The Power Shift: Decolonising Development

Enacting an individual and collective Pledge for Change. Kate Moger and Sidhee Patel interviewed.

• Kate Bird • Season 1 • Episode 36

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In this week’s episode, we talk to Kate Moger and Sidhee Patel from Adeso’s Pledge for Change initiative. The three pledges focus on equitable partnerships, authentic storytelling, and influencing wider change. The Pledge consists of a community of 13 INGOs who commit to working towards the shared objectives.

They talk about the importance of making public commitments to change both individually as leaders and collectively on behalf of organisations. 

We discuss the abundance mindset when it comes to situating new initiatives and projects in the international development space, and the importance of contributing resources and knowledge.

Kate Moger is Global Director of Pledge for Change. Prior to joining Adeso in July 2023, Kate spent over two decades working in humanitarian contexts, most recently as IRC’s Regional Vice President for the Great Lakes and Central Africa, supporting Burundi, Cameroon, Chad, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Tanzania. Previously she was IRC’s Deputy Regional Director for West and Central Africa and Country Director in Mali. Between 2003 and 2013, Kate held a variety of leadership roles with Save the Children in South Sudan, DRC, and Cote d’Ivoire, having begun her humanitarian work in protection services with refugee and asylum-seeking children in the UK. She gained development and peacebuilding experience with Sense International and International Alert, before which she taught English in Japan, and established a start-up travel agency in Russia.

Sidhee Patel works as a Program Officer for the Pledge for Change 2030 Initiative. She previously worked in administrative support, but she is now actively learning and navigating the humanitarian and development program sector. Sidhee has a bachelor’s degree in International Relations and has recently completed the 1st cohort of the Development Hub's Skill Share Program: Decolonizing Development and Humanitarian Action. She is dedicated to social justice and empowering the Global South community in the development and humanitarian aid ecosystem.

If you’re interested to find out more about Kate’s or Sidhee’s work, take a look here:

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Kate Bird:

Hello, I'm Professor Kate Bird, and this is The Power Shift Decolonising Development. Today we're talking to Kate Moger and Sidhee Patel from the Pledge for Change. They talk about the Pledge and how it brings together 13 international NGOs committed to equitable partnerships with authentic storytelling, and influencing wider change. They talk about the importance of public commitments to change, individually and as leaders, about the importance of lived experience encountering Eurocentrism, and about driving change from the majority world. Listen on for more. Welcome to the Power Shift Decolonising Development, the podcast series seeking to bring 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 Nompilo Ndolovu. Over to you, Nompilo.

Nompilo:

Hello, everybody. I'm Dr. Nompilo Ndlovu. I'm 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 methods study on poverty dynamics in Zimbabwe, where I led 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 Bird:

Thanks, Nompilo. Today we're very excited to be talking to Kate Moger and Sidhee Patel. Kate Moger is the Global Director for Pledge for Change, hubbed at Adeso. Prior to joining Adeso, Kate spent over two decades working in humanitarian contexts, most recently as IRC's Regional Vice President for the Great Lakes and Central Africa. Previously, she was IRC's Deputy Regional Director for West and Central Africa and Country Director in Mali. And previously, she worked for Save the Children, Sense International and International Alert. Kate is a feminist who believes that it is possible and necessary to transform the humanitarian sector to be congruent with our stated values. She's excited about working with Pledge for Change on disrupting power dynamics to contribute to an aid ecosystem based on principles of equity, solidarity, and self determination. Her colleague Sidhee Patel is a Program Officer with Pledge for Change and is actively learning and navigating the humanitarian and development sector. Sidhee has a Bachelor's Degree in International Relations and recently completed the first cohort of the Development Hub Skill Share Programme Decolonising Development and Humanitarian Action. So for more on Kate, Sidhee, and the work of Pledge for Change, please click on the show notes below this episode. I'm handing back now to Nompilo to ask our first question. Over to you, Nompilo.

Nompilo:

Thank you Kate. Okay, I'm addressing the other Kate now. Could you tell our audiences a bit about Pledge for Change, how it started, and what you are seeking to achieve?

