Includovate’s Feminist Approach
Includovate’s feminist approach is foundational to its work in fostering social inclusion, embedding principles of equity, empowerment, and intersectionality across all research, policy, and practical initiatives. Several key methodologies and strategies characterise this multifaceted approach:
In summary, Includovate’s feminist approach ensures that our social inclusion work goes beyond superficial interventions, aiming for deep, systemic change. Our methods are collaborative, intersectional, pluralistic, and action-oriented, focused on rebalancing power, transforming knowledge creation, and building more just and equitable systems at every level.
Core Methodologies and Strategies:
Centring Marginalised Perspectives and Lived Experiences:
Includovate prioritises the voices of those most affected by exclusion, including women, people with disabilities, and minorities. Through participatory and qualitative research, these groups are directly involved in every stage, from design to solution-building, ensuring that outcomes are grounded in their realities.
Intersectional Analysis:
Recognising that exclusion stems from the interplay of multiple identities (gender, disability, age, migration status, etc.), Includovate applies an intersectional lens. Our teams include specialised advisers in youth, disability, and gender to address the complexity of intersecting barriers in all projects.
Transformative and Emancipatory Aims:
The feminist approach at Includovate is committed to active social change. They don't just study inequality; they challenge and transform systems that perpetuate poverty, oppression, and injustice through policy advocacy, consciousness-raising, and interventions designed to shift social norms.
Pluralism and Ethical Alliances:
Includovate acknowledges the diverse forms of feminism, promoting context-specific methods and fostering ethical, collaborative alliances. This ensures that our approaches are tailored and informed by the varied experiences of those involved.
Collaborative, Locally Led Research and Capacity Building:
Consistent with feminist values, Includovate invests in building research leadership in low- and middle-income countries. By pairing researchers from the Global North and the Global South, they challenge colonial knowledge hierarchies and ensure that solutions are locally relevant and sustainable.
Modelling Inclusion and Diversity Internally:
Includovate practices what it preaches by ensuring its workforce is diverse across gender, disability, and geography. Employing individuals with lived experiences of exclusion in research, management, and advocacy roles ensures our work follows the adage “nothing about us without us.”.
Reimagining and Critiquing Existing Structures:
The feminist imagination is utilised as a tool to critique current social structures and envision more equitable futures. Through collective imaginative practice, Includovate encourages the identification and dismantling of unjust systems, as well as the co-creation of new, inclusive paradigms.
Challenging Discriminatory Norms and Power Structures:
Includovate actively focuses on "measuring, studying, and changing discriminatory norms that lead to poverty, inequality, and injustice," designing projects to contest harmful social norms and systemic power imbalances.
Representation and Leadership from Marginalised Groups:
Includovate intentionally creates leadership opportunities for individuals from low-income and marginalised backgrounds, fostering internal diversity that strengthens our advocacy for inclusive policy and practice.
Consciousness Raising and Storytelling:
Our feminist research contributes to social change by raising awareness about the challenges and potential of excluded groups, using training, facilitation, and storytelling to amplify marginalised voices and promote attitudinal shifts.
Co-Creation and Localised Knowledge Production:
Includovate fosters local ownership of agendas by pairing researchers and incubating local research capacity, particularly in low-income settings, thereby decolonising academic research and policy innovation.
Ethical Practice, Safeguarding, and Informed Consent:
All research adheres to rigorous ethical, consent, and safeguarding standards, including child protection training, to build trust and protect vulnerable participants.
Action-Oriented, Systemic Change:
Includovate's feminist strategy is action-driven, aiming not just to understand barriers but to implement solutions that reshape broader social, political, and economic systems, targeting the root causes of exclusion.