Empowering Local Voices in Global Development. Niharika Srivastava Interviewed

In our latest episode, we interviewed Niharika Srivastava, an international development professional from India who specialises in evaluations and research. She has moved from the corporate world to impactful work in development and with a rich background in community theatre, economics and a passion for participatory learning, Niharika shares her insights on the critical role of context in development practices. She emphasizes that effective development work cannot be a one-size-fits-all approach. Instead, it requires a deep understanding of the unique challenges and opportunities present in each context. Sharing her experiences across Africa and Asia she highlights the necessity of unlearning and relearning to ensure that solutions are tailored to the specific needs of communities. Niharika advocates for use of local knowledge and experiences in creating equitable and effective programmes that truly reflect the needs of those it aims to serve. Throughout the episode she shares practical steps for professionals in the sector, urging them to engage with local communities and understand the political economy that shapes development agendas. Her insights serve as a powerful reminder that at the heart of global development lies the need for collaboration, respect, and a commitment to social justice

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

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A suggested reading for the audience:

Reading

“Big Aid Is Over” – Kevin Starr (SSIR, 2025)A provocative essay on why the era of large-scale donor-driven aid is ending. Starr argues that governments in the Global South must own and finance solutions that are affordable, scalable, and context-specific – challenging one-size-fits-all aid models and pushing forward  localisation and sustainability. Read here.

Listening

Interventions from the Global South (Podcast) brings together activists, community organisers, change makers, and intellectuals from/of the Global South to imagine registers for theorising communication and co-creating transformative practices that address inequalities, climate change, depleted democracies, and the precarity of labour. Drawing inspiration from the Non-Aligned Movement and communication rights movements, it foregrounds Southern concepts of solidarity, resistance, and Indigenous knowledge systems.

 DevHub Podcast - Disrupting the Development Sector from the Global South.

In this episode, Priyanthi Fernando (IWRAW Asia Pacific) speaks about her ‘disruptive’ approach to development, continuously asserting Global South perspectives and challenging entrenched power dynamics. A great complement to ongoing debates about decolonising aid and shifting power within the sector. 

Transcript

 Empowering Local Voices in Global Development. Niharika Srivastava Interviewed

Kate: 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. My co-host Dr.Nompilo is here today. And I will hand over to you Nompilo.

Nompilo: Thank you Kate. I'm Dr. Nompilo Ndlovu a Zimbabwean born South African based development professional, working across transitional justice, gender conflict and vernacular histories. I have over a decade of experience in academia policy and the non-profit sector and bring a strong Pan-Africanist perspective to my work. I'm deeply committed to centering marginalised voices and driving meaningful social impact. In that regard, I have worked with Kate as a senior associate of the Development Hub across various research, leadership and collaborative engagements. Back to you Kate.

Kate: Thanks Nompilo. Today we're talking to Niharika Srivastava. Niharika is a global development professional who uses mixed methods in monitoring, evaluation and learning. And has worked to support South-South learning across Africa and the Asia Pacific. Having facilitated knowledge exchange, particularly in nutrition, climate resilience and food systems, Niharika is deeply committed to participatory and adaptive learning approaches that empower local actors and support evidence-based, equity driven programming and has worked on projects across Africa and the Asia Pacific funded by a range of development actors: including FCDO, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, unicef, UNDP and Gain. Right now, Niharika is completing her masters at IDS Sussex while working as a consultant with the Development Hub on power and economic transformation. For more about Niharika and her forthcoming blog series, please click on the show notes below this episode. Back to your Nompilo for our first question.

Nompilo: Hello Niharika. We've met before but it's great to have you on the show today. I wonder if we can start our conversation by you telling our audience a bit about yourself and why you chose to work in global development.