Kate Moger:

Yeah. Thank you so much. Kate and Nompilo, great introductions, and really happy to be here with Sidhee. So the Pledge for Change was an idea that started with Degan Ali, the Executive Director of Adeso back in 2021, when following the Black Lives Matter movement in the sector, the so called racial reckoning, Degan wanted to seize on the movement, the openness, the awareness of some of the historic injustices that had shaped and continue to shape the sector. And so brought together a group of like minded and I think like hearted CEOs of some of the largest international NGOs. And they went through a process, over about 18 months, of learning and unlearning together, not really with the intent of coming up with this thing that has evolved into the Pledge for Change. But as they went through that process where they met monthly, they spent three hours a month together in some quite vulnerable conversations. They got to the place where they realised that individually as leaders and collectively on behalf of their organisations, they wanted to make these public commitments to change, to do differently, to do better and to take that learning into tangible action. So they came up with three pledges which are organised around the principles of equitable partnerships, authentic storytelling and influencing wider change, and launched publicly in October 2022 on behalf of their whole families and federations of organisations, and said by 2030 we will have realised these commitments. And I joined the pledge a few months later in July last year. And now we're really at the stage of trying to make those promises come true, to deliver on the commitments that we've made and to work in ways that are, as you said in the introduction, Kate, are congruent with the values that we've outlined. So practicing different ways of partnering of telling stories, of being in the sector with the hope and expectation that will enable the shift that all of these individual leaders have committed to make that real.

Nompilo:

Okay. Great. I like that vulnerable conversations led to public commitments and pledges. That's wonderful. The next question already leads from the first and either if you could answer it, could you tell us about how you work with the organisations that have signed up to the pledge?

Kate Moger:

Yeah. So right now we have a community of 13 signatories, 13 international NGOs, who on signing up, commit to this transparent reporting progress towards the pledges as well as to making a financial contribution to running the secretariat and keeping the thing moving. And so those signatories, they're all international organisations working on a global scale. And then we have a growing group of supporters who Sidhee largely supports and works with. 47, I think, at last count of organisations and individuals from across the ecosystem. So a really diverse and eclectic group ranging from community based organisations, civil society movements, movements of movements, networks, think tanks, academic institutions, donors, funders. So a really interesting mix of perspectives from across the ecosystem and what unites these people is the commitment to the shared vision of a stronger aid ecosystem based on those principles of equity, solidarity, humility, and self determination. But as you would expect inside such a diverse group coming from such different places, there are really quite different understandings of what that looks like, and particularly how to get there, and how fast to get there. And so part of the work that we try and do in our two person secretariat is create the container for the types of conversations that are needed to get to some shared meaning, some collective understanding about what good looks like, what change looks like, helps people to understand the incentives, the constraints, the possibilities, and the risks for organisations going through these change processes so that we can co create and co design the bits about how are we going to deliver this in meaningful ways, and then how are we gonna measure it? So we have a nascent accountability and learning mechanism called the PALM, the Pledge Account Learning Mechanism, which aspires to inverting some of our current paradigms and understandings about accountability and to whom the sector needs to be accountable and who gets to decide what good looks like. So within that accountability and learning mechanism, there are three pillars. We have a more classic, I would say, INGO self reporting against some agreed indicators. And then a partner survey, which will be delivered by WACSI, the West Africa Civil Society Institute, and which also hosts Ringo. So we have the connection to the Ringo prototypes and the ecosystemic work that they're doing alongside a Southern assessment piece in which the data that comes from these different sources will be triangulated and reviewed by Global Majority thought leaders, leaders in the civil society space, with the hope and intention that we can again curate conversations that allow people to really question some of their normative discourses and why they think that things should be done in a certain way in order to look at are we progressing meaningfully towards this change or is it another tokenistic effort that might just perpetuate some of those norms. So lots of different ways that we're trying to engage with all of them. I think the other thing I would just say on that is that we're working really hard, Sidhee and I, to not create another centre, to not create another piece of infrastructure, another entity, another organisation that needs to take resources out of the system rather than putting them back into the system. So we talk about the importance of the abundance mindset that we bring to this, where we look at these 13 giant INGOs and 47 supporter organisations and the capacity, the energy, the imagination, vision, the extraordinary resources that they hold. And think about if all of those individuals, teams, and organisations can be moving towards this vision, then we're hopefully onto something quite cool and exciting.

