Shifting Power: Trust-Based Decolonial Feminist Philanthropy for Change

In this paper, authors Samuel Oji Oti, Emma L.M. Rhule, Tiffany Nassiri-Ansari, and Shaady Salehi assert that, while conventional philanthropy has made a profound impact in global health, it is fraught with power asymmetries and harmful practices that perpetuate gender inequalities and impede progress toward many of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. These practices include excluding women and gender-diverse people from leadership positions and ignoring their voices in policy, programme, and intervention design and implementation.

In the face of the “global polycrisis”—the rise of the anti-gender movement, threats to and assaults on liberal democracy, and the disproportionately gendered impacts of climate change, armed conflict, and forced displacement—the authors call on global health philanthropy to depart from its model of funders setting the agenda and determining how impact is measured. Informed by Three Horizons workshop participants, the authors share a vision for global health philanthropy where decolonial, feminist advocates drive long-term strategic thinking, intersectionality, trust-based funding, and community-led solutions.

This paper forms part of a 12-paper series with the United Nations University International Institute for Global Health (UNU-IIGH), Advancing Gender Equality in Health: Expanding voices, evidence, and time horizons for change.

This work is licensed by UNU-IIGH under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.