Niharika: Thank you so much to the both of you for having me. Kate has already said a lot about what I do on a day-to-day basis but I will take a moment to share with you how I ended up five years ago in the international development space. I did an undergraduate degree in economics at the University of Delhi at one of the top institutes back in my country India. Which is notoriously famous for producing the best investment banking analysts and corporate financiers, entrepreneurs and management consultants and needless to say being an impressionable 18-year-old when you join you've stepped out of your home, which is not Delhi for me which is not my country's capital but another smaller provincial capital. And obviously impressionable 18-year-old girl has thought that she is going to make a career in corporate finance. She is very good at math and trying to do her chartered financial analyst course and everything. I worked for like six to eight months, first at an insurance firm and then at a personal wealth management firm, only to realise that okay, I need to know how to manage my own money but this is not what I find happiness in. That reason is not because I just one day find a woke up and had an epiphany, but because of my background in performing arts. I have been on the stage since I was five years old as an actor and then as a writer of plays when I was in school. In fact, the first play I ever wrote was an adaptation of a South African play called Woza Albert. I was 14 years old then. When I came to the University of Delhi, I was exposed to this amazing World Street theater and how street theater can be theater as a means for mobilising grassroots movement as a force for behavior change or making people aware about challenges in their neighborhoods or L-G-B-T-Q rights, et cetera.

And while I joined that particular society, the dramatic society at my Institute for the Love of the Craft, I kind of stayed and directed plays because I actually fell in love with the process of taking up an issue. Talking to people, researching about it and actually putting out ideas in creative ways. Which is something I do in a way every day even now, even though my plays have transformed into slightly boring reports and presentations but that is how I am. I will say that a lot of people are very skeptical about me wanting to cross over from corporate to development, because of course, development doesn't pay as much as investment banking or corporate finance in general. But I think I took a bold bet on myself and I think I have been really happy doing the kind of work that I do. And I would say that I barely knew what I was getting into but I really think as Kate mentioned, I'm an evaluation specialist and I think the questions of what works, what doesn't for whom they really get me ticking and they make me want to jump out of bed every morning, and it excites me. My work excites me a lot. So yeah, that's what I'd say. And to anyone who's looking to go for what they feel that they should be doing when they are 21, please go ahead there's nothing to lose. That's what I would say.

Nompilo: Thank you for sharing that. And my view is that development work is so intersectional. So it is interesting to me to see that you can use your financial background and as you said, the reports that you write now in evaluation are scripts on their own or a playwright version of reports. It's such a refreshing way of looking at it. More importantly that you can bring difference skills into your work. I'll move on to the next question. You have worked mainly for IPE an International Consultancy Company headquartered in Delhi, India and with branch offices in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Nairobi-Kenya and London in England. What are the top five observations you have reflecting on your personal experience of working across the continents of Africa and Asia? And if I can ask the question further, what wider relevance might these observations have for others working in global development and humanitarian action, especially when we are seeking to decolonise the whole ecosystem. And thinking in a more focused way about dignity, community led problem identification and action, and how policy and technical transfer might work and the importance of embedding south to south and circular learning. That's a mouthful.