Nompilo:

Oh, it's beautiful. It's the principle of the abundance. Let me move on to the next question. I'm really intrigued that Pledge for Change is working largely with international NGOs headquartered in the minority world, and yet it is based in Kenya in the majority world. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about why it is important that decolonising and anti racist change is being driven from the majority world or global South, depending on what terminology you use?

Kate Moger:

Yeah, thank you. And I suppose the first thing to acknowledge is that these are contested and evolving terms, right? The language that we use is changing and different people with different positionalities prefer different labels. One of the exercises that we did at a recent global gathering with the Pledge participants was to look at the ways those labels work with our embodied selves positioning ourselves in a room in relation to the terms global north, global south, local, international, and so on, and seeing how that feels as a receiver of it and I think that the realisation for many who've had the privilege to use those terms about others, in fact, it's quite an uncomfortable place. So with that caveat, using the language, using the shortcuts and the shorthand that we have, I would, answer that question by saying, again, from Degan's leadership, I think that at the beginning of this initiative, both Degan and our global advisory group, which comes as the name suggests, from around the globe, were very clear at the inception of the idea that initiatives that are designed to localise or to decolonise that are centered in, or led by the global minority or the global north, cannot be the change that they want to see. There's a contradiction in terms to the idea that the international NGOs headquartered in London, New York, DC, Geneva can localise in ways that are going to feel and be acceptable to the people leading the work in the places that the work is delivered. And there was a recognition and continues to be a strong recognition inside the Pledge that the labor, the energy, the burden of transformation to make those changes cannot and must not be transferred to the global majority in much the same way as white people must not depend on black and brown people to address structural racism. So, I think one of the things that's very interesting about the pledge is that it's hosted inside Adeso, a Somali founded, Somali led organisation headquartered in Kenya that's seeking to be the driver, the catalyst, the lever of change across the system. And again, as I said, to do that in ways that feel aligned and congruent with the stated values. So to make sure that in our internal governance and decision making that we're thinking about who's holding the power and why, we're thinking about where the resources are coming from, thinking about who's included and who's excluded from working groups, events and conversations. Because it comes from this recognition that you can't change, you can't make the world different by doing things in the same way. We have to make the world different by doing things differently. And there's an opportunity in this to practice difference. And that can be quite confronting for people because with the norms and the approaches that people are used to are quite strong. But I think part of the privilege that I have and the joy that I have in this job is sitting with some of the discomfort and the tensions and the challenge of having those different parts of the ecosystem look at each other from a slightly different perspective, and therefore think about the ways in which they might be able to work together differently.

Nompilo:

Okay. Alright, Kate, you are White and from the UK, you are based in Kenya and working to root out race and coloniality in INGOs in the development and humanitarian sectors, many of them headquartered in the UK. You must have to confront your own power and positionality in order to navigate this difficult territory. Can you tell our listeners and viewers a little bit about your experience of this?

Kate Moger:

