







































Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 5(1), Summer 2023  

Shah, Decolonizing Data and Recovering the Person in Christian Relief and Development Organizations 65 

 

Decolonizing Data and Recovering the Person  

in Christian Relief and Development 

Organizations1 
 

Rebecca Supriya Shah 
 

 

The purpose of this paper is to prompt Western Christian organizations—funded and led by people 

whose histories are intertwined with colonialism—to examine the impact of their “gaze” on people in 

the Majority World.  Today, because of the vast scale of the Christian humanitarian and relief industry, 

Christ-centered development assistance must avoid perpetuating entrenched asymmetries of power 

and authoritative knowledge production between the Global North and Global South. To safeguard 

the rights of those living in poverty requires a conscious effort to decolonize Christian development 

data collection by recognizing the dangerous potential for Western Christian organizations to impose 

inequitable measures of data extraction and acquisition on the Global South. 

 

 
Introduction 

On the 16
th

 of April 1917, Mahatma Gandhi 

arrived in Champaran in North Bihar at the foothills of 

the Himalayan mountains. He came to investigate 

reports by Indian sharecroppers who accused the 

British landlords of extorting large sums of money and 

forcing them to grow indigo in lieu of other more 

profitable crops. Gandhi decided to gather data to 

prove that the tenants were being oppressed by the 

British planters. In a few weeks, Gandhi and teams of 

volunteers visited twenty-eight hundred villages and 

collected over eight thousand statements from indigent 

indigo farmers. Gandhi was ordered to leave 

Champaran, but he refused and was imprisoned by the 

British. Hearing his friend was in prison, Anglican 

clergyman Charles F. Andrews offered to help. Gandhi 

kindly refused the offer, saying that it was up to Indians 

to learn to be self-reliant and to fight for their freedom. 

Armed with a crushing mountain of evidence of 

the abuse of Indian tenants by British indigo planters, 

Gandhi was able to force the colonial government of 

Bihar to introduce the Champaran Agrarian Bill into 

the Bihar Legislative Council on November 29, 1917. 

The bill abolished the oppressive tenancy system, and 

the farmers were free to plant whatever crops they 

 
1

 The author expresses gratitude to several individuals who provided valuable feedback and assistance. Dr. Timothy 

Samuel Shah and Dr. Daniel Philpott provided helpful comments on the content and structure of the paper. Dr. 

James Ponniah of the University of Madras offered assistance during the participatory research in Chennai, India. 

Special thanks are extended to the editors, Dr. Roland Hoksbergen and Dr. Nina Kurlberg, for their helpful 

comments and constructive suggestions.   

deemed most profitable. The bill also protected 

farmers from any litigation from the powerful colonial 

planters associations.  

Mahatma Gandhi realized that data was an 

indispensable means of empowering those living in 

poverty to solve their problems. Gandhi also realized 

that external engagement must take the form of 

accompaniment of local actors as they take the lead in 

dealing with their oppression and deprivations. Ahead 

of his time, Gandhi recognized the positionality of the 

Indian researchers. While the Englishman Charles 

Andrews might have enhanced the credibility of the 

Indian team with the British authorities, Gandhi wanted 

the Indians to persuade the authorities to abolish the 

tenancy system through their own efforts and with their 

own data.  

The purpose of this essay is to explore whether the 

methods and modalities of amassing knowledge and 

personal data employed to serve the growing needs of 

the rapidly expanding Christian relief and development 

industry in the Global North carry the risk of 

perpetuating asymmetrical power structures and even 

reinscribing coloniality in the Global South (Corrigan, 

McAlister, and Schäfer 2022). I suggest that there is a 

latent risk that some Christian relief and development 

organizations will—borrowing the analysis of Catholic 



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 5(1), Summer 2023  

Shah, Decolonizing Data and Recovering the Person in Christian Relief and Development Organizations 66 

development economist Denis Goulet—behave like 

“one-eyed giants,” insofar as they may prescribe 

“superior” technical, efficient, and even “colonial” 

methods of data collection that ignore people’s felt 

needs and perceptions and “act as if man could live by 

bread alone, as if human destiny could be stripped to 

its material dimensions alone” (Goulet 1980, 481). 

However, I fully acknowledge that further fine-grained 

empirical research would be required to test and verify 

the precise extent to which this latent danger is being 

realized. Finally, I illustrate how participatory action 

methods might be useful, portable, and accessible tools 

of representation and analysis that have the potential to 

counter the risks associated with more traditional 

research approaches. Drawing on some of my research 

conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic (2020-

2022) and utilizing the Participatory Rural Appraisal 

(PRA) methodology, I will explore the value and 

suitability of participatory methods to inform a genuine 

conversation about decolonization and data colonialism 

and, ultimately, to protect the dignity of those 

individuals and communities being studied.  

I hope to prompt Western Christian 

organizations—funded and led by people whose 

histories are so intertwined with colonialism—to 

examine the impact of their “gaze” on people in the 

Majority World. Today, because of the vast scale of the 

Christian humanitarian and relief industry, Christ-

centered development assistance must avoid 

perpetuating entrenched asymmetries of power and 

authoritative knowledge production between the 

Global North and Global South. To safeguard the 

rights of those living in poverty requires a conscious 

effort to decolonize Christian development data 

collection by recognizing the dangerous potential for 

Western Christian organizations to impose inequitable 

measures of data extraction and acquisition on the 

Global South.  

Power and structural inequities operate in 

Christian development institutions but are rarely 

discussed. If we are to decolonize data collection, we 

need to raise certain questions. First, why do certain 

individuals and associations become recognized as 

experts in Christian data collection, including designing 

and implementing Christ-centered monitoring and 

evaluation frameworks? Do these differences arise 

because Northern institutions have genuine expertise, 

or are they due to more complex issues such as the trust 

of Western donors, Western notions of “standards of 

excellence,” or memberships in networks that are based 

in the West? Second, the exercise of power, including 

the quantification and commodification of data, 

including very personal data of individuals in the 

Majority World, raises issues about the legitimacy and 

accountability of Western Christian institutions. How 

and on what basis do Christian institutions in the North 

acquire the right to exert this power? Is it enough that 

they are motivated by a Christ-centered vision of human 

well-being? Or do we need to develop additional 

criteria around processes of data collection in the 

Majority World? Third, how do we hold those who 

exert power in data collection processes accountable, 

particularly if they are the ones who control the sources 

of funding? 

A cautionary remark is worth making at this 

preliminary stage. I adopt a critical point of view about 

the data collection methods of Christian organizations 

in the Majority World primarily because I consider 

their work to be too important and too valuable—at least 

in principle — to be jeopardized by a system of data 

appropriation and utilization that disregards and 

underestimates the complexity of their task. Therefore, 

to reiterate, my analysis is designed to provoke self-

critical reflection and to encourage Christian 

practitioners in the Majority World to examine their 

work carefully and deliberately and in the light of a rich 

and robust Christian vision of the dignity of the human 

person, so that Christ-centered development and 

humanitarian efforts can remain viable and successful 

on their own distinctive terms. 

 

The Rise of Evangelical Humanitarianism 

and Data Gathering 
In the 1960s and 1970s, as evangelical 

humanitarian organizations such as World Vision went 

mainstream and actively expanded their work in hard-

to-reach areas of the world like Ethiopia and Somalia, 

they rapidly professionalized and were able to compete 

for funds with secular development agencies. By the 

time the 1980s rolled around, the number of 

evangelical relief and development agencies not only 

outnumbered missions but also began to catch up with 

secular humanitarian agencies in size and reach (King 

2012, 936). The success of evangelical relief and 

development agencies in accessing American 

government funds and attracting media attention 

worried some leaders like Ron Sider who urged 

evangelicals to live simply and support social issues 

(Sider 1977). While Sider encouraged this turn to 

development, he worried that some evangelicals might 

not fully understand the dangers of secular 

development policies and programs. Sider warned that 

“it makes no sense for Christian development agencies 

to take their basic assumption on the nature of 

development from secular sources like the United 

Nations, secular government in developed or 

developing nations, or private secular development 

agencies” (as quoted in King 2012, 940). 

