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Description
The conversation around citizen science in Africa has largely been dominated by frameworks borrowed from the natural and social sciences, often sidelining the rich, embodied knowledge practices that communities have sustained for generations. This paper argues that Theatre for Development (TfD), as practised in rural Nigerian communities, functions as a legitimate and undertheorised mode of citizen science — one that generates, tests, and circulates locally-grounded knowledge in ways that formal research methodologies frequently cannot access. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in 2018 with community theatre groups in Farasime, Owode Apa, Badagry, this study examined how TfD processes — from needs assessment through to performance and post-show dialogue — mirror the iterative logic of participatory action research. Residents of this coastal border community were not passive subjects but active knowledge producers: diagnosing community problems, proposing solutions, and evaluating outcomes through dramaturgical means. What emerged from that process was, in every functional sense, citizen science — only it happened on a performance floor rather than in a laboratory. The paper further interrogates why this knowledge continues to be treated as anecdotal or supplementary within development discourse, linking this marginalisation to broader epistemic hierarchies that the Fifth Industrial Revolution risks entrenching further if African scholars do not intervene. As digital platforms and AI-driven data systems increasingly shape how knowledge is validated and circulated, the TfD practice documented in Farasime offers both a warning and a model — a reminder that sustainable transformation must be built on what communities already know, not only on what algorithms can detect. The study concludes by proposing a framework for integrating TfD methodologies into citizen science policy conversations across the continent.