Yeah, thanks Nompilo, I actually really love this question because it feels like this is where I do most of my work on myself, which informs the way in which I work in the world. But that by no means means that I have a perfect answer or even a complete answer to the question. It feels like a question that's constantly evolving and that I'm constantly working with. So I've lived on the African continent for 17 years now. And I think over that time, I've learned to hold very differently the white saviorism that I think if I'm honest, informed, a lot of the reason why I was here at the beginning and the earlier parts of my career here. Because as you mentioned, I carry skin color privilege, I carry passport privilege, education privilege, class privilege, and I'm deeply and I would say increasingly aware of how those identities and how that privilege has enabled my career and given me access to opportunities and to spaces, and to resources and power and status, that was not certainly at the beginning of my career and to some extent still now available to my African colleagues. I think another privilege set of privileges that I bring around language, I speak fluently the two probably most successful colonial languages on the continent. But I also speak fluent INGO, as I often say. And I think part of the reason that I'm useful in this job with the Pledge for Change at the moment is because my fluency in that language, which is a whole other set of jargon and dialects and acronyms and different understandings of meaning feels like I can navigate some of the power dynamics and some of the resistance and some of the challenge in realising the pledges that people with other identities might face different resistance and different challenges in making true, which is not to say that I should be doing this job in perpetuity. The pledge actually, we fully intend that it will cease to exist in 2030. And my hope and expectation is that before that time, it will become more and more of the global majority and led by people with the kind of experience of civil society movement building and change processes led from the South that I don't have and that I can't offer. And I think that's going to be an important part of the pledge indicators of success in the journey that we're on. I suppose the other things that feel important in relation to the question about my apparent privilege of the way in which I've been able to learn on this journey from some extraordinary leaders and colleagues, and mostly, if I'm honest, the amazing women of color who've accompanied me, who've coached me and mentored me and pushed me and challenged me and told me off when I'm getting it wrong and help me to figure out how to get it right, so that I can use the power and privilege I have in different ways to contribute differently. So my decision last year to leave a big INGO, where I had a position with a lot of structural power, a lot of resources, and high status, and I decided to come into this role with Adeso and with the Pledge. It's felt and continues to feel really instructive. And sometimes really hard, but really instructive in terms of learning how a different positionality feels in the ecosystem. You know, having spent that 20 years in INGOs with a set of assumptions about how the system works, to be working for an organisation that is positioned differently helps me to see and understand how that experience is for others and I feel like that's really important to the role that I'm doing because we're asking people to make those kind of shifts. We're asking people to think about how to reposition themselves in the global system. And I hold a bias that I feel like the planet, the ecosystem in which we operate, will continue to need all of us. It will continue to meet people of all sorts of different identities, positionalities, backgrounds and experience. If we're going to have any chance of mending the damage we've done to this planet and to each other, we're going to have to find different ways of coming together and working together to make that version of global solidarity, of collective action, that stops replicating those historical harms, and the destructive power relations that mean that my white skin has got me to where I've got to, which I know is a bit of a circular argument, but it feels like an important thing. And maybe I'll just finish by saying, my identity is my positionality, are always in relation to other people. And so I feel hugely blessed really, so fortunate to have colleagues like Sidhee, and other people in Adeso and in this big community that we're making, who bring very different lived and professional experiences who really, and I'm looking at Sidhee directly here, who can help me see and hear things that I can't see and hear by myself. I can't access them. So the learning that that brings me, which I hope is reciprocal, at least some of the conversations that we're having, just feels like the kind of the magic, and on that micro human level of interaction, feels like the ways in which we can practice working across difference and across power dynamics and across power and privilege towards this sense of shared meaning and understanding and ways of going forward together.

Nompilo:

Thank you for those very personal reflections and observations. I'd like to hand over to Kate to ask the next few set of questions.

Kate Bird:

Thank you, Nompilo. Sidhee, it's lovely to see you again. I last saw you on our Skill Share Programme a few weeks ago. You're a Program Officer at Pledge for Change, and you recently completed our Skill Share Programme. Can you tell listeners a little bit about your work, and what prompted you to work on such a challenging and contested area?

Sidhee:

Thanks, Kate. It's good to see you and Nompilo again. I work as a Program Officer and I support the Pledge for Change my responsibilities entail organising retreats or support sprints that which I held earlier this year with the co facilitator called Mo, and I coordinate communication, so I basically serve as the key contact for the Pledge community. And for people who are interested in joining the Pledge for Change. And I also handle the administrative duties. What got me into this work is I started out as a admin assistant, and before that I was very interested in creating my own NGO and helping people out building schools and taking orphans out to the streets and not have them back. Unfortunately, my dream is on pause right now. I don't want to say I've stopped pursuing that dream. It's on pause right now because I'm trying to navigate the sector like you mentioned earlier and learn how it works. Because when I entered this sector, I learned about the different bureaucracies that exist in the sector, different power dynamics and how everything is very Eurocentric based and the lack of global South leaders having the platform to present their work, their amazing ideas and things like that. Yeah, I think that's what got me. And then, I'm a Kenyan Indian. I unfortunately cannot relate to living in India because I've never been there, but I have lived my entire life in Kenya. So I do acknowledge that I do have a certain positionality where I am, I do have a little bit of privilege, which I acknowledge, and that's what I'm trying to reflect on when I'm working in the sector to understand that you realise that there are nuanced cultural and social dynamics at play when you're decolonising development as it is, and other sectors. Yes.