Things came to a head at the Consultation on the 

Church in Response to Human Need held in Wheaton, 

Illinois in 1983, which was attended by American 

evangelicals such as Ron Sider and Global South 



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 5(1), Summer 2023  

Shah, Decolonizing Data and Recovering the Person in Christian Relief and Development Organizations 67 

evangelicals such as Vinay Samuel, Samuel Escobar, 

and Rene Padilla. The framers of the “Wheaton 

Statement” devote an entire section to “Christian Aid 

Agencies and Transformation.” The statement 

mentions that “the plight of the poor is often exploited 

to meet donor needs and expectations.” Furthermore, 

the Wheaton declaration goes on to state that imposing 

Western management systems on local communities 

arises because most organizations assume “that 

Western planning and control systems are the only 

ones that can ensure accountability” (“Social 

Transformation” 1984, 27). 

Indeed, as the new generation of large-scale 

Christian relief and development organizations grew in 

size and popularity, their need for reliable data to 

measure their results grew alongside an increase in their 

funding, including a large influx of private donations.
2

  
To manage and organize the large-scale 

development programs now in place across the globe, 

it became necessary to collect reliable and objective 

data—on the model of Western social science—to 

demonstrate to donors and the relief organizations 

themselves that their efforts were making an impact 

(Wuthnow 2009). Yet certain forms of data risked 

flattening the complexity of lived Christianity in the 

Global South to limited, but measurable, Western-

centric categories. 

For example, in his study of Satnami women in 

India, Chad Bauman finds that in the mostly 

agricultural community he researched, women 

generally worked alongside men in the fields. Upon 

conversion, however, Satnami-Christian women 

discarded their traditional fieldwork, confined their 

activities to within the home, and embraced behaviors 

consonant with what Western missionaries regarded as 

“respectable” womanhood and pious femininity. 

Furthermore, Bauman notes that following missionary 

ideals of “propriety and restraint,” elaborate Satnami-

Christian weddings were stripped down to short 

Western-style ceremonies in the church (Bauman 

2008; Kent 2004).  

While this particular example is drawn from 

historical accounts of Western missionaries operating 

in India in the mid-twentieth century, the challenge for 

Northern Christian institutions to understand the 

complexity of context and culture in their operations 

remains critically important. Western-based non-

government organizations (NGOs) often do the 

irreplaceable work of nation-states, Christian 

foundations, and communities. Their work, as Erica 

Bornstein discovered with World Vision’s Child 

Sponsorship in Zimbabwe, is a “liberatory force” that 

changes lives. But it may also “disrupt relationships of 

 
2

 In the late 1990s, World Vision’s President Robert Seiple said that his organization was “the largest privately funded 

relief-and-development agency in the world” (Seiple 1998).  

belonging,” as well as magnify and reinforce layers of 

economic disparity between groups of people in the 

same local context (2005, 171,195). 

In India and in other parts of the Global South, 

indigenous economic, religious, and social structures 

were sometimes treated as suspect phenomena to be 

judged and ultimately transformed in accordance with 

Northern Christian standards. These standards became 

the accepted norms for understanding social, 

economic, and religious life in the South. Women in 

the Global South, who may not exhibit the kind of 

feminist power, agency, and confidence of Northern 

women, may be regarded as “oppressed” or 

“subjugated.” (Miles 2006, Mahmood 2001). The 

colonial move is evident here as individuals in the 

North rise to become the subjects and saviors—in part 

through acquiring authority and mastery through 

processes of data gathering—while individuals in the 

South remain helpless and downtrodden as the 

debilitated objects and the grateful recipients of 

Northern benevolence.  

 

Coloniality and the Growth of a Christian 

Relief and Development Industry 
Technical approaches that were part and parcel of 

prevailing paradigms of modernity and modernization 

were increasingly adopted by Christian relief and 

development agencies, and ironically caused them to 

have a limited and less holistic understanding of 

development often contrary to their own Christian 

assumptions (Bornstein 2005).  

During the United Nations Decade of 

Development in the 1960s and even earlier, in the 

forties and fifties, a group of Catholic scholars led by 

French Catholic priest Father Louis Joseph Lebret 

strongly criticized the one-size-fits-all modernization 

approach being advocated by the UN and by its 

partners. This approach, argued Lebret, simply reduces 

economic development to increasing consumption and 

production and is insufficient and ineffective (Culebro 

Juárez and Gasper 2021). Development for Lebret is 

more human and more developed when people are 

called not just to “have more” but to “be more,” both 

spiritually and materially. Inspired by Lebret, his 

student and pioneer development ethicist Denis Goulet 

maintained that there can be “authentic development” 

only when there is a “societal openness to the deepest 

levels of mystery and transcendence,” and when this 

yearning for mystery and transcendence is recognized 

and satisfied (1974, 41). 

Unfortunately, such a broad understanding of 

authentic development is not shared by most in the 



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 5(1), Summer 2023  

Shah, Decolonizing Data and Recovering the Person in Christian Relief and Development Organizations 68 

secular and even some in the Christian development 

community. As Goulet observes, the issue is the 

premium frequently placed on the search for technical 

efficiency and sophistication in the development 

industry. Goulet notes, as mentioned above, that 

“technical experts are often one-eyed giants because 

they come convinced that, somehow or other, they 

know what is good for people, and they have the 

answers” (Goulet 1990). “One-eyed giants” might 

include highly trained experts, including those from the 

Global North and those who may belong to the Global 

South, but who are trained in institutions dominated by 

Northern ideas, practices, and methods and thus 

operate as outsiders. The imagery of a one-eyed giant 

suggests that certain types of “superior” or technical 

approaches to development may in reality be myopic, 

limited, and constrained in their understanding of 

development because they lack an “authentic” and 

fuller understanding of the economic, social, and 

spiritual needs and perceptions of the people they 

profess to help. 

Widespread recognition of “desecularization” and 

the global resurgence of religion in the late 1990s saw 

global development institutions such as the World 

Bank, the United Nations Development Program 

(UNDP), the US Agency for International 

Development (USAID), and the UK’s Department for 

International Development (DFID) begin to work 

more deliberately and closely with large-scale religious 

institutions (Tomalin 2018, 10)  The intersection of 

religion and poverty, particularly in the early 2000s and 

following the tragedies of 9/11, further increased 

partnerships between secular Global North 

development donors and institutions and faith-based 

relief and development agencies across the globe 

(Tomalin 2018). To compete for government funds 

and to professionalize operations, some large Christian 

development institutions hired evaluation professionals 

and began developing technically sophisticated data-

gathering methods and frameworks to measure 

program effectiveness and sustainable impact 

(Wuthnow, 2009).  

The secular development industry soon realized 

that Christian institutions often have personnel with 

deep historical roots in the communities they are 

seeking to reach and could gather vital granular data at 

the local level. Global North Christian development 

institutions became key partners with global 

development institutions in the extraction and 

appropriation of information from a variety of sources, 

including from vulnerable and marginalized 

communities on sensitive topics such as condom usage 

for HIV/AIDS prevention, contraception, and 

domestic violence (Corrigan, McAlister, and Schäfer 

2022). 

In these situations, as in so many others, Western 

Christian relief and development agencies, particularly 

international faith-based organizations (FBOs) such as 

Tearfund and World Vision, serve as intermediaries 

between local Christian communities, and the secular 

development industry (Bornstein 2005, Wuthnow 

2009). Since Western Christian institutions have a 

history and experience of working with local Christian 

communities, they play a key role in collecting and 

“translating” local data and knowledge, including 

indigenous customs and values, for the global 

development industry. These power issues that affect 

development data collection need to enlist faithful 

Christians to take deliberate action to decolonize data 

gathering. For example, restoring dignity and ownership 

to the Global South requires donors and leaders to 

reduce the gap between those who voice their views 

about the programs they want and the actual decision-

makers.  

 

Christian Relief and Development 

Organizations as “Value-Bearers, Value-

Promoters, and Value-Destroyers” 
Data-gathering frameworks and technologies are 

not value-neutral. By employing certain data-gathering 

methods, Christian institutions convey a powerful bias 

favoring a certain form of rationality, a conception of 

“the good life,” and a particular approach to power and 

authority. For example, Birdsall and Beaman note that 

the quantitative approach employed by the Pew 

Reports on religious harassment within and between 

countries obscures the complexity of a variety of 

religious traditions and does not reflect the lived reality 

of people of faith. Yet the data from Pew are often 

quoted and utilized by religious freedom organizations, 

including Western-based Christian institutions 

advocating for religious freedom in the Global South 

(Birdsall and Beaman 2020). Some data collection 

methods may also favor particular narratives about 

individual autonomy, faith, sexuality, and even the role 

of the market that may be at odds with those living in 

the Majority World. 