Niharika: No, thank you so much. And I think for me it's very important to reflect on this because I have spent about five years doing what I do professionally. And I must say that when I had started out I was begging people to give me work because I could not justify how a person who's worked only in finance can legitimately want to do something related to development. And at that point of time, I was just like if I can get to do any small job even at my city's neighborhood, I will be good. But I had not imagined that work with IPE Global which is where I work, would not just take me to different corners of my very vast country, but also of the majority world. That being said, I can say that because I have grown up in a developing country, a lot of things are things which are lived experiences for me. So, to me it's not a surprise that a road outside my home is bad or is poorly lit because I know it is, I have accepted it as my reality, and I know a lot of the reasons and now is the time for me or was the time for me to now think about what can we do to fix this. So there is a lot of people from the global south working internationally and if we have lived experiences, a lot of it is already known to us. But that being said, my first project took me to say Dar es Salaam City in Tanzania, I realised that even though the background I was born into in this setting is similar in the sense that it is a developing country context, it is an up and coming mega city but I need to learn more about the context. So I think the first big learning as an international professional working in the global south is to understand context is the king. Regardless of where you're from, you always have to unlearn, relearn and you need to be very humble in accepting that you will not know everything. You need to speak to those who know and you need to learn from the ground up. You need to read a lot and you can acknowledge that there are a lot of similarities. For example, street food weddings, I work a lot in food so a lot of my examples will be food related, is common but challenges are same but maybe approaches are different. For example, I can do say urban rooftop farming in Bangladesh, but if I propose the same in India, the policymakers going to look at me like as if I'm a crazy person because urban agriculture is a concept doesn't exist there. So there are similar challenges but we have to acknowledge it same but a little different. And since we work in development and there's so much written about it from people, from the west and now more and more people from the global south, there are certain approaches that are more popular that are a single organisation or consultancy for instance, pilots a new approach and it's worked everywhere and they kind of travel to different parts of the world and try and cross-pollinate but it has to be contextualised one size can't fit all. And I think one of the very important things, because I work in the field of evidence and we get to be very consumed by what is going to be the method and what tools am I going to use? What's my data and my envivo and my whatever artificial intelligence this, that. We get very obsessed with methods and tools but there's a lot of politics around evidence. What evidence is being sought, how is it going to be used? There's been very funny instances with me, where we want you to write this report so that you can justify this and I'm like we are not doing that, like that's not against all ethical principles of being a researcher. But also at the same time, what is the use of doing all this research and narrative building? Is to kind of trigger some sort of an action.

So we need to understand what ticks people with that power and how we understand the politics of programming, development programming and how we get more people to use the amazingly brilliant research that we do. So that's what I would say. There is a lot in terms of decolonisation and I've been thinking a lot about it ever since I worked and I realised that one of the very easy pathways to this very big, esoteric term is actually in a very boring concept or practice of procurement.

I have realised that it's just because as a consultant, more often than not I am responding to RFPs or I'm responding to a terms of reference and to be able to do that work one needs to fulfill what my partner or my potential partner is going to be asking for me. And if partners really want to see representation, say from young people or from people who have lived in that context, then those kind of clauses, need to be there. Otherwise we will end up perpetuating the same blindness to however we've been formulating our teams. A couple of weeks ago, I was writing a proposal for my organisation and at the back of my head I have a team structure I want it to be gender balanced, I wanted to have an equal number of people from the particular region that we are bidding in but I just told myself let me see. Let me have this human resource teaming structure flow out organically and let's just see how it turns out with just this very basic guideline in my head. And to my surprise, it turned out really well, with just keeping it at the back of my mind that I need to be very authentic when I'm writing, I don't want to pretend that I know something. I really want that other person who has my teammate, who has actually lived say in the Pacific which is where this was based. And I loved how organically it came out. So I would say that, that being said it will not always work this way and we need to take some kind of like conscious efforts to kind of decolonise the practice or ensure that processes are locally led and they actually reflect the ground reality of what we are writing about, where we are working in, so on and so forth. And that will of course, need for people to adjust to ways of working in that particular country. For example, working in England, fixing interviews and appointments. I know that an email will work because that's how the culture is but if I need an interview with somebody in Bhutan or I need somebody else and so I will need to pick up the phone and call them, that's the only way it's going to work. So there's a lot to learn and unlearn that's what I'll say. I think I'll stop there because I've been speaking way too much.

Nompilo: No! You have been speaking through your passion and we appreciate it and I think your various thoughts were actually caught because they were reflected quite well. I also really liked how you spoke about for you south to south learning. Just how so much of it is the same, but so much is different, right? So even when we're talking about Africa and Asia development work, the context are different. So it cannot be one solution fits all. I also really enjoyed you reflecting once again in our methodologies and the way we analyse things.

And I think we've had quite a few people coming to speak about receiving research or report writing methods, which are not necessarily fitted for every context. So thank you for reiterating that.

I'd like to move on to the third question and already touch on what you've kind of been speaking about before, but need you to reflect on your own power and positionality, and that of IPE your long term institutional home. Do you have any reflections that you would like to share? Especially speaking once again across the continents of Africa and Asia?

