The importance of human wisdom in making knowledge more equitable.
As published by the World Economic Forum Global Shapers Cambridge Hub on 22/02/21 here.
It’s been over a month now since I started my first ever job at the Saïd Business School of the Oxford University. It should have been like going back home, revisiting my ends, but unfortunately like everything else these days, I’ve been working from home in Cambridge. But the lockdown did not stop me from launching into a trip down memory lane. My first time in the business school was in my second year at Oxford, about 7 years ago, when I started my Entrepreneurship Course. I remember falling asleep at around 5pm in the crowded lecture hall, in the Nelson Mandela Lecture Theatre. I also remember looking at the busk of Nelson Mandela at the far-right corner and recalling the impressive achievements of this man. In one lifetime he studied law, went to prison, saw the end of apartheid, became President of a nation and won a Nobel Peace Prize! That’s pretty cool. And being Mauritian/African, I felt a little sense of belonging to be sat in a lecture hall that he himself inaugurated back in 2002.
Fast forward to 2021, I am now working for the Skoll Centre at the school. This year I’ve been thinking about what my True North is, what is it that I am working towards in the long term. I’ve always been interested and actively involved in women empowerment and girl’s education generally. And this comes from my own experiences and from wanting things to be fair, to make things equitable for all. Having been the first Mauritian girl to have attended both Oxford and Cambridge Universities, I’ve been exposed to the inequalities to girls’ education from a very young age. I’ve also dabbled in pro-bono consulting work, up-skilling refugees and mental health. But I found that I always learnt more and definitely achieved more impactful changes when we had people who have lived experiences of the social challenge we were trying to address. Let me give you an example. While trying to set up a mentoring scheme to help refugee students apply to universities, it was not only important to interview refugees or people working on the ground with NGOs. What made a difference was to have someone on the team who was not only doing a PhD on the effects of forced migration on the consumption of education but was also themselves a refugee. They were able to bring in their own experiences to the conversation which meant that we were able to offer more targeted, and needed, assistance. I came across another such example while having a chat with a friend from Ghana. There was a team investigating the low attendance of girls in schools in a specific village. They concluded that this was for cultural reasons, where girls’ education was not valued. However, when a Ghanaian girl from the same village, who back in her childhood days went on to study in a different village, had come back and joined another research team, the real reason for low attendance came to light. It was actually the lack of girls only bathrooms in schools that led to girls not being able to go to schools when they were on their periods after the age of puberty. The accumulation of missed school days eventually led to a high number of girls dropping out.
I started thinking about how important it is to create space to allow people who have lived experiences to take part in brainstorming and creation of sustainable changes, especially when we are trying to address social challenges. In the world of research, usually focus groups or interviews from the community are used to include the “voice” of the people with lived experiences. But why are we asking them questions, that we think need answering? Why are we taking their experience and thoughts, and claiming they are our own research insights? Why are they not being given the chance to be at the brainstorming table? Why are they not trusted to have the ability to address the challenges they have lived through?
Doing some reading on this I came across the terms “lived experience” and “learnt experience” which eventually led to me Knowledge Equity. The first one is obvious, they are people who have had first-hand experience of a specific social problem or of being part of an under-represented group. Learnt experience, on the other hand, refers to acquiring experience through learning, research and active effort. As explained to me by the Superstar of Knowledge Equity, Baljeet Sandhu, these do not have to be mutually exclusive groups! There are so many people around us who have both lived experiences but are also learnt experience leaders. They are the ones we need to bring about systemic social change!
Let’s go back to Nelson Mandela. He was able to use his long imprisonment, as well as his law degree to shape his own personal and political development. But most importantly, these two things together shaped his contribution to the struggle of the African National Congress to overthrow the constraints of apartheid. He had both lived and learnt experiences and he used them to bring about one of the biggest systemic social change in the world! So, more than 25 years later, why are we not involving people with lived experiences in the conversation? Why do we still have the toxic ‘saviour’ mentality where we don’t think that the people we are trying to help, have the ability and wisdom to contribute to the discussion? It baffles my mind!
Knowledge equity is basically the effort to expand what is currently valued as knowledge and addressing the fact that communities have been excluded from this discourse through imbalanced structures of power and privilege. The people impacted by social challenges don’t need to be given a voice. They have a voice. What they need are access to resources, the space to get involved in the conversation, and for their input to be given value and due consideration!
I have now found my True North! It was something I was noticing, something I was working towards without knowing that there is a whole umbrella term and group of people working on this too. I am so excited to have found this path, and I am now trying to learn more about the current situation, and the best practices to bring about change when it comes to making knowledge more equitable! If you have any suggestions of case studies, or pertinent reading on this topic please send them my way, I am on a learning journey. If you’d like to just have a chat on the topic, please ping me!