A case in point are the traditional Western social-

scientific surveys and questionnaires administered to 

respondents tend to presuppose that those surveyed 

function and act as—and indeed are—independent and 

unencumbered individual agents. But this 

methodological and epistemological premise may be 

completely out of step with a social reality prevailing in 

much of the Global South, in which individuals are 

embedded in, and act as part of, larger communitarian 

wholes, whether of family, clan, tribe, or faith. Goulet 

thus maintains that the very means or the processes by 

which data are collected, processed, and analyzed are 

themselves “value bearers, value promoters, and value 

destroyers” (Goulet 1990). By designing certain types of 



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 5(1), Summer 2023  

Shah, Decolonizing Data and Recovering the Person in Christian Relief and Development Organizations 69 

evaluation approaches or proposing Western-centric 

frameworks of accountability and learning, Christian 

technicians confer values, negative or positive, on 

various forms of social customs, religious beliefs, and 

cultural practices in the Majority World—for example, 

in favor of individualism and against familism, tribalism, 

and communitarianism.  

While not explicit in their condemnation, it is 

possible that some Northern/Western Christian 

agencies may implicitly judge certain cultural, religious, 

and tribal resources to be inferior, backward, and 

inimical to development, perhaps because they do not 

fit with modern Western cultural assumptions. 

Behavioral economists have written about the 

frustrating reality that poor farmers in the Global South 

frequently fail to make certain strategic and profitable 

investments even when the likely returns are high 

(Tanguy, et al. 2014). There is no denying that certain 

attitudes and behaviors associated with apathy and 

helplessness do exist among lower-income 

communities in the Global South (Ibid.). The relevant 

question, however, is how much such attitudes and 

behaviors reflect “cultural patterns” that need to be 

reformed, or are a reflection of economic and structural 

conditions. A further question is whether Northern 

Christian relief and development agencies have any 

criteria or guiding principles to help them critique their 

own cultural assumptions and value judgments, and 

how these assumptions and value judgments inform 

their own approaches to data and knowledge generation 

in the Global South.  

Criteria that might be helpful in guiding Christian 

relief and development organizations may be drawn 

from natural law theory. Thomas Aquinas, who lived 

between 1224 and 1274, is generally regarded as the 

pre-eminent theorist of natural law. Although Aquinas 

lived and wrote in Europe, his writings leave no 

“palpable trace” of the “dealings of his era’s kings, 

popes, and emperors” (Finnis 1998, 3). Thomas 

Aquinas, it seems, was “engaged in a vast trans-temporal 

conversation” and thus was not confined to his time, but 

instead transcended his time (Ibid., 4). His writings on 

natural law were informed by serious reflection and 

study of various masters of inquiry including scholars of 

eleventh-century Persia and twelfth-century Islamic 

Spain (Ibid.). 

Natural law refers to a set of principles or precepts 

that are derived from eternal or divine law but are 

accessible to common human reason and are used to 

order human life and human community (Finnis 1998). 

For Aquinas, the first principle that ties together the 

many principles of natural law is “good is to be done 

and pursued and bad is to be avoided” (Ibid., 80). With 

natural law as a possible guiding principle in mind, I 

suggest that practices that aim toward universal goods of 

human life—which include family, religious practice, 

community life, protection of the weak and vulnerable, 

knowledge, and so forth—are the ones to be valued, 

affirmed, promoted, and sustained in relief and 

development work as in all domains of human 

enterprise. 

The precepts of natural law could help Western-

based Christian development, relief, and humanitarian 

agencies not to impose ad hoc, individualistic, or 

technocratic criteria that are specific to the West, or 

perhaps point them toward Christian approaches that 

allow for Christian beliefs and practices but critique 

harmful local practices. Problematic local practices that 

indeed deserve legitimate critique may include child 

marriage, female genital mutilation (FGM), the caste 

system, witchcraft, and so on. In the same way, 

Christian development agencies may adopt approaches 

to data collection that meet the criterion of reinforcing 

the basic goods of human life, human dignity, 

authenticity and integrity, and rational human agency 

(or the good of “practical reasonableness”) as outlined 

in Aquinas’s theory of natural law. The following list of 

questions that each organization should ask itself is in 

no way exhaustive, but seeks to identify certain aspects 

and risks of colonizing approaches to data collection, as 

well as facets of decolonizing approaches that could be 

adopted by Christian relief and development agencies: 

 

• How do Northern Christian development and 

relief agencies avoid predatory extractive 

practices of data collection and abstract 

digitized quantification of data? The goal here 

is to protect the God-given dignity of the most 

vulnerable and marginalized members of the 

human family through the practice of 

informed consent so that they are treated not 

as mere objects but as full human persons—

i.e., human subjects possessing agency and 

inherent worth as ends in themselves. In cases 

of extreme vulnerability and diminished 

autonomy such as in refugee camps, 

individuals need to be protected so that data 

collection is not seen as a transaction through 

which vital services are provided if and only if 

consent is obtained.  

 

• How do Northern-led Christian data-gathering 

practices avoid a paternalist framing of their 

efforts as the only ones who know best 

because they happen to have the resources 

and skills to engage in systematic data 

collection and analysis?  Capacity building and 

strengthening are fraught with colonial 

overtones where Northern institutions are full 

of ideas about how to “fix” Global South 

problems. While capacity strengthening in the 

Global South is key to greater ownership and 



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 5(1), Summer 2023  

Shah, Decolonizing Data and Recovering the Person in Christian Relief and Development Organizations 70 

control of data collection, access to Western 

foundations and funding, political influence, 

and power are structural issues that capacity 

strengthening alone cannot remedy. Consider 

the onerous accounting and paperwork 

needed to access a grant from USAID or from 

foundations like the John Templeton 

Foundation.
3

 Decolonizing data collection 

needs to consider the structural inequities 

inherent in grant-making institutions in the 

West. In doing so, Christ-centered data 

gathering could effectively promote the good 

of justice when institutions and individuals in 

the Global South have access to a variety of 

resources they need for their flourishing and 

the flourishing of their communities.  

 

• How does the data collection of Northern 

Christian agencies actively protect freedom of 

religion, including the freedom to convert, 

even if the individual chooses to practice a 

religion whose beliefs are contrary to the 

Christian gospel? Christian development 

agencies are called to respect human dignity 

by giving people the freedom to practice the 

religion most in accord with their own 

judgments of conscience. Natural law 

maintains that religion—understood as the 

attempt to achieve harmony with whatever 

transcendent source of meaning and reality 

there might be—is a basic, universal good and 

should be protected and promoted as such.  

 

• How do data generation practices of Western-

based Christian development agencies 

address the methodological assumptions and 

methods that perpetuate unequal power 

dynamics and may be regarded as 

domineering, technocratic, and extractive? 

The section in this paper that could help 

address these issues is the example provided 

below of participatory research conducted 

among Dalit communities in India during the 

COVID-19 pandemic. The research 

illustrates the need to provide individuals with 

the room to voice their perspectives, their 

experiences, their commitments, and their 

culture. The methods of data collection need 

to be flexible and open-ended. By providing 

 
3

 To learn more about The Templeton World Charity Foundation Human Flourishing Project see 

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non-textual methods such as the “River of 

Life” (explained below), individuals have 

accessible and versatile tools to talk about their 

experiences. Methods that provide an 

enabling environment with the tools and the 

voice to provide the data that organization 

needs to monitor programs and at the same 

time articulate their concerns collectively 

encourage the inclusive and active 

participation of those living in poverty. 

 

• How can the process of data collection by 

Christian individuals and organizations foster 

community, build friendships, and 

appropriately respect and strengthen marriage 

and family life? Data collection methods that 

seek precise measurement and scientific rigor 

may categorize individuals as “oppressed,” 

“victims,” or “backward.” Data collection 

methods may also use terms such as 

“observed,” “underdeveloped,” or “foreign 

culture,” which create distance and underlie 

agendas to justify the domination of one group 

of people over another. For Aquinas, 

friendship, marital communion, and family 

life are basic human goods. Human beings 

were created by God to live in community and 

in fellowship with one another. Practices of 

data generation that enable participants to 

“trade places” could reduce the distance 

between the data gatherer and the program 

participant. This in turn could foster respect 

and build friendship between very different 

groups of people. Understanding one’s 

positionality may help forge stronger 

connections between Northern data gatherers 

and Southern program participants. 

