The first time I understood that the development sector does not believe what it says about grassroots knowledge, I was in a room in Harare watching a consultant present a financial sustainability framework to a programme officer who had been running one for seven years. The consultant had been commissioned to design what the programme officer had already built. She tried to explain this. He thanked her for her perspective and moved on.
The word perspective is worth pausing on. It acknowledges without legitimising. Perspective is what you have when you haven’t produced knowledge; it is what earns you a seat in the room and ensures you don’t speak at the front. That exchange, and hundreds like it across the continent, is what the Beninese philosopher Paulin Hountondji called extraversion: African intellectual production oriented outward, toward frameworks and validation systems located elsewhere, while the knowledge that actually exists in African institutions travels outward as raw material and returns, if it returns at all, as expertise produced by someone with the right credentials.
The practical consequences of this arrangement are specific. Three organisations working independently in Kenya, Zambia, and Nigeria each developed the same solution to the same problem: women could not participate in programmes if participation cost them income-generating time. All three designed rotating systems where women were compensated for attending. All three had evidence. None had heard of the others. When practitioners in three countries arrive at the same answer through the same reasoning without any contact, they are engaging in a methodical practice: observing conditions, testing responses, and documenting what holds and what doesn’t. But because they are practitioners, mostly women working in under-resourced organisations without institutional affiliations, what they produce gets filed under experience rather than knowledge. That distinction matters enormously when it determines what gets funded, cited, and built on.
Nigerian academic, Prof. Oyeronke Oyewumi‘s scholarship on how Western epistemology organised itself around vision, around what can be seen, measured, and codified, helps explain why this happens so consistently. A knowledge system that recognises knowledge by its form cannot see knowledge that exists in practice, in relationship, in the accumulated intelligence of organisations that have spent years figuring out what actually works in specific communities under specific conditions. It is not that practitioner knowledge is invisible. It is that the instruments for recognising knowledge were not designed to find it.
The gender equity sector enthusiastically performs recognition. Conferences include a voice from the field. Funding applications require community participation. Research projects promise to centre marginalised voices. Then the money goes to the people who centre those voices rather than to the people whose voices are being centred. Prof. Amina Mama, a prominent Nigerian-British feminist scholar, researcher and activist, writing about the conditions under which African feminist scholarship gets produced and circulated, observed that knowledge which is embedded, relational, and specific to context gets treated as less rigorous precisely because of those qualities; the same qualities that make it useful. The sector has absorbed that logic completely, which is why it consistently funds the extraction and analysis of practitioners’ knowledge rather than the systems practitioners need to document and develop it themselves.
Last year, nineteen organisations across seven African countries participated in a peer documentation process through the network I work with. They wrote up what was working in their programming for each other, not for funders or evaluators, but for peers facing identical problems in similar contexts. When you are writing for someone who shares your conditions, the questions shift. You stop describing what worked and start explaining why it worked in this community but not that one, what you tried that failed, and what has to already be true for a particular approach to take hold.
What came back were practitioner frameworks with genuine analytical depth. One pattern emerged consistently: community ownership predicts organisational survival better than funding levels. The organisations still running ten years later are not the best-funded ones. They are the ones communities treat as their own, which shows up in governance structures that give community members real decision-making power, in financial models where communities contribute resources, and in leadership transitions that work because founders have built systems rather than personal followings. That is a finding. It emerged from rigorous cross-contextual observation with specificity about mechanisms and conditions. It will not be cited in the literature that shapes how funders make decisions, because it was produced by practitioners rather than processed by an institution that knows how to make knowledge legible to the people who control resources.
South African scholar Pumla Gqola has written about how Black women’s knowledge gets positioned as supplementary; as the context for someone else’s argument, the texture that makes research legible, never the argument in itself. The gender equity sector has institutionalised that positioning. It has built an entire funding architecture around it, one with a long enough lineage that Hountondji was diagnosing it in the 1970s and Arjun Appadurai was naming its structural logic in the 1990s. The critique is not new. What is notable is how completely the sector performs disagreement with it while reproducing it in every grant cycle.
The practical changes are not technically complicated. Fund practitioners to document their own work. Develop review processes that assess practitioner writing on its own terms rather than by proximity to academic institutions. Commission inquiry from organisations embedded in communities rather than from institutions that visit those communities to gather their material. But none of that will happen by wishing for it, because each of those changes requires institutions whose authority rests on controlling what counts as knowledge to accept a redistribution of that authority. That is the structural question the sector has not found a way to ask honestly: not how to include more grassroots voices, but who benefits from ensuring those voices never produce anything treated as authoritative, and what it would actually cost them to stop.
Feature photo by Blue Ox Studio of two women smiling in a village near Arusha, Tanzania.
Vimbai Lole leads public affairs and communications at the Alliance for Women and Girls (AFWAG), where she spends much of her time thinking about what gets lost when knowledge remains informal and what becomes possible when practitioners are treated as the experts they already are. Feminism, for her, is about who gets to know things and whose knowing counts as knowledge. She is based in Harare.