I caught up with Cheri from accountability lab earlier this week and we discussed the ‘blueprint’ of what has worked for them in the context of empowering the people who are affected by inequality, to indirectly or directly drive solutions on the road to inclusion. We:

• Spoke about meeting people where they are, giving them the tools to express their thoughts, feelings and ideas in their own word
• Reflected upon the tendency to use certain countries as ‘exemplars’ in the context of what corruption really looks and feels like- comparing our experiences of Nigeria, South Africa, the UK and the States
• Discussed the powerful combination of self-awareness and building unlikely networks

Then I went to talk as part of a speaker series yesterday at Stanford’s King Center on Global Development. The topic was Youth Employment in Africa and after hearing perspectives from the World Bank and the co-founder of WAVE (a social enterprise set up in 2013 to tackle youth employment in Africa), I realised just how much I thought I knew but didn’t know about the issues facing millions of African youth but also how much the speakers thought they knew but didn’t know about the very same issue. In this case, the magic combinations of self-awareness and building of unlikely networks has resulted in a follow up coffee where we hope to better understand our blind-spots, and use our new found knowledge for good.

Week 5 Reflections: Full circle / Knowledge Integration and Project Planning: Data, Inequality and Society (2022-2023) by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0