Individual-level relationship-building may be a 

critical step toward long-term structural 

changes. 

 

• How do Christian institutions become aware 

of and come to terms with the power 

manifested in different aspects of data 

collection? In some cases, data generation, 

including the planning and implementation of 

data collection, in Christian relief and 

development organizations, may be 

unidirectional from the Northern 

headquarters to the Southern program offices. 

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https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.templeton.org_&d=DwIFaQ&c=4rZ6NPIETe-LE5i2KBR4rw&r=V7SPit7SKrWs5OnskXKnH0rPJLUKfo9HA-Y3VmuCbXg&m=oafG7a5TjLqVHcPc22bSP8oAAdPnzXjabtbD56OelW7usV58BplPCau6xC2kHNzB&s=_nzIxjA2C583rmvalLeitO5j4Sq4Afp-JxM6UdeNRSU&e=


Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 5(1), Summer 2023  

Shah, Decolonizing Data and Recovering the Person in Christian Relief and Development Organizations 71 

It is important to recognize, for example, that 

certain forms of data gathering, such as large-

scale, impersonal digital surveys to measure 

maternal mortality or randomized controlled 

trials to measure the impact of cash incentives 

among poor farmers, entangle the institution 

in the coloniality of power and impact the 

kinds of knowledge that is produced. 

Positionality refers to how individuals and 

institutions are perceived in the setting in 

which they undertake research. A decolonized 

data collection infrastructure recognizes the 

politics of knowledge generation in relation to 

the voice, credibility, and validity of data. 

Western-based Christian development and 

humanitarian institutions gathering data in the 

Global South need to be mindful of 

positionality, power dynamics, relations, and 

perceptions of those living in poverty.  

 

Combining a comprehensive Christian vision of 

the human person and human dignity and of the goods 

that truly fulfill the human person with the imperative 

to collect good, measurable, data for relief and 

development programs is extremely challenging. The 

process requires paying close attention to the immense 

and legitimate cultural diversity inherent in the contexts 

in which Christian relief and development 

organizations operate, while allowing the process to be 

guided and shaped by Christ-centered values and 

virtues. 

 

Decolonizing Funding for Data Collection in 

Christian Relief and Development  
One major challenge we face in the Majority World is 

that most of the funding for development programs, 

including research and capacity building, comes from 

Western governments, Western foundations, or 

private individuals living in the West. Thus, the 

process of translating development data may often 

occur within the structure of Western cultural 

assumptions and Western power dynamics. Consider 

an outcome evaluation from the early twenties for a 

large Christian humanitarian and relief agency 

headquartered in the United States.
4

 I was the lead 

evaluator for this end-line evaluation that assessed the 

impact of a biblically based holistic approach to 

development being implemented across the globe. 

The approach was designed to overcome apathy and 

hopelessness, and drew heavily on biblical teachings, 

particularly from the gospel.  

 
4 Note that this is a sensitive internal evaluation that cannot be made public due to the impact it might have on the 

organisation’s work in some countries of the Global South.  

US-based managers and local staff were keen to 

harness biblically based principles to eliminate the 

destructive hold of witchcraft on the lives of program 

participants. Rooted in Christian teachings that human 

beings are made in the image of God, they taught 

participants that they are determined neither by fate 

nor by unknown evil forces, but are instead free to 

flourish—and free to choose available pathways to 

flourishing—because that is God’s intention for them 

and their families. But the Western-trained program 

leaders did not stop there. They went on to explain to 

program participants that certain traditional cultural 

practices, such as protecting the Baobab tree 

(common in Senegal), were evil and should be 

stopped if they wished to flourish. 

In the context of the Global North and Global 

South balance of power, particularly financial power in 

the form of grants and aid, discussions that disparage 

certain aspects of culture risk reinforcing Western 

cultural imperialism and sustaining a false narrative 

about the superiority of Western Christian culture. 

Furthermore, once established, these categories of 

“backward,” “undeveloped,” and “illiterate” may 

encourage a colonial discourse that defines and 

perpetuates power imbalances between Global North 

Christian institutions and Global South individuals.  

One of the main thrusts of this Christian 

organization’s biblical approach to fighting poverty is to 

engage and challenge deep-seated cultural constraints 

on economic development and spiritual uplift. In fact, 

it is valuable and indeed essential to recognize that 

certain cultural practices can be harmful to human 

fulfillment and thereby inhibit authentic development. 

Elsewhere I have written about the developmental 

constraints imposed by the caste system on the lives of 

Dalit men and women in India (Shah 2021). Even so, 

to de-Westernize and decolonize research approaches 

and data gathering, Christian organizations should not 

start from a default posture of hostility or skepticism 

towards traditional cultures and particular cultural 

practices. They should recognize that more often than 

not there is value in protecting and preserving cultural 

values and traditions, such as those aspects of culture 

that support marriage and marital stability, family life, 

and domestic harmony. Therefore, to begin a 

conversation about decolonizing development data 

collection in the Global South, Christian organizations 

should critically inquire whether it is culture that blocks 

authentic development in a given instance, the effect of 

prevailing economic systems and structures, the way a 

particular development scheme may have been 

designed and implemented, or all of the above. The 

design and implementation of a development scheme 



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 5(1), Summer 2023  

Shah, Decolonizing Data and Recovering the Person in Christian Relief and Development Organizations 72 

may fail (or may not fully succeed) precisely insofar as 

it lacks a proper respect for, and understanding of, 

human persons within their particular cultural context.  

 

Data Colonialism and Christian Relief and 

Development Organizations in the Global 

North 
Recognizing the gap in per capita income between 

what were then referred to as “developed” and “less 

developed nations,” the United Nations declared the 

1960s as the First United Nations Development 

Decade (“United Nations Development Decade”). An 

understanding of the impact of the development 

decade followed by the technological advances in “big 

data” capture provides an opportunity to examine the 

complexity of dealing with technology, data, and 

efficiency in international non-governmental 

organizations (INGOs), FBOs, including Christian 

humanitarian institutions that compete with secular 

organizations. There is no doubt that what is happening 

with development data in both Christian and secular 

organizations is inextricably linked to what some have 

called “datafication” and “the quantification of the 

social” (Couldry and Mejias 2018, 16). Given Western 

influence on global development trends, the concepts 

of datafication or “data colonialism” may help challenge 

Western FBOs to question the widespread and large-

scale extraction and wholesale appropriation of 

personal data from the Global South (Ibid.). 
 

According to Couldry and Meijas, data colonialism 

combines the predatory extractive practices of historical 

colonialism with the abstract quantification of data by 

computers or other highly technical processes. Data are 

harvested as a natural resource, de-personalized, and 

dispersed to various entities to be used for profit or 

gain. The legitimate owners of this data, the people 

from whom it is collected, are neither informed nor 

compensated. Deploying the concept of data 

colonialism to Christian organizations’ data-gathering is 

not to suggest that these organizations are as brutal or 

as violent as historical colonialists. Rather, we use the 

framing of colonialism to understand what Couldry and 

Meijas call a “naturalization” of data appropriation that 

has been adopted by Christian institutions that paves 

the way for the exploitation of the vulnerable, ignores 

the protection of individual rights, and most 

importantly blatantly disregards the inherent dignity of 

the human person made in the image of God.  

Consider an example from a different context: the 

well-known case of Henrietta Lacks. According to a 

recent article in the New York Times: 

 

 
5

 For more information, see Holpuch 2023. 

 

Henrietta Lacks, a Black mother of five, was 

dying of cervical cancer in 1951, when doctors at 

Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore took a 

sample of her cells without her knowledge or 

consent. 

The invasive procedure led to a 

revolutionary discovery: Her cells were the first 

to reproduce in a laboratory, which no human 

cells had done before, allowing researchers to 

develop vaccines for polio and the coronavirus 

and treatments for disease including cancer, 

Parkinson’s and the flu. 

But it would be more than two decades 

before her family knew that the cells were fueling 

research in laboratories all over the world, 

and even in space, creating an unparalleled 

medical legacy. 

On Tuesday, which would have been Ms. 

