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Agyeman and Ranawana, From Development to Repair: 

Dismantling Racism and Its Role in Shaping Poverty Today 56 

  
 

 

From Development to Repair: Dismantling 

Racism and Its Role in Shaping Poverty Today 

 

Ann-Marie Msichili Agyeman and Anupama Ranawana 
 

 
 

This article discusses the multidimensionality of poverty, how it is shaped and maintained through 

colonial logics, and how this understanding requires a holistic process of reparations. Reparations is a 

key part of decolonizing development. Anti-racism with integral intentions can be an expression of 

reparation as we actively dismantle hierarchies entrenched by racism (such as coloniality, apartheid, 

and caste systems). Drawing from a research project on race, ethnicity, and poverty conducted by 

Christian Aid, the authors reflect on what faith-based international non-governmental organisations 

(INGOs) must do in order to make these recognitions and move toward repair through working 

towards eradicating poverty.  
 

 
 

Reparations as a Theological and Moral 

Imperative 
A key focus within international development 

discussions regarding climate justice has been that of 

“Loss and damage.” Loss and damage, as formally 

understood, is a mechanism adopted at COP 27 

through which economically disenfranchised countries, 

those often facing the most significant impact of climate 

change, can receive monetary assistance to cope with 

the impacts of extreme weather events. The adoption 

of this scheme is connected to significant mobilization 

by indigenous and small island nations regarding the 

connection between colonial extractivism and climate 

change. In particular, it is some level of recognition that 

longstanding forms of colonialism have helped increase 

the vulnerability of specific people and places to the 

adverse effects of climate change (IPCC 2022). As 

scholars such as Amitav Ghosh and Gurminder 

Bhambra and Peter Newell have long argued, climate 

change is a broad planetary crisis that can and must be 

understood in terms of processes of resource extraction 

and settler cultivation that have dramatically altered the 

environment on which life depends (Ghosh 2021). The 

unequal effects of climate change are linked to the 

moral and structural logic of the European colonial 

project that saw certain communities and natural 

resources as sites of continuous extraction and 

elimination (Bhambra and Newell 2022). Loss and 

damage could thus be a form of reparations from 

Global North countries that profited from 

colonialization to countries in the Global South that 

have been impoverished and made more vulnerable 

due to these historical processes. 

 The concept of climate reparations is not new, as 

political geographer Keston Perry outlines. It is a wide-

ranging and appropriate mechanism for recognizing the 

magnitude of the climate crisis, as well as creating a 

response that centers history and ethics (2020). Perry’s 

emphasis on the ethics of the issue is important, and it 

provides an anchoring point for our discussion here, 

which focuses first on how the systems of reasoning and 

morality entrenched during the European colonial 

project maintain poverty and exacerbate vulnerability to 

extreme events, and second on the role of reparations 

in responding to these historical injustices. In doing so, 

the argument aligns with those of others who see 

reparations as a moral imperative and a fundamental 

necessity for the process of healing that must occur for 

formerly colonized nations (Moffett 2017). Kenyan 

theologian Bob Kikuyu, for example, argues that the 

goal of reparations is reconciliation. Such a process of 

reconciliation must include not only monetary 

reparation, but also relational healing, both a repairing 

of relationships and a repairing of the relationship with 

creation (2022a). In other words, reparations can be 

seen as the holistic healing of all human relationships 

(Maluleke 1997; Harris 2017). 

The road to reparations is complex and 

challenging and cannot be achieved without a significant 

understanding of the multidimensionality of justice. In 

this article, we focus particularly on how policymakers, 

international development organizations and others 

with decision-making power need to understand 



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

 

Agyeman and Ranawana, From Development to Repair: 

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poverty. Our particular emphasis is to engage faith-

based INGOs that have, historically, been unwilling to 

recognize their role in perpetuating the colonial project 

(Goudge 2003; Duffield and Hewitt 2013; Kothari 

2005; Wilson 2013; Silvey and Rankin 2011). This is 

significant because, as activists and scholars have noted 

repeatedly, the international development industry has 

always struggled to conceptualize the poverty prevalent 

in the Global South. Indeed, poverty is a major focus 

for the knowledge activities of the industry, particularly, 

as Jayati Ghosh points out, in terms of “defining the 

poor, categorizing the poor, analysing the behaviour of 

the poor, assessing policies designed to assist the poor 

or to alleviate their poverty, and so on” (2011).  

