The Power Shift: Decolonising Development

Ubuntu and African Humanist Leadership approaches. Faye Ekong interviewed.

• Kate Bird • Season 1 • Episode 34

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In this week’s episode, we talk to Faye Ekong about management approaches to leadership which are rooted in African experience. Faye tells us about the absence of African approaches represented in mainstream management and leadership.

Faye Ekong introduces us to African Humanism, which embodies dignity, social harmony, coexistence and community. We talk about the importance of understanding historical, social, and cultural contexts within organisational policy, instead of importing a prescriptive Western model.

We also discuss the discriminatory assumptions around compensation and legitimacy for service providers from the Majority World (or Global South). 

Faye highlights approaches which are grounded in humility, inquiry before judgement, and courage over comfort.

Faye is the managing director of RWA. She has over 15 years’ experience in human resource management, organisational design, learning and development, coaching and employee engagement programs including at the executive level. She has worked with a range of global stakeholders such as government agencies, private sector corporations, and non-profit entities in Africa, Europe, Asia and North America. She is certified by the Society of Human Resource Management as a Senior Certified Professional (SHRM - SCP)

Motto: “Growth begins at the end of our comfort zone!”

If you’re interested to find out more about Faye Ekong’s work, take a look here:

Recent work:

Relevant resources:

  1. Mungi Ngomane (2019) Everyday Ubuntu, Transworld Digital.
  2. GLOBE Project - The GLOBE researchers developed the Culturally Endorsed Leadership Theory (CLT) that posits the importance of leadership being anchored in the social and cultural markers and nuances of a given context.
  3. Johann Broodryk (2005) Ubuntu Management Philosophy, Knowres Pub.
  4. Lerutla, M. and Steyn, R. (2021) ‘African Business Leadership: Perspectives from aspiring young leaders’, SA Journal of Human Resource Management, 19. doi:10.4102/sajhrm.v19i0.1467.


Kate:

Hello, I'm Professor Kate Bird, and this is the Power Shift Decolonising Development. Today, we're talking to Faye Ekong of Ravel Works Africa, a management consultancy headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya. Faye talks to us about Ubuntu leadership and African humanism, and how she brings these approaches into the advice she gives her clients, who are largely located in America and Europe. I particularly like the way that this flips the script on the widely accepted direction of travel for technical advice and brings a private sector perspective into our conversation about decolonising development. Listen on for more. Welcome to the Power Shift Decolonising Development, a podcast series bringing together thinkers, practitioners, and activists to share ideas, inspire change, and identify tools for practical action. I'm Professor Kate Bird, a socio economist and director of the Development Hub. Today's co host is Dr. Nompilo Ndlovu. Over to you, Nompilo.

Nompilo:

Greetings, everyone. I am Dr. Nompilo Ndlovu. I am a Zimbabwean living and working in South Africa. I'm an oral historian who applies gender frameworks to my work with communities in Africa. Recent work has included involvement in a mixed method study on poverty dynamics in Zimbabwe, where I led the work on gender and marginalisation. My PhD focused on mass violence, memory, and local transitional justice in post colonial Zimbabwe. Back to you, Kate.

Kate:

Thanks, Nompilo. Today, we're very excited to be talking to Faye Ekong. Faye is the Managing Director and Co Founder of RavelWorks Africa, an African management consultancy firm headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya. The RWA caters to diverse global clientele, provides services relating to HR, professional development, and organisational design and change. Prior to establishing RWA, they held various senior roles in international humanitarian organisations. And before her work in the humanitarian sector, Faye was a consultant in global management consultancy firms. Faye has collaborated with international stakeholders, including governments, and the private sector, international academic institutions and non profit organisations in Africa, Europe, Asia, and North America. She's also appeared on numerous global platforms, including podcasts, panels, blog posts, newspaper articles, and as a keynote speaker. For more on Faye and the work she does, click on the show notes below this episode. Back over to you, Nompilo.

Nompilo:

Okay. Let's get into our first question. Faye, could you tell our audiences a bit about Ravel Works Africa and the work that you do internationally?

