Decolonizing Aid Will Take More Than Listening
Follow our lead. Commit to act.
Every Black and brown woman* in the world has a story of being unheard. When you work in human rights or global development, if you’re looking for it, you start seeing the persistent pattern of silencing, dismissing, and ignoring women of color, whether in affected communities or local leadership (or even in your own organizations). You start to realize how much you contribute to the construct and, depending on your own race and gender, where along the spectrum of power you fall. And you realize how much of what we confront in our work to push for justice and equality would shift if we truly started listening and acting on what we hear.
A few years ago, I was invited by an organization in Arusha, Tanzania, to hold a series of discussions on using narrative design for child protection advocacy efforts. I began the first day with a set of questions to learn more about the political, social, and cultural context around the national child protection agenda — the theory being that it’s impossible to design a strategy or a solution until you know the historical and current contexts in which people are living. After about ninety minutes of discussion, I noticed the organization’s team starting to look at each other. I thought to call a break, when one of the team leaned over and said, “No, it’s not that. It’s that…