Kate Bird:

Thank you Sidhee. So we discussed Eurocentrism on the Skill Share Programme. Can you tell me a little bit about your vision for development sector, where development goals and the theory of change is set by the majority world.

Sidhee:

I would love to share that, because I think that's one of my favorite sessions from the Skill Share Programme, where we talked about how Eurocentrism is embedded into all of our work that we do. It's changing now, which I recognise, and I acknowledge that there are small changes happening in the sector, which is good. And I would love to see more changes happening. For example, we have the big INGOs who can support locally led initiatives. That's actually related to one of the pledge action items that came out from the retreat recently. So many of my aspirations for the development sector right now are quite aligned to the three pledges, which is equitable partnerships, authentic storytelling and influencing wider change. I say equitable partnerships is because we need to provide a platform. We as in the collectives development and humanitarian society and ecosystem, and have Global South leaders tell people how they should change and incorporate local communities, perspectives, their ideas, and feedback. The other thing I would say is, I would love to see more global South to South collaborations. For example, I do know that one of our colleagues is campaigning for a library where she is keeping different books on decolonisation, and she wants to teach the community about decolonisation itself, and it's free for them. So if we do not have access to such things, then I don't think that we will move ahead with decolonisation if we do not support locally led initiatives. The other thing is, I would say, valuing people's lived experience. Like Kate mentioned, we are all needed at the end of the day. We all have different perspectives and opinions and finding a common ground is ideal for the new developed world that we want to see. And I think some of the values that I would love to see and share with everybody would be to be open minded. We are all human beings. Sometimes we are controlled by emotions. Sometimes we're controlled by logic. You just need to give space to everybody to feel what they're feeling at that moment and then maybe create a space where they can share and you can learn from them and you can also advise them to move forward. The other thing would be trust, inclusivity, and reducing the marginalisation that is being faced by many people of color in the world.

Kate Bird:

Thank you very much, Sidhee. So, it's been a real pleasure talking to you, Sidhee, and to you, Kate, on this session today. To finish up, I'd really like it if you could each identify a practical first step that our listeners and viewers can take to embed anti racist and decolonised action into their professional practice or into their daily lives if they're not in the development and humanitarian sectors themselves. So, Sidhee, could you perhaps suggest a practical step first and then I'll hand over to Kate to make her input.

Sidhee:

Sure. I think this has been said before by somebody else, but I'll repeat it. It's to self-reflect. You understand where you're coming from, your positionality, your privilege. You have to understand that some of the thinking or the education that you have gotten is quite based on Eurocentrism, it's a hard word, sorry. But I do wanna share this quote where that was shared by one of our supporters during the sprint. They said"learn who you are and then learn who they told you to be." So I think that's very powerful for someone to think of when you're making the changes that you want. Yeah. Thank you.

Kate Bird:

That's a very, very lovely insight. Thank you, Sidhee. Over to you, Kate. Can you suggest your practical intervention or action?

Kate Moger:

Yeah, I love that. I love that Sidhee. Thank you. And my one individually I think is very similar. I think it's to invite questions, to invite questions of yourself, and to invite questions of and from others. Find someone who has a really different viewpoint to you and have a conversation and be curious about why that is. And what are you bringing to your opinion? And I think for me being prepared to iterate, to hold those feelings lightly and to learn from those questions. And then it would be remiss of me not to say at this moment, one way that you could do this is to log on to pledgeforchange2030. org, and sign up to the newsletter, see whether you'd be interested in joining us as a supporter. I hope you've got a sense of what a very, very cool and interesting, and hopefully change making community it is, and we really welcome other people who would like to join us and co create what we want this sector to look like going forward. So, thank you.

Kate Bird:

Thank you, Kate. I'd very much encourage our listeners and viewers to do just that. And if you take a look at the show notes for this episode, you'll find useful links like that. So do take a look and take this action forward. So I will hand back to Nompilo now to say her farewells.

Nompilo:

Thank you both for such deeply personal insights, as well as sharing the amazing work that you do at Pledge For Change, my best wishes and hopefully we will keep in communication.

Kate Bird:

Thanks Nompilo and thanks to you Kate and Sidhee for joining us today.

Sidhee:

Thank you for having us. Thank you.