Faye:

Thanks so much for the question. And thank you also for having me on your podcast. I'm very honored to be here. So, Ravel Works Africa, as Kate you'd already mentioned a minute ago, we are a management consultancy firm. We're not different than any other management consultancy firm in the world, in the global west, etc. Granted, we do focus on human resource management, on organisational design, development, professional learning programs, and then we have a separate tech wing that focuses more on e-learning and communications technology. So we do that both for our clients here on the continent. And when I say continent, I mean sub Saharan Africa as well as globally. Maybe just to add to that, what really got us started was we started to be really concerned about what does the future of work look like? And how can we as a consultancy firm support our clients or prospective clients in guiding them in that future of work when it comes to systems, when it comes to competency skills of the workforce, but also approaches an organisational culture that will be sustainable or competitive in the future of work. So I think that gives a good enough overview for the moment, Nompilo, unless you want me to add a bit more.

Nompilo:

No, I think it's perfectly fine. I have a feeling you'll speak about it further in your next question. Kate, do you have anything you'd like to ask further?

Kate:

No, no, it's fine. Please go on to the next one. Thank you.

Nompilo:

All right. Faye, you were interested in Ubuntu leadership. Could you tell our audience how you came to be interested in these approaches to leadership and why having management approaches rooted in the African experience matters?

Faye:

Yeah. So like I was just saying, my concern or interest has always been in the future of work, what will that look like in terms of our workforce, in terms of the skills we need, but also the organisational setup. And so in general, I think we can see that in the management and leadership literature, there is a glaring absence of any African studies or African theories and approaches. And that has always bothered me quite significantly right from my days even of doing a master's because all of the theories and all of the approaches I came across were mainly Western. And by this I mean Europe and I mean North America. And I said, well, but it can't be that we have a whole continent here and we've got nothing. That's absolutely impossible. And particularly in light of the fact that our informal sector or our informal economy in Sub Saharan Africa is huge. It's about 80 to 90 percent of work takes place in the informal sector. So those people are all practicing different management approaches, leadership approaches, without a book behind it, without a big degree and certification from fancy universities, but it's working. So that's one. The second thing is when you look at management history and theory, especially for the future of work, it all talks about a human centric approach, or people centered approach. Well, one of the things is actually in African humanism. This is not new to us. It's not something that we just got post Covid. It's always been there when we talk about transformative leadership, servant leadership. And so it appeared to me that what we have ingrained in the way we function in most African communities and societies happens to also be a globally relevant leadership approach for the future of work. Does that make some sense up to there? So that's how I got interested into it. Because one, there was an absence of anything I could find in the literature or very few studies and books. And two, when I look at where the future of work is going, it seemed to me that African humanism could offer us quite some good directives in terms of leadership approaches.

Nompilo:

Yeah. Can I ask a follow up question to that? Can you tell me a little bit about what Ubuntu leadership and African humanism is, especially for those who haven't heard terms before?

Faye:

Yeah, exactly. I know I use Ubuntu a bit loosely. I'll be honest with you on that one, because it's a concept which we have across the continent, right? In almost every single country across the continent, you have a different version of it or a different word. I think I was mentioning, in some of our introductory calls about, in Kenya, we call it Utu or Harambee in Swahili, in Tanzania, you might call it Ujamaa, et cetera. But what I mean here is really as African humanism collectively, what I'm talking about is a philosophy that emphasises really human dignity, on the one hand, social harmony, coexistence and community. So in a kind of nutshell. And so what we know is that leadership management, actually, anything we do as human beings is culturally relevant. It's culturally endorsed. Okay. So we struggle a lot in Africa when you bring, this is my opinion so far, but when we are importing theories and approaches on how we should manage our businesses, our staff, our employees, our communities, our stakeholders, which are not grounded in African humanism as an umbrella term, we can then not turn around and say, well, it's not working. Naturally it won't. Because it's not coming from our side. It's not grounded in our cultural norms and values. So yeah, I will stop there for the moment.

Nompilo:

Alrighty. How can these approaches help your clients or organisations more widely?