Lacks’s 103rd birthday, some of her 

descendants gathered at a news conference after 

reaching a settlement with a biotechnology 

company that they had accused in a lawsuit of 

profiting from the cell line named for her, 

HeLa.
5
 

 

Often, the “person” whose “personal data” are 

extracted is unaware that she is being subjected to this 

process. Of course, development initiatives may often 

require the collection of some data, in some form, and 

by some systematic methods. Western-based Christian 

organizations function on a global scale. Proving the 

comparative advantage of FBOs over large-scale secular 

development organizations demands the extraction and 

appropriation of vast quantities of personal data from 

poor and vulnerable program beneficiaries. 

Furthermore, on matters such as contraceptive usage 

and maternal health, attempts to justify the collection of 

personal data may take different forms. FBOs may see 

personal development data capture as necessary and 

important to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of 

program outcomes. On the other hand, and not unlike 

their secular counterparts, they may be compelled to 

rely on a conception of the human person that reduces 

and reconfigures her as a “resource that is just there” 

(Couldry and Mejias 2019, 4).  

Although the structure of colonialism is different 

today, we should understand that the mechanics of 

colonial power exploiting the vulnerable and exerting 

control still underlie certain forms of data gathering in 

the Global South. Covert and clandestine methods of 

data extraction and appropriation may be hard to 

detect, by their very nature, like the extraction of the 

about:blank


Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 5(1), Summer 2023  

Shah, Decolonizing Data and Recovering the Person in Christian Relief and Development Organizations 73 

cells of Henrietta Lacks in the 1950s. But in my 

extensive firsthand acquaintance with the research 

approaches and methods employed by Global North-

based religious and secular development agencies 

operating in the Global South, such methods and 

approaches continue and often remain unquestioned 

among the governments and secular and religious actors 

in the development industry. It simply is a widespread 

reality that such agencies seldom impose on themselves 

the kinds of rigorous respect for principles of consent, 

transparency, and confidentiality that Institutional 

Review Boards impose on university-based research in 

both Western and non-Western countries. Secular 

agencies may justify data appropriation because they 

may sincerely view the process of extraction and 

utilization of information as necessary to improve the 

lives of those in need. These agencies may regard data 

as a valuable natural resource that is in abundant supply 

but is not being put to good use. Like petroleum, 

timber, or any other abundant but underused resource, 

data may have little value until they are repackaged and 

reconfigured to be used in development programs.
6

 But 

research by Christian organizations—organizations that 

profess to respect the inviolable God-given dignity of 

every human person—must view the subjects of research 

as ends in themselves and not as mere means or 

instruments to some larger goal, however worthy it may 

be. 

Both a colonial mindset and a form of paternalism 

may underlie and animate data collection efforts by 

large development agencies, both Christian and secular. 

While there is little doubt that the motivation of data 

collection is to improve the economic and spiritual lives 

of the poor and vulnerable, Northern-led data gathering 

often frames themselves as the only ones who know 

what is best and who can process, assess, and manage 

data. In some cases, due to a lack of skilled capacity in-

country, there is a significant gap between the skill sets 

of the staff in the Western headquarters and those in 

local offices. Yet colonialism and decolonization of data 

are not only about the dichotomous power imbalance 

between Christian experts in the North and subjects in 

the South. Solutions are being offered by the Christians 

in the Global North in the name of and for the 

perceived good of people in the Global South. Yet just 

as in colonial times, people in the Global South are not 

 
6

 Large-scale humanitarian and relief organizations use digital technology, including various forms of digital data, to 

manage critical aid particularly to communities in hard-to-reach locations. World Vision uses a digital mapping system 

called “Last Mile Mobile Solutions,” or LMMS, (https://www.wvi.org/opinion/view/inculcating-culture-innovation-

development-sector) to deliver aid to remote rural areas. LMMS captures demographic and vulnerability data for all 

individuals in a household. The system then provides individuals with a digital identity registration card. By the 

circumstances they find themselves in, beneficiaries are subordinate and unable to question the capture of their 

personal data including their vulnerability status that might include their religious identity. Humanitarian aid 

technology prompts us to question how care and control are interlinked. In such cases, World Vision’s digital 

registration card may be regarded as a form of power that blurs the line between empowerment and control.  

full and legitimate participants in charting their own 

path to progress. Putting decolonization into practice 

could begin with investing in capacity strengthening in 

Global South institutions and decentralization of power 

to individuals in-country to actively pose their own 

questions, collect their own data, produce their own 

authoritative knowledge, and advance and implement 

their own development agendas. 

 

Decolonizing and Changing the Terms of 

Reference for Development Data Gathering: 

Among Dalit Communities in the Slums of 

Bangalore and Chennai 
For scholars, activists, and practitioners, 

particularly those who have adopted a decolonial turn 

in their work and practice, the use of participatory 

methodologies may provide an acceptable and 

immediately accessible technique of representation and 

analysis that is in line with Audra Simpson’s concern 

that scholars pay attention to “what people say,” instead 

of “writing away from and to dominant forms of 

knowing” (Simpson 2007, 68). If decolonization of 

development data means fundamentally changing the 

relationship between the Majority World and Western 

FBOs, it seems reasonable to say that the way poverty, 

deprivation, well-being, freedom, and happiness, to 

name a few, are conceptualized and on which data are 

collected among the peoples of the Majority World will 

have to undergo a radical transformation. 

The following section represents powerfully and 

forcefully what happens when poor and vulnerable 

individuals and communities are allowed to say 

something—in their own words and on their own 

terms—about their intersecting lived realities of crushing 

poverty and religious restriction. This project, which 

was conducted under the auspices of the Coalition for 

Religious Equality and Inclusive Development 

(CREID) at the Institute of Development Studies at the 

University of Sussex, illustrates how it might be possible 

to change the terms of reference and possibly 

decolonize development data collection among the 

poor even during an exigent circumstance and urgent 

crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic (CREID 2021).  

The purpose of the research was to highlight the 

impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the lives of 

https://www.wvi.org/opinion/view/inculcating-culture-innovation-development-sector
https://www.wvi.org/opinion/view/inculcating-culture-innovation-development-sector


Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 5(1), Summer 2023  

Shah, Decolonizing Data and Recovering the Person in Christian Relief and Development Organizations 74 

traditionally excluded groups, such as religious 

minorities, women, and Dalits. The relevant impact of 

the pandemic is not restricted to its economic 

consequences. If it were, it would be reasonably easy to 

develop economic measures to ameliorate the adverse 

outcomes of COVID-19. Instead, persistent poverty 

among these pockets of those with low income must be 

understood as decisively shaped and exacerbated by 

vulnerabilities that arise because of long-standing 

constraints on freedom, including the freedom of 

religion or belief or “FoRB”—i.e., the freedom to hold, 

change, express, and practice one’s own authentic, 

conscientious judgments about spiritual truth and 

ultimate reality. 

 

The Methodology 

This research project drew on interviews 

conducted at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 

two urban-poor slums in Chennai and three urban-poor 

slums in Bangalore in India. As mentioned above, the 

focus of the research was to identify the economic, 

social, and spiritual impact of the pandemic on the lives 

of vulnerable individuals living on the margins of society 

in urban India. In many local and national disasters, 

ethnic minorities, religious minorities, women, and 

other vulnerable groups of people are often among the 

worst affected, and at the same time, enjoy the least 

access to effective systems of support and resilience
 

(Bethel, Burke, and Britt 2013). The COVID-19 

pandemic was no exception. The research explored the 

role of freedom of religion or belief during and after the 

pandemic. In addition, the research examined the 

direct and indirect consequences of religious identity—

and of the construction and treatment of religious 

identity—on the ability of the poor to navigate the 

lockdown. Given the constraints of conducting in-

person data collection during the pandemic, the team 

was keen to assess whether and how Freedom of 

Religion or Belief, where it existed and could be 

exercised, generated positive consequences during the 

lockdown. The team considered the ways in which 

individuals who enjoyed the freedom to exercise and 

express their religion were able to navigate and, in some 

cases, overcome the various disruptions and challenges 

posed by a national lockdown that lasted for more than 

three months. 

Twelve participatory inquiry groups were 

conducted with a total of 96 participants. Data were 

collected through drawings, individuals’ reflections, 

ranking and scoring matrices, and sixteen semi-

structured interviews. Separate groups of men and 

women from each religious minority were convened, 

with facilitators of the same religion and gender where 

possible. Discussions were conducted in participants’ 

preferred language (Urdu, Tamil, Kannada, Hindi, 

English).  