Niharika: Yeah. Thank you. I think this is a very deeply personal question, yet very important. I hope it resonates whatever I say with people. So as I said I am a young professional, I identify as a young development professional and personally, there is a lot of so to speak imposter syndrome, just to say that, do I even deserve to be in this room? I remember one of the very interesting pieces of feedback that I had received from a mentor was, why don't you speak more often? Because in a closed up more personal space I would have a lot of ideas to share but no confidence to verbalise them while I was interviewing people or presenting. So I would rather initially take like a backseat and I realised that I'm not qualified enough or I don't deserve to be here is one part of the story.

The other part of it is if I add, I'm not white let me just put it that way or just a general perception that i'm from India, so I am an expert in India but nobody is willing to look at me or it is not natural for people to suddenly look at me and say that I can be an international expert. Which is strange to me because the same benefit of doubt or the same credibility or credentials would be very naturally afforded to somebody from the global north. Is something that I have witnessed. And because this is the first time that I have stepped out of India and now living in another country and I meet so many people from the global south and they echo this sentiment as well, that is what I will say. That being said, i'm first gonna talk about personally myself and then of course for globally South Hubbed organisation such as the one that I work for, that's the other part that I'll come to. But a lot of people have asked me, you live in India why do you need to go to the UK to study poverty and development? But the truth is that unfortunately educational institutions in my country are not able to attract the kind of global forum that my current institute in the UK is able to. And that experience of having studied in such a multi-cultural context, which is possible in places such as this is something that I have looked to a lot. Not just to say that, okay this adds legitimacy to my work because I also know that once I complete my education and I'm a little older, it'll not be that one finder I feel very confident about myself. I feel that okay, I am the most qualified researcher that will not happen. But yes, these are steps in building in firmly holding my ground in the sector. That's what I will say personally. Institutionally, I want to say, there are a lot of similarities between say, a company that starts very humbly just to work out of India and so to say slowly and slowly convincing the bigger, larger, global North contractors, convincing them to take them as a sub partner. Into other countries or other states. A very big part in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a lot of the work of very big development partners like the FID would not be through locally based institutions. And there was always a need for a global north a big contractor. And from that evolution of, it can be led by companies from the global south from the country itself.

There has been a long journey for IPEs as well, from like being a small contractor to DFID, to be being one of the lead contractors for FCDO directly. There is so much, that has been achieved. They've also been called the best kind of consultancy in like South Asia. And because of the rich, because just of the size of the country that i’ve worked in, there's just so much happening. There's a lot of eagerness to learn from India's experience but I would say that it's not all obviously the most natural choice because we are in the global sun. I would say the things are definitely changing, it's moving in the right way. More work flowing, being led by local institutions, institutions in the global south. And to be very honest, this is not to take away anything from the expertise that people bring from the global north. It is more about reducing barriers and how to bridge that like make it convenient for say, Nigeria to learn from India. India to learn from Nigeria, just as an example. Or for example, the UK, Nigeria and India coming and doing like a try party, knowledge sharing and all of that is only possible when you have different kinds of people with those backgrounds coming together. And all of that coming together is only possible when you remove gates that global, older practices have kind of created. That is what I would have to say about this.

I will also say that, sometimes when findings or recommendations don't resonate, with people. For example, I have been doing a lot of strategy reviews for global climate bodies. And with us, I generally observed that in the final pool of consultancies, IPE would be the only company from the global south and the rest would be, say North American. But we would still get the work which is amazing, but there is yes, sometimes if findings are not favorable and people haven't said very pleasant things about this institution. There is a tendency to doubt your bonafide methodology and so on and so forth. But these are all, I think to be tackled with tact and diplomatically. We are more susceptible to this, but I think there is a lot more, I would say to prove for us there is a lot of heavy lifting and punching above our weight kind of feeling. Sometimes, I will not deny it but I think it is changing for the better and I'm quite proud of the institute I work with and its identity as being hubbed in the global south and working internationally.