Faye:

Okay. So for me, one of the things is like I was saying before, that anything we do needs to be grounded in the markers of our communities, our experiences. And so that's not just about leadership or management, take anything else, Nompilo, as an example. Certain places, what is normal is for you to eat your food with chopsticks. Other places, we eat by hand. Other places with fork and knife. It's grounded in your cultural markers, the nuances of who you are and where you are. So my point being specifically in leadership, the kind of one size fits all or the Western size fits all approach, it's not working. And we've seen that in Asia, which has developed some of their own nuances on how they manage their enterprises, their staff, et cetera. However, a specific example that really comes to my mind is when we talk about DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion, or diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging, which has become very trending in the last couple of years in the West in particular, but it's been a long standing debate and concept, which we have dealt with in Sub Saharan Africa long before it was popular in all of the big management journals, et cetera. It's just that the way we look at DEI is different, and we are considering different components of DEI. And so in an African context, for example, that can be a religious divide. North, South, Christian, Muslim, et cetera. It could be tribes, it could be gender, it could be clans. So my point is this, when we work with our clients, it's really trying to help people look at it from a broader lens, not just take your mental model as the only mental model when it comes to now DEI, and let's say in a western context DEI has lately been focused on race, specifically in the U. S., has been focused a lot on sexual orientation or gender identity, and that is fair enough because that is culturally relevant in your context based on your history, based on your political system, socio economic setup, etc., but it may not be relevant at all in a Somali context. And even if we look at just across Africa, Southern Africa has a completely different history than we might have in the West African context, right? In Nigeria, where we have is more the issue around North South divide, Kenya, we have an issue around tribes, South Africa is still, part of it is still those racial divides. But that is DEI, but from various different perspectives.

Nompilo:

Okay. I'm going to hand over to Kate in a bit, but I really do want to say, I'm quite happy to hear about a global management system that starts to think of the people that are not counted, the informal sector. And if you're talking in Africa about over 80 percent in the informal economy, then it literally means a whole lot of ideas are actually built for people that are actually not using them or not reaching them. So that's quite an intriguing aspect. It's also interesting to hear your views on what DEI is in different spaces outside of a Western perspective. But I think Kate will ask you that. Kate, please, can you proceed to ask the next question?

Kate:

I will. I want to just loop back to some of the things that we've been talking about a little bit as well, though, because when I think about things like Harambee and the kind of community based mutual support and mutual aid, what strikes me is the contrast between that and the drive that's often in the West for individual progress, individualism, the nuclear family, strongly focused on... in my country, the Protestant work ethic and measurement of progress against a kind of norm and ethic that if you're not hardworking in a particular way for particular levels of productivity and individualism, then somehow you're failing ethically. So that conflation of ethics and an almost punishing work drive, I think has become woven into professional culture, certainly in my country, but I see it if I look across to the United States, less so in some other European countries where I think they have a little bit more of a balanced view. But what I feel comes across from things like Harambee and from my understanding of African humanism is that it's quite deeply rooted in the idea of mutuality, mutual respect, community, a holistic understanding of who the person is, that you're not just a worker, you're not just a cog in a wheel, you're a whole person with a family, a kinship network, a wider community and you have responsibilities to that and to your work, you have responsibilities to your family and to yourself as an individual. And I kind of feel that's something that we in the West, or we in the minority world have lost. And when I come and do data collection exercises or I work with communities in Africa or Asia, and I've done both, I often feel that's what I take home with me, is that sense of community rooted as belonging, and what we've actually lost in our journey. So I wonder if that's also something that you are talking to your international clients about this sense of wholeness. So I don't think it's captured by work life balance. I think that's a bit of a nonsense, but this idea of the whole person.

Faye:

Yeah. And you see, again, interestingly enough, in the management literature and specifically even recently now in the HR literature, we hear about the human deal. So going beyond the EPP, the employee value proposition, and now the human deal. So meaning recognising the whole human at work. Okay. Not just my position as product manager or sales representative. But everything that Faye brings, and all of those challenges. So now I fully agree with you that it's a disconnect we see West is trying to get back there. That is why I got so interested in African humanism, because the West is trying to get back and say, how do we allow people to have a life outside of the work? How do we accept that somebody might have a death in the family and we need to accommodate it? How do we accommodate the fact that maybe the person you are raising, the child you're raising, is not your own biologically but it's your sister's and you have just as close a connection to that child as you would to your own. So all of those components which, I don't want to blanket it like you said, in the West I think particularly southern European countries Italy Spain Portugal might have a more family oriented or more communal, but I'm not sure if that is accurate. But I'm saying most of the West is trying to get back to this, having lost it somewhere across the way, like you were saying. And so I'll give you a very concrete example, when we're working with some of our clients that have international presence, when you have just very strict HR policies, which are anchored in the West, which means a family is one husband, one wife and your biological children. That means all of your staff who are not, let's say, American or German or Swedish or British. They had a big disadvantage because for us, our families can be me, my grandmother, my auntie and my auntie's children and whatever. They are just as important to me as your biological son. When you say to somebody, a family is a husband and a wife. Well, in many of our countries, polygamy is legal. There's nothing wrong with this. You can debate whether you like it, you don't like it, but it is part of our DNA, our fabric. So you are now asking me choose between one spouse and another choose between I can't do that. And that would be culturally completely unacceptable for you to go back and say, hey wives, I love all of you, but I've chosen Kate over the rest of you for the insurance. So it's those small, small things. I understand if I go into a Western context and say, hey, we are four wives, you would all have a fit. You'd be like, whoa, that is impossible. How can you be? But in another context, nobody's, it's yeah, okay, that's great. And we all move on. But moreover, Kate, what you were saying that in Ubuntu, let's say the four overall values that we have in Ubuntu is compassion, solidarity, survival and respect and dignity. And that's what the whole point of Ubuntu is, I am because you are. So recognising that I am only because the rest of you are. So if you are suffering, if you are struggling, if you are not well, there's a kind of automatic instinct without an organisational policy or process for me to jump into help and support to the extent that I can, which like you're saying in a Western setting, it seems really difficult and I've seen that in certain organisations people are really struggling and your colleagues are saying oh sorry well maybe next week Thursday I can maybe squeeze in 10 minutes to have and that puts a very big divide between you know me and you because you are willing to come through for me only when it is hyper convenient for you and in the smallest possible denotations.

Nompilo:

Thank you. Just before Kate proceeds, are you receiving buy-in for these ideas, especially in other communities, this idea of wholesomeness, do you find that it's becoming the norm in the management practice world?

Faye:

Well, I think the norm, that's a big word. So we're at the beginning stages. So I think people who have a global presence or organisations that have a global presence are increasingly open to this because they're realising my idea from Washington, D. C. or from London or Geneva, somehow it's not working. And so people are increasingly open to a certain extent to say, well, what else am I missing? How else can I embrace this? How else can I, for instance, revise my processes, my HR policies, et cetera, to be more inclusive, holistically, not easy for people because of course you're challenging deeply held assumptions, beliefs about productivity, effectiveness, employee relations that people have had for 200, 300 years. And so it's a mixed bunch. We've had certain clients who are very open, particularly, I'm recalling now an issue on DEI because it was a global DEI project over 50 countries, and they realised somehow what we are trying to push, it's not clicking in any of the other 49 countries. Well, that means there's something wrong with your idea of what DEI is supposed to be.

Kate:

Thank you. I think what comes out from what you've just is that you're kind of going beyond an idea of people being treated instrumentally as a productive cog, to bring their whole self to the workplace and this thing I am because you are is I think it really resonates with me because If you're not able to be your whole self, then how can you be creative because you're actually shutting down whole elements of who you are and saying oh, well, I'm just gonna be this little part of myself this tiny contained part of myself. I'm not actually gonna be a whole human. And if we're not a whole human, then how can we interact as a whole human with other members of our team? And if we can't do that, then how can we support them and have that mutuality in the work that we do? Because we're not cogs, we're people. So, this approach I find it very meaningful, actually. And what I like about the way that you're working is that you're actually very politely blowing up hierarchies of knowledge and expertise that are based on this kind of Eurocentric model with whiteness and Eurocentric ideas at the top of the pyramid. And you're actually saying, actually, do you know what? There's real value in these ideas rooted in Africa, rooted in African humanism, and here you go. We can help you out with your problems in your organisations in North America and in Europe. And boy, oh boy, do you need it. Look at all the people who are leaving with burnout. And perhaps this idea of Ubuntu or African humanism has something to offer with that.

