Rooted in Land and Place: Reflections on Knowledge and Power in Kenya
This post marks the beginning of a new chapter in our work as learning partners on the Wellcome-funded Centres for Exchange (CfE) initiative. Building on insights and learning from Phase 1, this second phase brings together a new cohort of community-based organisations across Kenya, South Africa, and India. Over the next two years, we’ll be sharing reflections and insights from this evolving process, beginning here with our first visit to two Kenyan partner sites.
Last month, our team joined two powerful workshops in Kenya, one with Lwala Community Alliance in Homa Bay and another with Women’s Climate Centres International (WCCI) in Kakamega. These gatherings were part of the new phase of the Centres for Exchange (CfE) initiative, a Wellcome-funded program supporting community-led approaches to knowledge exchange (how knowledge is created and shared together) in global health and development. CfE brings together grassroots organisations, researchers, and institutional partners across Kenya, South Africa, and India to co-create more inclusive, relational, and participatory ways of doing research.
As learning partners in this next phase, our role is to accompany the eight funded organisations in documenting, reflecting, and sharing their learning journeys, centering local leadership and practice along the way.
These first workshops brought together partners, community leaders, and local government to explore how participatory approaches can deepen both health research and community engagement. They were also the first in a series of workshops we’ll be co-facilitating with all eight organisations participating in CfE Phase 2, each designed to support collaborative learning and deepen locally grounded approaches to knowledge exchange. While both gatherings surfaced invaluable learning, one moment from our day with WCCI has continued to resonate.
A Moment of Redefinition
We were midway through a discussion on refining WCCI’s learning questions when we found ourselves needing to pause. The term “grassroots woman” appeared repeatedly in their framing, and we asked the group what exactly they meant by it. The researchers in the room were the first to respond. Their answers came quickly, each response framed by absence: a grassroots woman lacks formal education, lacks access to services, is economically marginalized, and politically underrepresented, has limited mobility. We captured their thoughts on a piece of flip chart paper, a familiar litany of lack: what these women didn’t have, couldn’t access, weren’t included in.
The conversation then opened to the two women in the room who had been invited to represent the grassroots volunteers at the heart of WCCI’s work. They were invited to share their own interpretation of the term.
One of them paused, then spoke with quiet clarity:
A grassroots woman is someone who has a deep understanding of the land and the place where she comes from. She holds knowledge that comes from being rooted there. When you arrive in her village, and ask about the environment, she has insight on everything and everyone. A grassroots woman knows the environment of the place.
The room fell silent, and then everyone started to applaud. It was a moment of collective reorientation, not just for our facilitation team but for the WCCI staff and the researchers themselves. The contrast was striking: where researchers saw absence, the community member saw presence and insight. Where researchers had listed what women lacked, the community member described what women held. In that moment, the conversation shifted — from an institutional lens shaped by systems of exclusion (institutional rules, norms, and practices that systematically sideline certain groups or forms of knowledge), to a place-based understanding grounded in relationship, history, and lived experience. This reframing challenged our fundamental assumptions about expertise. It forced us to ask: What do we overlook when we define people by what they lack, rather than by what they hold? The shift from deficit-based (defining people by what they lack) to asset-based (focusing on skills, resources, and knowledge people hold) language revealed how power structures shape our understanding of knowledge itself.
This moment also went to the heart of WCCI’s work: recognizing local women not as passive recipients of knowledge, but as knowledge holders who live and farm in changing climates, who steward water and seed systems, who lead without formal title but with deep authority. One of the project team members shared at the end of the workshop that this moment of definitional reorientation crystallised why the project focuses on making space to listen to women not as research subjects, but as deep knowledge producers in their own right. Their intention is to interrupt the pattern of researchers holding authority in spaces like this workshop and instead centre the lived experience of those most connected to indigenous forms of knowledge.
