 2014 (Human Rights Day), and ran under the theme “Recognition, Justice and Development,” a phrase meant to summarize its three linked objectives: recognizing the historical contributions and identity of people of African descent worldwide, advancing justice for the legacies of the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism, and supporting the economic and social development of Afro-descendant communities still living with the effects of that history.

The scale of the population the Decade addressed was enormous by the UN’s own accounting: roughly 200 million people identifying as being of African descent live in the Americas alone, with tens of millions more across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, whether as descendants of those forcibly transported during the transatlantic slave trade or as more recent migrants. The UN’s own background materials for the Decade noted that these populations remain, on average, among the poorest and most marginalized in the countries where they live, with documented disparities in access to education, healthcare, housing, and justice, along with disproportionate exposure to police violence and racial profiling. The Decade grew directly out of the 2001 Durban Declaration and Programme of Action, the outcome document of the World Conference against Racism, which had formally acknowledged that people of African descent were victims of slavery and colonialism and continued to suffer their consequences.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) served as the lead UN agency coordinating the Decade’s programme of activities, working alongside member states, UNESCO, and civil society organizations. UNESCO’s contribution ran primarily through two existing initiatives, the Slave Route Project (Routes of Enslaved Peoples) and the General History of Africa project, which the organization used to promote accurate teaching of the history of slavery and colonialism in school curricula and to combat the falsification and stereotyping of that history. Concrete institutional outcomes of the Decade included the 2021 establishment of the Permanent Forum on People of African Descent, a standing UN advisory body giving Afro-descendant communities a direct channel into UN human rights processes, and continued negotiations toward a full UN declaration on the rights of people of African descent.

Assessments of the first Decade’s impact have been mixed. Scholars and UN human rights experts, including members of the UN Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent, have credited it with raising international visibility around anti-Black racism and establishing new institutional machinery, such as the Permanent Forum, but have also concluded that it fell short of producing transformative change, citing insufficient political will and funding commitments from member states. In response, and building on those lessons, the General Assembly adopted Resolution 79/193 on December 17, 2024, proclaiming a Second International Decade for People of African Descent running from January 1, 2025, to December 31, 2034, under the same “recognition, justice and development” framing but with an explicit added emphasis on reparatory justice for the legacies of enslavement and colonialism.