Nompilo: Over to you Kate. Nothing more from my end. Thank you for those reflections Niharika.

Kate: So Niharika, we've previously had Kate Newman from Interact Guest on this podcast talk about decolonising development consultancy in episode 27 and to Nancy Kankum Kusi talking about the work of WACSI, the West African Civil Society Institute and Ringo reimagining the INGO in episode 30. And Faye Ekong in episode 34 talking about her work bringing Ubuntu leadership in African humanism to corporations largely based in North America and Europe. But you are our first guest from an international development consultancy company headquartered in the majority world or global south. I'd love to hear what you have to say about leading from the south or majority world. And your experiences of helping to shape not only development discourse, but in terms of influencing the way evidence is used and the way recommendations are made to governments and other actors, and of course any other observations that you'd like to make.

Niharika: Thanks. That's a loaded question and yeah I think I was reflecting on this, but I would say that I don't have a definitive answer for this, to be honest. But I just want to reflect on the way evidence is used and the way recommendations are made to governments and other actors and so on and so forth. I will take an example of climate change is an issue that comes up a lot in the work that I do. Some similarities I found back from India when I was working in Lesotho. Just because I know that climate is a challenge but unfortunately climate is still not, a political issue in the global south or at least within India, i'm not talking about internationally. And from what I know is that it is not an issue politically even in Lesotho or South Africa for that matter. Issue is of poverty and of livelihoods, income poverty. This is what I recognised. And I recognise that in policy spaces the word climate adaptation is not making those decision makers stick but livelihood enhancement, poverty reduction is because we are development professionals, we know that they're related but we need to speak in a manner of speaking that is understandable, palatable and relevant enough for the people with the power funding to move the needle.This is the kind of connection that I was able to draw because of kind of the similarities between the context I have lived in for the most of my life and when I was asked to work in Lesotho. But I know that say in the global north, yes! Climate change is an issue, it is a political issue for that matter but it is not the same. It's not framed in the same way, like how it is framed in Lesotho. So, using how we could draw the threads. And when we were working with this particular agency and this agency was ultimately working with the local government, department of the government of Lesotho they never realised at that point of time that this is how the need to frame their program and this is how they need to advocate for that kind of an approach till we brought it in. So I think, a lot has to do with understanding what is the current policy and political priority. This is not to say okay, if the political priority is to wash off you can't do incorrect things. But, if it isn't hurting anyone and if it makes logical sense, of course climate adaptation is a pathway to enhancing people's livelihoods but if it's the livelihoods narrative that it's taking. So what I'm trying to say is that there are a lot of similarities, again I'll reiterate what I said before, there are a lot of similarities from the global south, like from India versus anywhere in the world. But taking a step back, understanding what are the local priorities, that's one part of it. So understanding the political economy and so on and so forth. The other thing I would say is, I've shared this with you before, there is just a general interest to learn a lot from India and India's experience. I am a very big critic of my country at the same time, of course I love my country but I think this is a part of this entire rebranding the country. But, in general there's a lot of keenness to learn from where I come from, which is something that I have also observed.

So, I have personally never felt that people are looking at me with eyes of suspicion because I'm not from the west. But it is more to kind of learn that okay, you have walked the talk in your country and what can you share with us? Instead of what can you share with us from your experiences and if there are any lessons that we can transpose and adapt from like other places you worked in, from your own country et cetera.