The data included transcripts from sixteen semi-

structured interviews and twelve participatory inquiry 

groups which included a total of 96 participants. Data 

from the groups and interviews were transcribed and 

analyzed.  

Inquiry groups in each site began with a River or 

Road of Life exercise, which enabled participants to 

each share the stories of their lives over the last eighteen 

months, from before the pandemic to their experiences 

of life in the shadow of COVID-19. This exercise 

prompted group discussion of the issues and was 

followed by a participatory rural appraisal matrix 

ranking exercise to identify the group’s most pressing 

issues.  

Following the River of Life exercise, researchers 

led discussions that outlined the challenges stated by 

each participant through the use of a matrix. Using 

numbered cards or stones, the participants registered 

the severity of each challenge on a scale of 0 to 3. 

During the presentation of the rivers/roads, and the 

ranking exercise, major themes emerged in the 

discussions, prompted with additional questions from 

the researchers. These included experiences of 

targeting of religious minorities/marginalized groups, 

especially during COVID-19, and the impact of the 

pandemic on their livelihoods, health, security/safety, 

mobility, education, religion, and general well-being. 

The methods enabled reflection on whether the 

intersection of variables such as class, gender, and age 

heightened such vulnerabilities. Participants were also 

asked to rank the level of help or advantage gained from 

a variety of enablers on a scale of 0 to 3. Enablers 

included help from the government in the form of food 

or other rations, friendship, and the role of the 

Transcendent during the trials of the pandemic. Table 

2 below illustrates the enablers identified by Dalit 

Christian men in Chennai.  

 
Demographic Characteristics of the Sample 

The target sample for this study included 

representatives of the Dalit community who belonged 

to the minority and the majority religious communities. 

These included Muslim women and men, Christian 

(Protestant and Catholic) women and men, and Hindu 

women and men. All the individuals in our sample had 

lived in their respective slums for more than two years 

and were daily wage laborers or individuals who were 

employed in professions (such as drivers or bakers) 

who could not earn money working from home. Most 

of the individuals in our sample had children or 

grandchildren in school. 

 

Recalibrating the Methodology to Examine Freedom 

of Religion or Belief During the Pandemic 

Most of the individuals in our target sample 

belonged to the Dalit (previously known as “outcaste”) 



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 5(1), Summer 2023  

Shah, Decolonizing Data and Recovering the Person in Christian Relief and Development Organizations 75 

community. As noted, respondents were daily-wage 

laborers. To access individuals from hard-to-reach 

communities, such as Muslim women in the slum, we 

worked closely with local facilitators and our contacts in 

the slum, who were of the same faith and gender as 

those they studied. In Bangalore, the staff of a local high 

school served as the major points of connection and 

facilitation. Administrators of the high school 

introduced us to parents from the slums who welcomed 

the opportunity to venture out to participate in our in-

person focus group discussion after being “sheltered-in-

place” for over three months. Table 1 illustrates the 

respondent profiles of the individuals who participated 

in the focus group discussions in Chennai and 

Bangalore. All our meetings were conducted in the 

local community and with the informed consent of the 

participants.  

 

 
Table 1: Profile of Research Participants in Chennai and Bengaluru, India. February – April 2021 

 
Category Number Slum Name, City 

Dalit Christian Men - Chennai 8 Korrkupet, Chennai 

Dalit Muslim Men - Chennai 8 Vyarsapadi, Chennai 

Dalit Hindu Men - Chennai 8 Korrukupet, Chennai 

Dalit Christian Women - 
Chennai 

7 Korrukupet, Chennai 

Dalit Muslim Women - Chennai 7 Vyarsarpadi, Chennai 

Dalit Hindu Women - Chennai 8 Korrkupet, Chennai 

Dalit Christian Men - Bengaluru 10 Lingarajapuram, Bangalore 

Dalit Muslim Men - Bengaluru 6 Sait  Palya, Bangalore 

Dalit Hindu Men - Bengaluru 6 Baglur Slum, Bangalore 

Dalit Christian Women - 
Bengaluru 

11 Lingarajapuram  

Dalit Muslim Women - 
Bengaluru 

5 Sait Palya 

Dalit Hindu Women 12 New Lingarjapuram 

Total 96  

  
The River of Life and Ranking Exercises 

The participatory methods were drawn from a 

cluster of methods available to social scientists and 

practitioners designed to foster genuine participant 

inquiry.
7

 We employed these participatory methods to 

enlarge our shared imagination and concerns about 

what it means to be human. Specifically, what does it 

mean to be a human who is both deeply diminished 

socially, politically, and economically and yet also 

profoundly religious and oriented to the transcendent, 

during a time of serious upheaval and distress brought 

upon by the COVID-19 pandemic? As such, at least at 

the outset of the exercise, the participatory method we 

employed aimed to create a research environment in 

which Dalit Muslim, Christian, and Hindu men and 

women were empowered to serve as intellectual 

 
7

 To learn more about participatory methodology, see 

https://www.alnap.org/system/files/content/resource/files/main/prmmanual-v1-1.pdf  

collaborators as well as leaders of inquiry group 

discussions.  

Unlike the regimented and bounded reach of 

traditional methods, such as structured and semi-

structured interviews, the participatory methodological 

approach of using reasonably flexible and open 

methods of inquiry—such as the River of Life drawing 

exercise—was designed to encourage local voices to be 

expressed, with the help of as little external direction as 

possible. The ranking exercise was designed to give 

policymakers a quantifiable idea of the extent of various 

intersecting deprivations facing religious minorities. We 

acknowledge, however, that the mechanistic process of 

“translating” the experiences of the very poorest 

members of the slum community occurs within a power 

structure. There are significant concerns about how 

researchers using participatory methods “translate” 

https://www.alnap.org/system/files/content/resource/files/main/prmmanual-v1-1.pdf


Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 5(1), Summer 2023  

Shah, Decolonizing Data and Recovering the Person in Christian Relief and Development Organizations 76 

religious experiences, including religious practices and 

beliefs of individuals in the Global South. Within the 

constraints of this project, we were able to identify 

certain issues that, although particular to the special 

social context (urban poor slums), were easier to relate 

to the Western context.    

Our interest in adopting participatory 

methodologies to gather information on the impact of 

COVID-19 on religious minorities in India did not 

grow out of isolated and limited attention to research 

methodology. Rather, we started with a strong 

conviction that had grown from seeing how 

participatory methodologies, particularly the River of 

Life exercise, could highlight the lived experiences of 

religious communities, including religious minorities 

and Dalit Hindus, and build their confidence to speak 

up and challenge power structures that constrained 

their ability to thrive before and after the pandemic. 

The experiences of the project team of Indian scholars 

working with very poor and marginalized communities 

for decades and a growing conviction that the freedom 

of the poor to enjoy the right to believe and practice 

their religion or beliefs prompted the team to identify 

an inclusive and empowering data gathering approach.
8

 

 

The Possibility of Trading Places 

Conducting an intensive research exercise at the 

height of a global pandemic, and following one of the 

world’s most stringent national lockdowns, required 

extreme caution. To overcome some of the 

understandable reticence and unease our respondents 

were experiencing, we brought them into focus-group 

discussions in which small communities of individuals 

from Dalit backgrounds and religious minority 

communities could speak as much to each other as to 

us. In so doing, our research built on the social capital 

and relational depth that one often sees in poor 

communities, in which individuals have lived beside 

each other for generations, sharing each other’s sorrows 

and joys. 

Consider this conversation among the group of 

Dalit Christian women we gathered for the focus group 

discussion. The group realized that one of their 

neighbors was depressed because she was lonely during 

the lockdown: 

 

Lakshmi: But being locked inside reminded me 

of feeling the same way when my husband died. 

When he died, I felt that the entire, whole world 

is gone. Being alone inside I thought I have no 

one, and I felt like an orphan…. I used to talk 

normally with people, but again, when I go 

inside, I cry again. 

 
8 To learn more about the “River of Life” participatory methodology, see the following article by Ziad Moussa: 

https://pubs.iied.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/migrate/G02828.pdf.  

 

I drew this rock here again in my river because I 

don’t know with whom I am going to stand, no 

one is there for me…. (crying) Everyone is scared 

of Corona but I think I should have died during 

Corona (crying). 