Faye:

Well, you've said two things. So one is naturally when you come to the office or work with your team, you're not leaving the rest of yourself in the car park, and then you enter into the office setting, right? So whatever is worrying you, stressing you, or even exciting you, you are carrying that with you. That's it. And as a leader or manager, you want to have a successful team and my belief is that people need to be able to bring that. I'm really excited. My granddaughter just gave birth, for example, and it's a little baby girl and we all say, wow, that's great. Is it this Sunday? You know, what do we bring? Et cetera. We send messages or you say, my cousin is sick right now. And we go to the hospital. That's a community. And that is very specific. Well, I say more specific in our context, I believe in Middle East, we have something similar, Asia, Latin America as well, but in the West, completely out. You've said another thing about the kind of dominance of what is accepted knowledge. What is accepted research? What is accepted best practice based on certain parameters? And I'm sure the two of you are also actively involved in all of the dialogue around decolonising knowledge, decolonising research, and all of these things. And I'm reminded of that specifically. It's a personal story. But when my mom was doing her PhD 80s, she's an anthropologist collecting data in Sudan, actually on bride wealth and family trees. And she came with a very Western kind of model. This is how a family is. This is how we're going to map out the tree. And she always tells the story of how it became very confusing very quickly. Oh, this is my sister. Oh, this is my brother. This is my mother. Oh, but we just met your mother yesterday. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is my other mother. So this very linear of, you know, this is my, no, it's kind of, this is the community. These are people who matter to me. And the word we use is mother. So when you hear somebody say, this is my other mother, my other father, my sister, my brother, that doesn't mean biological, that I have an obligation to be there for me, but it means by virtue of humanity, of solidarity, of compassion. And so she always tells the story, she's like, you know, it's already then I realised that whatever models they were teaching us in the West to go and investigate anthropology, it's completely useless in a different context where it just doesn't resonate.

Kate:

Yeah, thank you. And I'm going to work, move on to another question now. So Ravel Works Africa is a Kenyan organisation advising clients mostly in the US and Europe, and there's a critique that says that the private sector buys in expertise that works and they're buying yours. That the international development and humanitarian sectors are so rooted in white supremacy and coloniality that hierarchies of power and race remain, meaning that it's still highly unusual to have experts from the majority world advising, for example, bilateral donors or international NGOs. Does this reflect your experience?

Faye:

Yes and no. So we are in a fortunate position, we work with a lot of also non profit foundation international organisations, including also donors or European let me say government entities. But you are right. I think private sector overall has a very much more"I need somebody to do x, can you do it" That's it. There's not always a lot of additional bias, you know, that says but these names are not really the ones familiar and where's your location that seems a bit far from where we are. So I'm seeing generally over the past few years an increasing willingness to engage with African companies. That's, I guess, why people hire us. Yet there's always that underlying fear, which very often it's, how do you say when it's not, it's implicit, you can kind of tell it coming out in the way questions are asked or the way things are phrased where you're like, I'm not sure if we were a Belgian or Dutch company, you'd be asking me for the same information. So there's sometimes that. I say very flippantly, but that's kind of idea that as an African company, you know, can we really trust them or will they hire their grandmother to do the finances or do their, you know, compensation assessment? So that's one. There's also what we have seen in our experience, two things, and I got to be careful how I say it, but very often what some clients are looking for is somewhere in the hierarchy, there's got to be a white person, surely overall at the top of something or there's got to be the main parent organisation, which has got to be European or US based. And so when you tell them we have none of that, takes them some time. And the other thing is as well is that there's a preconception that because you're hiring an African company, we should be significantly cheaper. And so sometimes when people see our fees or our rates, it's like, but you're based in Kenya. Yes, but expertise costs money no matter where in the world it's located. So, anyways, but in short, no, I'm seeing generally more organisations, both private sector and for profit open, but there is a kind of, I say, subtle, I don't know if it's patronising energy. I'm saying I have no empirical data on this. You know, I didn't do a research, but there's something you can tell where you say, here's where the discussion starts to get difficult because you have to overcome, like you were saying, these mental models of what does expertise look like. And traditionally in the development sector, expertise was White. Moreover, it was White male. So even as White women, that took a long time for you to be equally respected. But that's kind of how the sector was set up right from independence all the way going forward.