Kate: Thanks Niharika. Thinking about what you've just said, I find a couple of things quite striking. Just focusing on the climate change kind of entry point that you have done. It's interesting to observe that in both India and Lesotho, that climate change isn't a policy or political issue but that livelihoods are. It's not surprising because it's the livelihood issues, the food security, the natural disasters issues that are the proximate issues. They're the closest issues to people and therefore those are the ones that get the kind of policy attention and the policy support. But what strikes me about the next bit that you focused on in your response, is the way that you were talking about, really thinking about not just the entry point in terms of understanding political economy. Which is quite often how western consultants would use political economy analysis. They would do the political economy analysis and they'd say, now that I understand this mapping of the political economy, here is the entry point for me to say what I want to say. So they've already done the messaging, they've decided what their messaging is and then they're going in to find the entry point for how they can get their point across. And what you are saying is something quite different. It's understanding context so that you can understand really what the local priorities are and responding to those local priorities. So it's not going in and bludgeoning people with this is my opinion, these are my priorities. You are actually looking at what works given that context. So I think, it's not a new point, the point that i’m making, but it's the first time that, that's come to me in terms of that south-south understanding I think perhaps more open to exploring rather than parachuting in and saying, we know what needs to be done. We know what needs to be said. We just need to persuade these people. And that's why the political economy analysis is done. So I think that's quite interesting actually. And that's not the outcome that I was expecting from that part of our conversation at all. So that's kind of news for me, that's interesting.

Onto our next question, as we bring our conversation to a close, I'd like to ask you to explore what practical steps. You can recommend to other professionals in global development and humanitarian action. Other than self-reflection or the inner work, because that tends to be the first go-to response that our guests say. So, what is the first thing, the priority, other than the inner work that you can recommend to professionals within the sector for supporting or contributing to decolonisation and anti-racism within our sector. Particularly thinking about professionals from the majority world. On one side and then if you would say something differently to people from the minority world or the global North.

Niharika: Yes. I will answer your question; I want to just add one more reflection I was having off when you were reflecting on what I had just said. This is very funny because I have never ever said this out loud, but now I realise it. The reason for not just parachuting in or like coming and keeping a more open and exploratory approach, the answer is very simple, it’s like when I'm young and nobody supports me. When I'm in my initial part of the career and I find that one person and I feel very happy, in my mind I'm like, when I'm older and I'm experienced and if I see someone who's struggling, I will really help them out. I will not let that other bad thing that happened with me, happen to them. I would say the approach of the institution I work with and my approach to my work is very similar to that. Reason being is that, I was just saying earlier in the late 1990s or early 2000s IPE in its work and I hear so much from so many senior people I work. There are people sitting there in government offices, Indian consultants and there is somebody who flies in, flies out. That's the fly in, fly out consultant. And they didn't just give like a blanket approach and they just go away after that, Right! Without really understanding okay, they did the political economy analysis and they will somehow say okay, this is how you need to do it whatever, and they will try and land their message through. But when you have been at the receiving end of some not great advice, or advice which has not been that useful or advice that has not been so contextually grounded, it is obviously natural for a person or an institution to think that if I were to go and do it somewhere else, or even in my own field or country, I would try and do a better job of understanding the context.

To me, it's almost common sense. So that's what I'll say. It's like, because we've seen it happening so much in our country and the work that we've done, I think as an improvement on working internationally is to really understand, context to speak fluent, translation is not just translation for the exercise with there's so much of collaboration, but there's so much nuance to it. It's not just the exercise of, if I look at the example of translating something, so I'll just say that. Now coming to your question at hand so other than self, particularly you said like people from the majority world and from the minority world, and this is piece of advice that somebody had given me two years ago. And they told me that I always keep telling myself that, I know I need to be closer to the field and everything and I need to be closer to where the action is happening because that's how I have been trained. But somebody gave me a very valuable advice and they said that, if you are from the global south, if you're from the majority world, I will tell you if it is possible within your means, whatever you can do, put all your effort, go and work at the headquarter level. As you will know at the moment, most of the headquarters are in the global North. Just to see how those questions about resourcing, funding fund flows, priority setting, agenda setting happen and how that kind of percolates down to the regional and national levels. Because as people working in the field or people working in different countries or like on the field, we don't know the politics of that, or we don't know the context of those conversations. So it's just good as a person in international development later in life, I have all the liberty to decide where I want to be. As a young person I can say that the advice, made a lot of sense to me because I can this way see what happens where and see how it fits with each other or doesn't fit with each other and how can I make programming better for local realities while also seeing, the funding agenda is set in and so forth and how I can mobilise innovative funding. And they also told me that if you were from the global north or from the minority world, I would've told you to go and work in the field as much as possible because unfortunately you haven't lived in that kind of a setting, having access to clean water. Like clean water not coming from your tap is not something you're exposed to. That's exactly the example that they give me. And I was sitting in this place in Paris, which is when this advice is being given to me. I thought that makes so much sense because that way in this approach, the people from the minority world can actually go live, see how life works for the people that they are working in. From the global south, can see how decisions are made, what happens in the seats of power, where in rooms I literally have no access to, and so on and so forth.

