Why a reparative approach is the only way forward for international development

Many of the gender inequality challenges facing global majority countries today are rooted in coloniality.

They can be traced back to the dismantling of Indigenous legal systems and the marginalisation of women who, prior to colonisation, held central roles within their communities. Beyond the direct impact on women, their exclusion weakened entire social and civic ecosystems.

Considering the West’s historic and ongoing underdevelopment of global majority countries, terms like ‘charity’ and ‘aid’ are misnomers. Research has highlighted persistent imbalances in global financial flows, with capital outflows from global majority countries often outweighing the aid and investment they receive.

Instead, ‘repair-based-contributions’ might offer a more useful framing.

Framing development-support as charity normalises the idea of benefactors setting the terms. Repair, on the other hand, demands the reverse. It requires those with power and resources to acknowledge historic imbalances and to support redistribution on terms defined by those most affected.

Colonial, patriarchal legacies demand a repair-based approach

If equity is the goal, international development organisations must frame their work through this historic harm, not as benefactors, but as indebted actors. In the context of gender equity, a reparative approach must prioritise a hands-off funding model, directing resources toward issues defined by the women closest to them and the initiatives they design in response to their own insights.

When resources flow to women, repairing the socio-civic impacts of being excluded from these spaces, the benefits ripple across families, communities and beyond.

To better understand what this might look like in practice, I spoke with Lydia Wanjiku, CEO of Lensational, a Kenya-based nonprofit that trains women in photography to document the issues impacting their lives and communities, then supports them to use their photography to influence policy and secure commercial work.

Funding lenses

The training programmes Lensational runs, Lydia explains, result in trainees developing photostories which consistently reveal policy-relevant insights that typically go unheard in formal development spaces. Not because these realities are obscure, but because women closest to the issues are often excluded from the arenas where knowledge is legitimised.

When women are resourced to create and participate within spaces from which they have been historically marginalised, more rounded insights come into view.

One project with Maasai women offers an eye-opening example. Initially designed to document climate-driven migration, it revealed something deeper. As Maasai men led ‘their’ households in response to shifting wildlife corridors and environmental pressures, women were rarely consulted. As a result, families were routinely relocated away from schools, reliable water sources and food access points. This placed significant but avoidable strain on the entire community.

This small example reflects a bigger reality. When women are excluded from decision-making, blind spots emerge and wider communities suffer.

Lydia’s position: leadership inside the tension

Since joining Lensational, Lydia has helped uncover blindspots, both within the organisation’s operations and external partnerships, and is working to minimise the extent to which the organisation might reproduce the very inequities it seeks to expose. In doing so she has reshaped programmes across Africa, Asia and the Caribbean to be more relevant to – and fair for – Kenyan women as and others in similar contexts. She has achieved this not simply because she is a Kenyan woman, but because she has a globally-minded perspective and a strong sense of justice.

Under Lydia’s leadership, Lensational has secured fair commercial pay for the photographers it trains, in some cases pay that rivals her own salary. Lydia occupies a difficult space. She leads a globally recognised organisation while navigating a sector where pay scales frequently privilege foreign staff over national professionals, even when they work in the same offices, cities and functions. Meanwhile, partnerships are too often shaped by donor visibility and strategic interests rather than community-defined priorities.

Within this framework, organisations like Lensational are expected to deliver insight, access and community trust on a fraction of the resources.

But Lydia is quietly pushing back. Her ambition is to not only surface women’s insights for policy advocacy but to more decisively channel funding directly into the locally designed solutions those insights generate.

Across the sector, there is no shortage of ideas and solutions. The shortage is the capital directed toward them. Local insight enters reports, conferences and policy spaces, while the resources required to build solutions are routed back through Western-led institutions. In effect, global majority women produce knowledge, often unpaid, while others receive the investment.

 With evidence of untapped community-led initiatives struggling to launch or scale, a reparative development approach demands that resources be directly and fairly redistributed toward the solutions women at the helm of their communities are already generating.

What happens when lived-experience initiatives are funded?

If Lensational highlights the abundance of untapped solutions, the Flone Initiative demonstrates what happens when these solutions are actually resourced.

In 2013, Kenyan activist Naomi Mwara was sexually assaulted on a matatu (minibus), Kenya’s primary form of public transport. Two years later, after seeing a video of another woman being assaulted, she decided to act.

Instead of accepting a system in which women are required to navigate buses with no signage, unpredictable rerouting and constant exposure to harassment, Naomi began gathering data to evidence women’s lived realities and challenge the status quo. Tracking public transport incidents, she used these insights to make specific recommendations for change.

From this work, she founded the Flone Initiative to make public transport safer for women and disabled people by targeting both policy and operations.

Since its inception, Flone has worked with more than 3,000 matatu operators, 100 transport stakeholders (including government agencies and labour unions) and more than 1,000 professional women. It also runs a UK Aid-funded annual women and transport conference. The result? As Naomi herself reflects in her recent Forbes profile: “There’s now an ongoing conversation about gender and mobility in Kenya and East Africa.”

Beyond transport, Flone’s research also revealed something else:

Other groups that are vulnerable to sexual assault and harassment feel more comfortable when women are in charge.

Naomi’s story may appear exceptional. But the underlying process is not. When lived experience is resourced, it produces evidence others recognise, with solutions that resonate and impacts that extend well beyond their point of origin.

The message is clear:

• Organisations must redistribute funds away from Western-led initiatives toward early and growth-stage initiatives led and founded by those closest to the issue.
• This funding must be flexible and able to adapt as new insights emerge or priorities and realities shift.
• When women lead solutions grounded in their own lived realities, communities do more than benefit; they recalibrate.
• Resourcing this work is not simply an ethical or reparative gesture. It will drive more effective and sustainable change within the current international development context.

Redistributing power and capital

The growing critique of international development is not rooted in minor grievances. It responds to systemic, deeply embedded practices and seeks to challenge both the moral legitimacy and operational logic of the sector itself.

To work within development today requires more than programmatic adjustment. It demands an active commitment to confronting neo-colonial dynamics, by disrupting top-down economic chains and valuing local leadership.

Doing this requires locally led, flexible and feminist funding to become a standard practice, not a lofty principle. And that will take an honest redistribution of power and capital.

This piece was commissioned by Restless Development as part of the Walking the Talk Campaign.