Kate:

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. And the issue of remuneration and compensation is an issue that we're coming back to over and over again. And the assumptions there about cheapness and value. And I think value, both in a monetary sense, but also value as in other senses in terms of the quality that you bring and you're working in an international marketplace. And so of course your compensation or your fees are international fees. So, thank you for that. Now, thank you so much for sharing your ideas with us today. We've covered quite a lot of ground in terms of thinking through Ubuntu leadership and African humanism. And I wonder, before we go to our final question. If you could tell us a little bit about what you see on the ground in terms of organisations, in terms of the changing way that these ideas are filtering through, because you've mentioned a lot of terms from the technical side of management consultancy that some of our audience might not be familiar with, but if you can talk in kind of more general terms about what you're seeing in terms of the changing way that organisations are managing their people and the way that these ideas are percolating through and influencing a new approach to management. I'd be really excited to hear about that.

Faye:

Right, right. So as you said that I'm just trying to think, let me separate the sector. So what we're seeing, of course, in the NGO sector is a lot more that kind of focus on I don't like the words, but that's what it's used the localisation, locally led development, right? So that organisations are taking that a little bit more serious. And looking at what does that mean for us to shift the power from Western centric to a Global South, decision making rights, influencing visibility, et cetera. So I'm seeing there's a lot of debate there, a lot of thinking around it, some tweaks in policy, but when the rubber hits the road, it's a very scary thing for many organisations to do because shifting power means losing power and nobody wants to lose power. So there's certain organisations, which I guess are further ahead in that and have fully decentralised and said, you know, we are just a federation or an umbrella and each entity does its own thing, but we all stick to the overall name and values etc. Other INGOs are really at the starting point, still trying to even define what is localisation? What does it mean? But you know at the moment you start digging into let's say, your partnership policies. What rights do partners have? How do they come to the table? You start to see it's still very much like this. Well, actually I've selected you and I'm giving you a bit of the money for you to do, I don't know, gender, climate change, whatever, education, it doesn't matter. So, that's there. I think for the NGO sector, the biggest thing is not about new policies and processes. It's really much more that introspective work. And that begins at individual level, that cannot be done, you know, via a new Gantt chart or a theory of change or switching an organogram. Private sector on the other end, it's a bit different from the perspective that the whole debate about localisation doesn't exist in most of the private sector. When you talk about localisation in a private sector, it means adapting a product or service to the needs of the local market. It doesn't mean having more Black people, more Asian, less White, whatever it is. So that's a very, very different approach. So even now, as you were talking about compensation, that is going to say slightly unique. The NGO sector seems to struggle so much with this. How do we do it? How do we do it? Whereas actually from a technical perspective and compensation, there's not a big challenge on how to harmonise your salary scales on how to harmonise benefits. There's a mental blockage, a mental model that says, I can't do it because for some reason, I believe just as an example, Norwegian expertise is worth more than Uganda, whereas in a private sector, we don't have that, it's I need a head of marketing who can do it. This is the benefits we give. This is the salary we give. And the question is much more, where do I want to source my talent from? Which markets do I want to get my talent from? Do I want to be globally attractive, only locally attractive, et cetera, and you fix your problem pretty quickly with it. So I'm always quite surprised we do a lot of work on compensation with our clients, especially in a non profit world, I'm surprised always by the number of barriers and obstacles many of them imagined that are on the roadmap towards equitable compensation. So Kate, I don't know if I even answered your question if I went off track now because you mentioned compensation before and I'm passionate about that.

Kate:

No, that was really interesting, actually, and contrasting the civil society organisations, international NGOs with the private sector is actually very illuminating for me, because I had heard that there were these differences, but obviously I work more in the kind of development sector, so I'm, I don't come up against the private sector in the same way. Although I might have key informant interviews with traders and so on. There tend to be informal sector people rather than people working for large international or transnational companies. So thank you so much for joining us today. I think you've given us some really interesting insights. And, I wonder if you could finish up by telling us a practical first step that our listeners and viewers can take to support decolonisation and shifting power, whether they're members of the engaged general public or work in the development sector.