And in that process I can create this way of circular learning. I was saying that it's all about reducing barriers. There still are quite a lot of barriers, but I think if we can learn from each other, there is a lot that we can do. That being said, I'm very cognisant that it is not easy for me to say that okay, if you're sitting in the global south, go and work in the global north or study. There is a lot of resource related questions and like financial constraint that goes into it so on and so forth. But if it is possible if you have the means, go ahead and do it that is what I can say. It's not a very perfect answer honestly, but I think and I'm seeing it right now. As I see my friends from England, my friends from France, going and doing their two months of fieldwork in Bhutan or in Tanzania. I see them now and the kind of perspectives that they have come up with and people like me who have come to the UK. And the kind of conversations we have never had exposure to, so I am seeing that and I think there is a lot of power if people can make it happen. And of course there will be a need to support these kind of exchanges as well. That's what I have to say.

Kate: Thank you for that response Niharika. I've had some thoughts while you've been talking, and one is that if you're going to work in global development, it's pretty important to understand the globe and what you are talking about is understanding how other people live. So it's understanding how other people live, but it's also I sometimes think of the global development as being an ecosystem but I also think about it as being a failed market, with all the failures that we know happen in markets in terms of information asymmetries, gatekeeping, monopolies, monopsonies, all of those things are going on. And you can't understand the market fully because of that, unless you actually go and sit with some of the other market players. So you get to understand how information flows through the system, how money flows through the system, how decisions are made, because not all of those are transparent. So if you are sitting in Delhi, you won't necessarily have equal and open access to the information that someone that's sitting in London or Paris has. So relocating gives you the chance to subvert those blockages and get access to that information, get access to those networks, which wouldn't be necessary if the market wasn't a failed market. Just some observations and some thoughts. But another thought, and I'd kind of like to finish on this thought, is that talking through all of these issues with me struck me very strongly when you've been talking about understanding context, when you've been talking about not just in a bland sense, but really understanding what the policy priorities are and what the political priorities are. Not so that you can, as I said earlier, bludgeon your way in and convince people of your opinion, but so you can really create a nuanced and locally relevant analysis and advice. What strikes me is that in working towards a decolonised approach in global development, we really are talking about increasing quality and increasing effectiveness of the work that we do. And I'd like to kind of finish on that point cause I think that's a really strong point to finish on. And I'd like to say goodbye on my behalf, but then I'd like to hand over to Nompilo to say goodbye as well.

Nompilo: Thank you both Niharika and Kate for a very thought provoking session. Yeah, that's it on my end. And we will continue these deliberations on other platforms.

Kate: Thank you Nompilo and thank you Niharika. Goodbye for now. I'm very much looking forward to reading your blog series, which we're going to be positioning on the Dev Hub website. Please do see the link in the show notes below, for all things Niharika. Goodbye from us over to you Niharika to say your last farewell.

Niharika: Thank you so much, Kate and Nompilo for having me on your podcast. I am always grateful to share what I have learned, I always feel very surprised that why would somebody give so much space to a 27-year-old? But I need to keep reminding myself that it's okay. There will be a point of time where I'll be 50 years old. Thank you so much, for just the chance to reflect on the work done thus far. Thank you.

Kate: Thank you Niharika, and goodbye from all of us.