 

Respondent in the group: Don’t say that. Please 

don’t talk like that. 

 

Another respondent in the group: Please 

don’t cry. We are there for you. We 

understand…. 

 

As we sat in the slum talking with the deeply 

broken men and women during one of the toughest 

times in their lives, our work of describing and 

documenting their lives and converting their stories into 

“data” that would yield “results” in the form of policies, 

was in some small way less extractive because of the way 

we approached the exercise. 

The slum with its tight networks and forced 

proximity enabled the women and men to understand 

what the personalist philosopher Edmund Husserl 

called “the possibility of trading places” (Duranti 2010). 

By this, we find that our respondents in the slum, 

because of their shared experiences and struggles, can 

see the world from the point of view of the other 

person—i.e., they have the real possibility of exchanging 

places. This is made clear in the exchange among the 

women in the focus group in the slum in Chennai and 

was just as evident across other groups in our sample. 

By allowing respondents the possibility of “trading 

places,” we had contributed in some small way to 

healing and restoring the community, even as we 

gathered our “data” and “documented” our results. 

Furthermore, the River of Life methodology, with its 

inclusive and interactive nature, draws on the genuine 

empathy and compassion present between group 

members and between the researcher and the 

participants. 

Any decolonized development data infrastructure 

that fosters respect and a sense of dignity between the 

members of a community and between the staff or 

facilitators of an organization requires reducing the 

distance between these individuals. What is meant by 

this? In traditional data collection exercises such as 

surveys, fieldworkers or NGO personnel who 

document the results of a program typically remove 

themselves from the process of data collection and 

begin to label individuals ostensibly for efficient and 

effective data collection. In doing so, fieldworkers place 

the “observed” in categories that give them the authority 

https://pubs.iied.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/migrate/G02828.pdf


Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 5(1), Summer 2023  

Shah, Decolonizing Data and Recovering the Person in Christian Relief and Development Organizations 77 

to construct “objective” and scientifically “rigorous” 

narratives about the individuals.  

Our approach was qualitatively different in both 

approach and data generated from some traditional 

data-gathering exercises undertaken during the 

pandemic to gather information on religion and 

COVID. For example, a repository of data to provide 

policymakers and practitioners with data regarding the 

responses of religious communities was created and 

housed at a university in Washington, DC. Much of the 

data may be extracted from communities, including 

vulnerable communities, in a purely impersonal 

process involving neither interaction with, nor the 

consent of, the populations from whom data is 

collected. Furthermore, the knowledge that was 

“curated” by Western scholars and development 

practitioners, ostensibly to aid vulnerable communities 

during the COVID-19 pandemic, was generated and 

utilized from the extracted data without any 

involvement or input from the rightful owners. The 

irony here is that efforts to decolonize aid have had little 

impact on the colonial frameworks that undergird 

much of the development data gathering from the 

Global South.  

Over the course of our research, the participatory 

methods that were used to collect data in India sought 

to empower rather than disempower the poor, even as 

the main aim of the participant ranking exercise was to 

describe and document their experiences with a view to 

converting the key results of our conversations into 

data-gathering exercises destined to yield results and 

create quantifiable matrices that would inform policy 

documents and briefings. This brings us to the core 

difference between the suite of data-gathering 

participatory methods and the traditional data 

collection methods that occur in isolation from the 

rightful data owners in the countries and communities 

in the South. In most cases, data collectors who employ 

traditional extractive data-gathering methods create 

systems and promote ideologies that justify their 

appropriation of data in the name of rigor and data 

quality that, it is claimed, are needed for proper project 

management and evaluation. However, from our 

experience, good quality, quantifiable data on the 

challenges and enablers that most affected vulnerable 

populations at the height of the pandemic was 

achievable with deliberate effort and patience on the 

part of the trained facilitators who spent time explaining 

how the ranking exercise works and the ways in which 

the community could benefit from the data that was 

gathered. 

Another way in which development data confer 

power to the researcher in traditional data collection 

exercise is when she documents and relegates, say, an 

individual in a micro-credit program to another 

timeframe, often one that is behind the one she 

occupies in the present (Fabian and Bunzl 2014). For 

example, the poor and marginalized are situated in a 

period that is technologically and economically 

backward or static, while the fieldworker resides in the 

active and advanced present. These “distancing 

devices” serve not only to deny the poor the equality 

they deserve but also to reinforce a sense of “otherness” 

(Ibid., 31).
 

 

 

Positionality and the Poor 

The methodology employed in the slums of 

Chennai and Bangalore enabled facilitators to intervene 

by asking questions and seeking responses of their own. 

The methodology thus enabled them to participate in 

the process “not [just] attentionally but intentionally” 

(Ingold 2013, 395). Truly examining the ravages of the 

pandemic in the lives of the poor, particularly those 

who belonged to Dalit and minority religious 

communities, required facilitators to trade places with 

participants, inviting the participants to lead and drive 

the conversation. In addition, our research objectives 

and methods required us, as Tim Ingold states, to 

“observe from inside” (Ibid., 389). 

One example of this is the case of Laila, who 

facilitated the conversation (or exercise) among Dalit 

Muslim women in Bangalore.  Over years of teaching, 

she had developed a tacit knowledge of the problems 

and struggles facing the women sitting before her. 

Although Laila might be regarded as an “insider” whose 

roots were in the local community, she was still in many 

respected as an “outsider” because of her education 

and her job as a schoolteacher. To better collaborate 

with the women and gain their confidence, Laila 

needed to reduce their perception of her as both an 

outsider and an expert who knows more and is better 

able to speak on their behalf. In the following excerpt, 

Laila began the River of Life exercise by talking about 

her fears and worries during the COVID-19 nationwide 

lockdown: 

 

“My friend has talked. Now I will tell you about 

my river... See, before lockdown, all was good. 

My husband runs a hotel. But after the 

lockdown, things changed. We had no business. 

Money was less. Think of your life. That was my 

life.” 

 

As a person of deep religious convictions, a 

woman, a schoolteacher, a wife, and a resident of the 

local community, Laila occupied multiple positions that 

intersected. As an educated Muslim woman who has 

the freedom to seek employment outside the home, 

Laila might be regarded as an “outsider” who was 

therefore able to transcend some of the challenges 

faced by women in her community. Yet Laila was also 

very clearly an “insider” who shared the vulnerability 



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 5(1), Summer 2023  

Shah, Decolonizing Data and Recovering the Person in Christian Relief and Development Organizations 78 

and concerns of the women by virtue of her gender, 

religious tradition, and geographic proximity to the 

slum where participants live.  

 

Identifying and Documenting Real-Life Impact  

A further major advantage of studying the impact 

of the COVID-19 pandemic in slum communities was 

the opportunity to focus on the realities on the ground 

and enter the real-life experiences of the poor in their 

range and depth. This enabled us to zero in on the 

effects of living conditions and of public policies that 

directly affect their lives rather than rely on a 

mechanistic and reductionist understanding that locates 

the sources of deprivation in supposedly “objective” 

factors that are external to the lived experiences, 

perceptions, responses, and choices of the poor.  

Our engagement with those individuals who reside 

in stubborn pockets of poverty in the slums, precisely 

because it seeks to illuminate the limits, dangers, and 

predicaments of their minority and marginalized status 

at the time of COVID-19, must systematically and 

sympathetically examine the identities, values, and 

norms of these individuals. Such a systematic and 

sympathetic intellectual effort is especially necessary 

when the researchers might judge these identities, 

values, and norms to be “oppressive,” “patriarchal,” or 

“traditional.”  Although specific examples are likely to 

be contentious, it is undoubtedly true that certain 

religious practices, religious beliefs, and institutions 

reaffirm and reinforce problematic patterns of 

patriarchy and gender inequity (Tadros 2010). And 

these constraints on freedom and uplift certainly need 

our deliberate and careful attention. Through social 

movements, legislation, and the media, much more 

needs to be done to limit and even eliminate those 

aspects of culture that constrain and diminish human 

flourishing, and such aspects undoubtedly include 

problematic practices and beliefs related to religion. 

At the same time, our focus group discussions with 

some of the poorest, most marginalized, and abjectly 

poor individuals in urban poor slums in Bangalore and 

Chennai identified cultural and religious beliefs and 

participation in religious communities as key factors 

that empowered and sustained them at times of 

significant crisis and social and economic upheaval. 