Faye:

So I'll give a couple. And let me put them first on the table and I explain what I mean. It's humility, inquiry before judgment and to use Brené Brown, courage over comfort. And so what do I mean by this? So particularly in the development sector has been set up under the guise from the 1950s, 60s, going forward I have expertise that you don't have. And therefore, when I come and I tell you how to do it, you listen to me, you use my systems, my policies, my setup, et cetera, and you just do it. Now, that is a lack of humility. Imagine, Kate, I come to your house tomorrow, and I have a look around, and I say, no, this is a disaster here. You need to change your curtains, this is not how a house is meant to look. I'm the expert on housing, and I'm going to tell you how your house needs to be set up for it to be good. And I'm going to empower you to help you to really remove your curtains and change the light bulbs. That's a lack of humility. And then I wonder afterwards, well, why is she still sneaking in a yellow curtain? Why is she still, you know having her dinner at six when I told her it has to be at 9 00 p. m. That's the best time to have dinner. And so then we wonder why it fails, it fails because I've not taken into consideration why you have set up your house the way you have, what is the importance for you of having yellow curtains vis a vis white ones for example, what it means for you, what your family thinks about yellow vis a vis white. So that's the kind of humility that same way if I was engaging with a client from I don't know Asia, Japan, China, I know very little and there will be a reason why you are doing performance management in a certain way while your finances are organised. So humility allows me to ask, walk me through, what's happening, I'm curious to know. Because the way I've learned it is X. The way I've seen it in Kenya, Uganda, South Africa, it's like this. But I cannot walk in there assuming that you have absolutely no clue and you've all been waiting for me to come and to tell you about African humanism, which may be in a Japanese context, you're like, no, thank you. I don't need that stuff here. And so that links then also to inquiry before judgment. I think it's a lot easier to say, let me find out, walk me through, what are you seeing that I'm not seeing before I make a judgment to say a local partner doesn't have the capacity, they don't have the competencies. They don't have the skills. It's high risk, etc. Same way Kate, you were saying before, the informal sector. It functions. It functions. So there's a reason why it functions. How can we have the arrogance to say no, no, unless they do management Western style, all of these kind of informal businesses will collapse because they haven't. And finally, it's the courage over comfort. Brené Brown talks about that, but I'm a big fan of that statement just in itself because we all know when we're in a meeting, when we're in a workshop, when we're in any kind of environment, we know instinctively, most of us know what is the right way. It might be uncomfortable, it might mean I have to speak up and you might not like it. It might go against the grain, but making that decision in a moment to say, actually, when we are putting these restrictions on our partners, that is comfort. It's not courage. So as an example, many of the local partners on the ground when they're working in international consortiums, they really complain because your reporting requirements that you place on them. You know, I need an activity report every week, a financial update, M&E report, etcetera, etcetera. They're doing more time on the reporting for you to feel comfortable. Then they're actually doing the work. And so we all know that is not an accurate or reasonable or sustainable way of managing, but yet we keep quiet. So it's challenging some of those components around compensation. Well, I think our staff in Uganda, you know, they should get less because Uganda is not so... we can say, yes, that sounds good as long as I still get my money, you know, and I still get paid on an international scale, but that's choosing comfort. It's not challenging the system. So I think each one of us, no matter which job we occupy, which position, there are small things where we can say, hang on a minute. This doesn't really make any sense. So let's unpack this and let's look, or let's be honest and say, we're talking about localisation, decolonising, shifting the power as a whitewash, because it makes us look good. It gets us donor funding. And it's nice in our brochures, but we're not really intending to do anything significant to, and that's also fine, but that's honest.

Kate:

Yeah, thank you. I think there's quite a lot of whitewash going on and shapeshifting and performative nonsense and I like what you've just said about courage over comfort. But, I think it's a muscle that many of us have to practice and build, because we're not used to being courageous, and it takes a particular kind of boldness to be courageous around these issues, and I think that's what community is about, isn't it? And, I am because you are, you said earlier on, and I think around this debate, I think we actually need to hold each other up and learn from people like you who are leading the way and being courageous in the work that you do. So I'd like to thank you very much for your inputs today and over to you, Nompilo, to say a final farewell.

Nompilo:

Thank you so much Faye. I was just reminded of the synergies with other interviews we've had when you mentioned the word human dignity. So it's really nice to see that there's just a flow, a trend, or a direction we move towards doing things. And I'm really glad that you're echoing that and reminding us of just where the direction of weight development is at. Thank you for the interview and take care both.