In June, I travelled to Johannesburg at the invitation of ActionAid Kenya. I had been involved in the Young Urban Women movement since 2024, but this was my first international engagement—and my first journey outside Kenya.
I was anxious. Johannesburg was cold; South Africa was in the middle of winter. I was also struck by the city’s roads and infrastructure, which appeared more developed than what I was accustomed to at home. But the most valuable part of the visit was the opportunity to meet and learn from young women from Malawi, South Africa and Zambia.
Across these countries, young women are organising against gender-based violence, challenging economic exclusion and demanding better public services. In Malawi, for example, Young Urban Women forums have formed part of broader efforts to confront patriarchy, expand access to sexual and reproductive-health services and strengthen women’s economic independence. In Zambia, feminist advocacy has pressed for social-protection systems that recognise women’s paid and unpaid labour. Such work differs from one country to another, but the underlying struggle is familiar: women are demanding not merely inclusion in existing systems, but a say in how those systems are designed.
The Johannesburg meeting also exposed an uncomfortable gap between what feminist movements say and what they do.
Beyond the language
Decolonial feminism has become a familiar phrase in development and activist circles. It sounds radical and progressive. Yet its meaning is less obvious when one moves from conference rooms to communities.
In practice, decolonial feminism asks who produces knowledge, who sets priorities and who controls resources. It questions feminist ideas presented as universal when they have largely been shaped by institutions in Europe and North America. It also examines how colonialism, capitalism, race and class continue to determine whose labour is valued and whose experience is believed.
The political scientist Françoise Vergès draws attention to the exhausting and undervalued labour performed largely by poor and racialised women—the women who clean homes, offices, hospitals and cities but remain underpaid and almost invisible. They “clean the world”, yet rarely share fairly in its wealth or power. Their exploitation, she argues, is not an accident. It belongs to a global economic order built through slavery, colonialism and the extraction of labour and natural resources.
For feminist movements, therefore, decolonisation cannot mean simply adopting a more fashionable vocabulary. It must change how organisations make decisions, distribute resources, collect evidence and relate to the women whose rights they claim to defend.
This is where the work becomes difficult.
Whose reality counts?
When speaking with women in our communities, we hear about marriage, relationships, insecure work, struggling businesses, violence and the daily negotiations required to survive. Yet formal reports do not always reflect these realities. Women’s lives are compressed into indicators, activities and success stories.
Even the language of the “young urban woman” raises questions. Which urban woman do we mean? Does she live in a middle-class neighbourhood or an informal settlement such as Majengo? Does she have a formal job, run a roadside business or depend on casual work? And what of the young rural woman, whose experience may disappear from a movement organised around urban life?
These distinctions matter. Women do not experience inequality in identical ways. Class, disability, sexuality, location, ethnicity and access to education all shape their choices. A movement that treats women as one uniform category will reproduce some of the exclusions it seeks to challenge.
This problem is compounded by the way organisations share knowledge. A group may be doing powerful work in one community—mobilising women, pressing for services and challenging harmful practices—without knowing that women in another country are confronting much the same problems.
The result is needless reinvention and, sometimes, isolation.
This is not because little is happening. It is because information usually travels upwards. Communities report to organisations; organisations report to donors. Stories are polished, packaged and converted into evidence of success. Far less attention is given to learning sideways—from one community to another or from one national movement to its counterparts elsewhere.
A genuinely decolonial movement would treat such exchanges as central rather than incidental. Women in Majengo should not merely supply information for a report. They should be able to learn from women organising in Lusaka, Lilongwe or Johannesburg—and to offer knowledge in return.
Rethinking evidence
Conventional monitoring systems can count participants, workshops and activities. They are less capable of capturing the moment when a young woman understands why her circumstances are not simply the result of personal failure. Nor can they easily measure the confidence that allows her to question a practice she once considered inevitable.
Yet this is often where change begins.
Feminist organising is usually slow and undramatic. Activists may return to the same community and hold similar conversations without seeing immediate results. Months later, however, a woman speaks in a meeting when she would previously have remained silent. She challenges an abusive relationship, approaches a public official or brings another woman into the movement.
Such changes may appear small from outside. Together, they alter what a community considers possible.
This does not mean abandoning numbers or policy outcomes. Both matter. But communities should help determine what counts as progress. Otherwise, organisations risk measuring what is convenient rather than what is important.
Stories are not raw material
Decolonial practice must also change how movements tell stories.
Activists and organisations regularly ask women to recount intimate experiences. They take photographs, record testimonies and document hardship. But does the woman concerned understand where her story will appear, who will hear it or how long it will remain in circulation?
Consent is not merely a “yes” obtained before an interview. It requires understanding, choice and the continuing ability to withdraw. This takes time—an awkward requirement in a sector driven by deadlines, outputs and demands for visible results.
The alternative is extraction: a woman gives away part of her life while the institution gains material for fundraising, advocacy or publicity.
If movements are serious about shifting power, the storyteller must retain some authority over her story. She should understand its purpose, influence how she is represented and, where possible, benefit from its use.
What decolonisation could mean in Majengo
In a community such as Majengo, decolonial feminism must begin with the knowledge women already possess. It should examine how women manage homes, earn incomes, care for children, resolve disputes and sustain community life—often without recognition or reliable public services.
It can also involve recovering African histories disrupted or distorted by colonial rule. Relearning pre-colonial histories may help communities understand how colonial governments, imported religions, labour systems and modern state institutions reshaped gender relations.
But reclaiming the past requires care. Pre-colonial Africa was neither a feminist paradise nor a single social order. Its societies were varied, and some contained their own hierarchies and injustices. The purpose of historical recovery should not be to romanticise the past. It should be to distinguish inherited African practices from colonial impositions, understand how both changed over time and decide what is worth recovering, rejecting or remaking.
The same scrutiny should apply to the organisations leading feminist work. A movement cannot credibly demand equality while concentrating authority in one office or individual. Some feminist organisations have experimented with political groups, collective leadership and teams deliberately composed of working-class women. Such arrangements do not eliminate conflict, but they show that leadership can be organised horizontally rather than around a single powerful boss.
For organisations working in Majengo, this could mean allowing women from the community to set priorities, share control over budgets, interpret findings and decide how their experiences are communicated. Participation should confer power, not merely provide attendance figures.
From principle to practice
The real test of decolonial feminism lies in ordinary decisions: who chairs a meeting, whose language is used, who records the discussion, who owns the information and who decides what happens next.
There are no neat answers. Decolonial feminist practice is not a finished framework that can be lifted from a handbook and applied everywhere. It must be built through listening, experimentation and honest reflection—including an admission when movements reproduce the very hierarchies they oppose.
Connecting women across communities and countries is part of that work. A conversation in Majengo may appear local, but it belongs to a wider struggle over labour, dignity, public services and political power. Making those connections visible reminds women that they are neither alone nor merely the recipients of a programme. They are producers of knowledge and architects of the movement itself.
Decolonisation begins when institutions stop treating women’s experiences as material to be collected and start recognising women as authorities over their lives. The task is not simply to change the language of feminism. It is to change where power sits.
By Whitney Atieno|KCEI Chairperson