About this episode

Robinah Rubimbwa discusses the need to decolonize international aid and emphasizes the importance of local empowerment in peacebuilding.

In this episode of the leadership podcast If You Were In Charge, Sanam Naraghi Anderlini and Kavita Nandini Ramdas sit down with Robinah Rubimbwa, the feminist peacebuilder, poet and mediator who founded the Coalition for Action on Resolution 1325 (CoACT), an alliance of 64 peacebuilding organisations in Uganda. A leadership podcast about people, power and possibilities. Robinah does not hold back. The way international aid is structured today, she says, is colonialism, and it is time to decolonise it. No outsider can empower anyone, she argues. Empowerment grows from within, built on local knowledge, trust and the structures that already hold a community together. Drawing on decades of training women mediators and young peacebuilders across Uganda, she makes the case that funders should talk less about their appetite for risk and more about their appetite for trust. This is women's leadership seen from the ground up. Robinah shares how a single 60,000 dollar grant from ICAN seeded a youth movement that is still going years later, how networks of community women mediators now resolve land disputes and domestic violence cases for free, and what it really costs to prevent violence…

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