10 November 2025 – In your TED Talk “Poverty is an Industry That Can Be Dismantled”, you challenge the idea of poverty — not as a condition but as a consequence of power and history. What do we miss when we ignore the structures that create and sustain it?
Poverty becomes normalised by development models which are Western-centric. These arise through the industrial development complex, emphasising growth while ignoring power, justice and history. It means we silence how the minority world (Europe, the US and other Western countries) enriched itself at the expense of the majority world through land invasion, settlement and colonialism. We overlook how global trade, governance and politics continue to reproduce inequalities.
Therefore, poverty is seen as individual, a character flaw rather than a systemic outcome. It reduces people to material lack — “one or two dollars a day” — while ignoring the denial of autonomy, dignity and voice. As I argue in the TED Talk, it has created a whole industry of poverty, milking the suffering of Black people and denuding us of our agency. It also centres whiteness as the saviour, excusing systemic inequities, and limits solutions to narrow metrics like GDP or SDGs. We miss solidarity, care and our duty to one another as human beings.
You’ve spoken about economies built on feminist and decolonial values. What might that look and feel like?
It begins with recognising that women’s labour should be viewed as central, not peripheral. We must expand what counts as work to include caring for children or elders, but also carrying languages, cultures, community archives. Social reproduction is an intergenerational legacy.
This is relational labour: our relationship with ourselves, with neighbours and communities and with the soil. Black and brown women globally are custodians of land and knowledge systems, yet these are rarely acknowledged in conventional metrics.
We need to rethink why work becomes prestigious only when masculinised. Cooking at home or working as a secretary is undervalued; yet chefs and chiefs of staff which are doing similar labour are celebrated and better paid. Feminist economics asks why.
Decolonial economics also obliges the minority world to divest from its addiction to power and being centred as the default. It prioritises the voices of the majority world because we are truly, by numbers, the majority. This means redistribution not just of resources and public goods, but of voice and power in global relations.
And in practice? Are there examples of this happening already?
There are. Kenya is piloting a Gross County Happiness Index, which disaggregates data to measure quality of life. For me, this begins to answer your question of what such an economy might feel like. It goes beyond hard numbers, which can describe but not truly capture lived experience. South Africa at the other hand has experimented with gender-responsive budgeting, deliberately directing resources to communities most in need.
In Aotearoa New Zealand, the wellbeing economy is Maori-centred, restoring Turaga (cultural and spiritual well-being) as a pillar of policy. Brazil’s Bolsa Familia is another inspiring case: within just one or two generations it shifted the needle on hunger and access to education. We also see food sovereignty movements across North Africa and the idea of buen vivir (good living) in Bolivia and Chile. None are without flaws, but they show that another possibility is exist.
You’ve also said reparations must be relational, not just financial. What does that mean in practice?
The root word of “reparation” is to repair. It must therefore include structural reform, political recognition, memory, truth-telling and economic justice. It cannot be that the perpetrator unilaterally defines what repair looks like. Recent gestures such as Germany towards Namibia and Belgium towards the Democratic Republic of Congo remain perpetrator-centred and deeply troubling.
Relational reparations mean survivors, descendants and communities are central to the process. They involve memorials, dialogue and rebuilding institutions that serve affected populations equitably. They also include investing in care networks, ecological restoration, education and health systems.
But some losses can never be repaired. Some languages have been killed, some species lost forever, some monuments erased from memory. That wound must be carried. Reparations without true contrition and repentance is very hollow.
You’ve worked across activism, policy and academia. What have these spaces taught you about possibilities and limitations for change?
I love a line often attributed to Alice Walker: “Activism is my rent for living on this planet.” Activism offers urgency, clarity and moral authority. It mobilises communities, but it often lacks resources and institutional pathways for sustained change.
Policy is the door opener. It can lead to structural reforms, redistribute resources and shift budgets. Yet policy can also reproduce exclusion when it only plays around at the margins.
Academia provides analytical tools, historicising and critiquing. But I have always resisted elitist scholarship, the one that lives in the ivory tower. My scholarship must contribute tangible solutions, not just abstractions. Change has to be relational, multi-sided, transdisciplinary, inter- and intra-community.
As we face ecological, social and spiritual crises, what kind of leadership do you believe is most needed?
We need leadership as networks and communities, not singular figures. It must be deeply feminist, placing listening and repair at its heart. Because feminism is not necessarily ‘lovey-dovey’; It is radical, it is linked, it is deeply steeped and I would like to think I stand on the shoulders of hardcore liberation fighters, like Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti. It must also be decolonial, rejecting inherited models of extraction and domination. And it must be intergenerational: holding space for the wisdom of eldership, the fire of youth and the diversity of human identities.
Leadership now must be less commanding, less male-centric, less about the “big man.” The cult of authoritarian figures is rising across the world. We need collective, humble leadership to counter it.
And what keeps you hopeful or grounded in this moment?
We call it “three wells of hope”. First, the everyday practices of care: for self, for others, for neighbours, for the past and for the future.
Second, memory. Remembering what we have done before, and those who resisted and overcame colonialism or apartheid is both grounding and generative.
Third, movements and communities of resistance and imagination. Whether in feminist collectives, grassroots struggles or academic kinship, we are already living into another world. Not only is another world possible, we are living and seeing it into existence.
Lastly, as a member of the Club of Rome, what does be part of this global community mean for your work?
It has been enriching and dynamic. I am still relatively new but already connected to a global community of people who are not always like-minded, but more of ‘like-hearted’, which is sometimes for me is even more important.
I also value the co-creative tension. When you pull a piece of elastic, you don’t know how much it can give without being tested for tension. That tension reveals resilience, possibility, how far an idea can stretch without breaking. The transdisciplinary nature of the Club of Rome appeals to my own instincts: tackling big problems in small bites from different angles. It has been a truly dynamic community.