Our methodology’s open-ended and versatile epistemic 

apertures, particularly involving the use of non-textual 

strategies of drawing, were designed to capture the 

profound and often radically interior and subjective 

impact of deeply held religious beliefs and tight-knit 

religious networks. This methodological approach 

invited our respondents to narrate—in their chosen 

language and symbology—how such beliefs and 

networks influenced the human spirit and resilience of 

those who live in pockets of persistent poverty, without 

directing or dominating the discussion with 

preconceived ideas about their faith or lack of faith. 

Consider the following participant ranking from 

our sample of Dalit Christian men in the Korukkupet 

slum in Chennai during the COVID-19 pandemic. The 

men were asked to consider what factors had harmed 

or enabled them to survive through the draconian 

national lockdown. The eight men in the group 

identified five categories of beneficial or enabling 

factors. The order followed the one in which the men 

ranked the different categories with the highest-ranking 

appearing first. These categories were the following:  

 

• the role of the church community in their 

lives, 

• a personal experience of God during the 

lockdown, 

• better relationships with their family, 

• assistance from their relatives, and 

• support from the government. 

 

Based on the men’s ranking of how important the 

factors were relative to each other, Table 2 on the next 

page illustrates that the most important impacts related 

to the church and their faith in God.  

As the table illustrates, government assistance 

either in the form of cash and in-kind transfers or police 

protection during riots was ranked lowest compared to 

help obtained from religious institutions. Furthermore, 

the men in this sample deeply valued their relationship 

with God. What is interesting is that at the height of one 

of the harshest lockdowns in the world, religious factors 

were not ignored or outranked by what some might 

consider more “objective” financial or health factors. It 

is likely, of course, that such relative rankings would be 

dynamic over time. Yet we see similar results for poor 

individuals from Muslim, Hindu, and Christian 

religious communities. Religious institutions and deeply 

held religious beliefs were consistently ranked as very 

beneficial for the poor in helping them negotiate the 

multi-faceted fallout of the pandemic in their 

communities.  

Listening to those on the margins sounds obvious. 

Yet Western agencies often hear what confirms their 

own assumptions and plans for the program. As Erica 

Bornstein notes in her research on Zimbabwe, when 

asked why sponsorship money could not be sent 

directly to the parents to buy things for their children, 

local staff from the Northern Christian agency told her 

that “the sponsor looked to the needs of the child not 

to the family” (2005, 93). In doing so, Bornstein 

suggests that the staff member “unconsciously 

articulated the power relations of transnational classes–

of sponsors and the sponsored–in her depiction of the 

parent and child relationship” (Ibid., 93). 

 



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 5(1), Summer 2023  

Shah, Decolonizing Data and Recovering the Person in Christian Relief and Development Organizations 79 

 

Table 2: Ranking of Enabling Factors for Christian Men in Korukkupet Slum in Chennai – March 2021 
* Names changed to protect survey respondents 
 

 Names* Help from 
Relatives/Wife 

Church (Role of Church 
members/Pastor/Priest) 

Experiencing 
God’s Presence  

Family Bond Government 
and Local 
Community 
Support 

1.  Arputhraj 2 3 3 3 1 

2.  Jayakumar 3 3 3 3 0 

3.  Kumar 2 3 3 3 0 

4.  Rajendra 2 3 3 3 2 

5.  Dayalan 1 3 3 3 2 

6.  James 0 3 3 3 1 

7.  Raja 2 3 3 3 1 

8.  Thomas 1 3 3 1 1 

Total  13 24 24 22 8 

The structure and mechanics of most data 

gathering for development are designed to move rapidly 

from instruction by international experts and staff to 

local staff and then to local program participants. For 

example, in a healthcare setting, local medical staff are 

rarely engaged as peer-mentors for international 

doctors. If they are, they are often labeled as “local” 

experts, which immediately conveys limited and 

bounded expertise and experience. Decolonizing data 

gathering not only recognizes but prioritizes the 

significant technical and practical knowledge and 

experience of Global South experts. Additionally, 

decolonizing the data collection process to include 

intentionally listening to voices from the margins 

establishes mutual ownership of data and recognizes the 

agency of the individuals who consent to share their 

data for the common good.  

Our methodology and measures thus attempted to 

capture the voices and lived experiences of those 

individuals living in persistent poverty and on the 

margins of society. The effort to capture such 

individuals' lived experiences and subjective 

perceptions is especially crucial, for their survival often 

demands a complex set of factors and dynamics. Such 

factors and dynamics may enable the poor and 

marginalized not only to subsist, but in some cases to 

proactively engage and even overcome the economic, 

social, and spiritual constraints on their well-being. By 

this, I mean that the process of being able to discuss the 

challenges individuals face at home or in the 

community may help them take active steps to 

overcome these problems rather than simply relate 

them to a researcher as part of a survey or 

questionnaire. For example, women who faced 

increased domestic violence during the pandemic 

lockdown shared their experiences with other women 

in the group and were able to get help with resources to 

handle the abuse.  

Many Global North individuals and institutions in 

the Christian relief sector ostensibly work from the 

protected distance of an office in the West or a local 

city in the Global South. Their efforts are carefully 

framed in the language of effectiveness, outcomes, and 

impacts. Some staff may even know a few program 

participants by name, but I wonder how many 

development professionals really want to get involved in 

the messiness of people’s lives. The highly 

professionalized development world with its timely 

reporting, programmatic efficiency, and objective 

research gives people ample reasons to stay aloof. Data 

gatherers are urged to achieve a certain kind of 

“distance” and “neutrality” throughout the research 

process. Otherwise, facilitators may introduce elements 

that risk “contaminating” the dynamics of objective 

research and the data-gathering exercise. One may 

nevertheless question whether avoiding all 

identification with participants is possible or even 

ethical. Decolonizing data collection involves rectifying 

power imbalances and restoring control of data to the 

rightful owners, but most importantly decolonization of 

data gathering compels Christians to be among the 

poor, to befriend them, assist them, and to accompany 

them.  

 

Conclusion 
Writing in 1961, the Yale political scientist Robert 

Dahl provided a classic definition of power: “A has 

power over B to the extent that he can get B to do 

something that B would not otherwise do” (Dahl 1957, 

202). To Christian development scholars and 

practitioners working in rural Bihar or Mumbai’s slums, 



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 5(1), Summer 2023  

Shah, Decolonizing Data and Recovering the Person in Christian Relief and Development Organizations 80 

it might seem farfetched to apply Dahl’s classic 

definition of power to their Christ-centered services. 

On the other hand, when we examine the history of 

development data extraction, appropriation, 

commodification, and utilization in the West since the 

end of World War II, we realize that it might not seem 

so farfetched to apply Dahl’s concept of power to 

Christian relief and development organizations. The 

structures of power in the development industry have 

become so entrenched even at the local levels that we 

may not recognize or identify them.  

It is important to recognize that most Northern 

Christian development organizations do not set out to 

deliberately impose power inequities, sustain structural 

barriers, or govern people in the manner of a colonial 

government. Yet, it is entirely plausible that by 

employing various assumptions, modes of thinking, and 

practices in the organization and production of data, 

Christian agencies foster forms of willful blindness and 

perpetuate ignorance. A decolonized data praxis 

challenges how colonialism may be pervasive but is not 

dealt with in current operations because those engaged 

in data collection may have not grasped the extent of 

the problem. Disassociating from the issues and 

ignoring the problems inherent in some Western-

centric forms of data collection foreclose the possibility 

of much-needed changes in the way individuals and 

institutions in the Global South actively engage in their 

own future development and progress. A decolonized 

data collection praxis means constantly and collectively 

thinking about and working towards reaffirming our 

commitment to Christ-centered service by embracing a 

vision of authentic development that empowers and 

uplifts those excluded and on the margins of society, 

and pursues modes of thinking and action that enable 

human beings to live dignified and flourishing lives.  

 

 

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Rebecca Supriya Shah is Special Advisor to the 

President for Global Initiatives at the University of 

Dallas, principal investigator for the Religion and 

Economic Empowerment Project (REEP), and with 

Timothy Shah, co-director of the Program for Indo-

American Understanding and Friendship at the Gupta 

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consults with international organizations, and 

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Author email: rshah2@udallas.edu  
 

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