The moment also surfaced something deeper: how language carries assumptions, histories, and hierarchies. The researchers’ initial responses weren’t wrong — they accurately described systemic barriers. But by leading with deficits, we had unconsciously centered what communities lack rather than what they know. This moment reminds us of the many ways African feminists have spoken and written about having authority “in our own knowledges,” what the African feminist Charter reflects as claiming “the right to theorise for ourselves, write for ourselves, strategise for ourselves and speak for ourselves” (The African Feminist Charter). It challenged us to think about how our facilitation practices can better uphold those commitments to voice, authorship, and theorising from lived experience.
At Pivot, we understand that language is never neutral. It carries power and shapes possibilities. Our commitment to participatory learning means regularly examining the terms we use, questioning our assumptions, and creating space for communities to define themselves on their own terms. This is also central to WCCI’s work. During the workshop, team members reflected that one of the risks in this kind of research is that “grassroots women do not feel safe or comfortable to engage,” especially in contexts where researchers retain power and status and may consciously or unconsciously look down on indigenous knowledge holders. Their project directly addresses these dynamics, working to remove barriers, affirm knowledge holders, and create spaces where local women can speak not only as participants but as producers and stewards of knowledge.
In the workshop, we also saw the need for this kind of intentional facilitation. The initial discussion was dominated by researchers, so we paused to invite the women’s perspectives explicitly and ensured translation support so they could share in their own terms. But this moment of reframing didn’t happen in isolation. It was only possible because the workshop itself had been structured to include all voices from the start, using participatory facilitation tools, moving at a pace that allowed everyone to engage fully, and with a shared commitment — from both WCCI and our team — to creating space where local women could speak not just as participants but as knowledge holders.
As we walked later through WCCI’s demonstration garden, into the forested paths of Kakamega, and reflected together on the flight home, this moment stayed with us. It reminded us that our role as learning partners is not to bring answers, but to co-create spaces where new understanding can emerge. Where those most affected by climate, health, and extractive research systems (research approaches that take knowledge from communities without giving back or sharing power) can speak on their own terms, and be genuinely heard. Moments like these are why we value the role of a learning partner — where we can use our facilitation, reflection, and research skills to support communities in surfacing and strengthening their own learning.
What This Means for Our Work
In many ways, this moment with WCCI encapsulates what this next phase of the Centres for Exchange project is all about. Not just learning from communities, but learning with them. Not just broadening participation, but rethinking who defines the terms of engagement in the first place. We’re working to continue to integrate these lessons into our facilitation approach, training resources, and the shared learning strategies we’re developing with partners.
As you engage in your own collaborative work, we invite you to examine the frameworks you bring: Whose knowledge are you centering? What assumptions might you be carrying? How can you ensure that those most affected by the issues you’re addressing get to define the terms of engagement themselves? Consider starting your next community meeting by asking participants to define key terms in their own words. This can be a small but powerful shift. You might be surprised by what emerges.
This commitment to redefining who holds knowledge and how it is valued is something we carry with us as we move forward in our work at Pivot Collective, where we aim to honour embedded knowledge, support relational ways of working, and challenge extractive models of global health and development. Over the coming months, we will continue to reflect on and share process learning and insights that emerge throughout this phase of CfE in close collaboration with the eight funded organisations and their communities. This work is deeply relational and grounded in co-creation, and we are committed to ensuring that any learning shared reflects the voices, leadership, and priorities of those we work alongside.
We want to express our deep gratitude to the WCCI team for their openness, insight, and generous welcome during our visit. Their reflections and leadership continue to shape our own learning.
As Learning Partners, we’re committed to continuing to share what we learn about how participatory, community-led, and embedded approaches to knowledge exchange take shape in different contexts. Over the next two years, we’ll be collaborating with project teams to share emergent reflections and insights as learning evolves. We’ll also be working with partners at Wellcome Trust and Development Dynamics to help facilitate open, collaborative exchange with others committed to this work. We invite you to walk with us; follow our journey, share your reflections, and help shape a collective vision for more just and inclusive knowledge practices.
