Mawazo Institute — 2024 Annual Report

The brief was to move away from the kind of institutional annual report that reads more like a compliance document than a story. Mawazo's 2024 theme was Connectedness, and the challenge was to make that felt, not just stated.

I landed on African spices as the visual and narrative language. Not as decoration but as a genuine conceptual framework. Spices travel across borders, hold memory and culture, and connect people through food and trade. That mirrored exactly what Mawazo's Fellows do across the continent. The result was a 74-page report using watercolour spice illustrations, warm earthy tones against deep navy, and a mix of typographic treatments to carry both data and long-form storytelling without flattening either.

The decision to let a Fellow's words run large, handwritten, and take up most of a spread was deliberate. The human being over the programme metrics. That's the kind of shift I push for in every publication I work on.