This of course means that the persistence of 

poverty justifies the relevance of the development 

industry, which is tied to the relationship between 

racism and poverty, an as yet under-researched and 

under-acknowledged issue in the sector. Scholars such 

as Uma Kothari and Althea-Maria Rivas, for example, 

note there is an intentional negligence of “race” in 

development thinking and practice (Kothari 2006; 

Rivas 2018). Yet the sector needs to acknowledge and 

address the continuing legacy of colonial ideologies and 

the persistence of forms of racialized outcomes and 

hierarchies in development. In this article, we 

understand racism and colonialism as having an 

intertwined and symbiotic relationship that together 

maintain coloniality. Beyond the political and 

economic realities of colonialism, coloniality refers to 

long-standing power that emerges through colonialism. 

These patterns define culture, labour, interpersonal 

relations, and knowledge production, and are 

maintained in books, assessment of academic 

performance, culture, hope, perceptions of the self, and 

many other aspects of livelihood (Maldonado-Torres 

2008). In paying attention to these patterns of power, 

we see how power maintains privilege and allows for the 

control of some groups in society. This means there is 

also a need to understand how Euro-American ideals 

influence the sector, and more specifically how 

authority, expertise, and knowledge have over time 

become racially symbolized.
1

 Any move toward repair 

must recognize the power of coloniality and must be 

accompanied by a reconceptualization of poverty in all 

its complexity. Two key questions for thinking about 

reparations is “How have centuries of racism 

 
1

 For clarification, we understand “Whiteness” here as elucidated by such scholars as Anthony Reddie (2021), Willie 

James Jennings (2020), bell hooks (1997), and Sylvia Wynter (McKittrick 2015); that is, as a dominant cultural space 

with enormous political significance, whose purpose is to keep others on the margins. Whiteness separates those who 

are entitled to have certain privileges from those whose exploitation and vulnerability to violence is justified by their 

not being White; what Jennings refers to as the constant reproduction of the plantation. 

contributed to this relational rupture that results in the 

multidimensional experience of poverty?” and “What 

has been neglected that needs healing and repair?  

To address all this, we draw from evidence from a 

race and poverty study that we conducted for Christian 

Aid in 2022 (Agyeman and Ranawana 2022). 

Participants for the study were drawn from a sample of 

Christian Aid partner communities and staff working in 

Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe, Colombia, Bangladesh, and 

Israel/Palestine. The purpose of this research was both 

to explore how different country programmes engaged 

with race, ethnicity, and colour in their programmatic 

work, and to better understand the links between race, 

ethnicity, colour, and poverty. Focussing on these five 

countries, we interviewed participants by applying a 

modified form of narrative inquiry (Clandinin and 

Connelley 2000). Narrative inquiry is a reflexive 

process that invites participants into dialogue to 

understand how they make sense of concepts, in this 

case related to race and poverty. We decided to open 

the dialogue in this way to create space for the voice and 

agency of our participants to place emphasis as and 

where they felt it necessary. It was clear from our 

findings that the issues were about so much more than 

a lack of access to resources, for we saw that individuals 

and communities are pervasively situated in spaces that 

prevent them from breaking out of the cycle of poverty. 

This implicitly (and at times explicitly) highlighted the 

political nature of poverty experienced as a result of 

systems of oppression based on race, ethnicity, or 

colour. We refer to our findings from these five 

countries to articulate what has been broken and is in 

need of repair. 

 

The Political and Multidimensional  

Nature of Poverty   
If reparations are part of a journey towards a world 

without poverty, then understanding the ways in which 

poverty exists and operates is important. There is a 

need to understand the entire ecosystem of meanings, 

values, ideas, and institutions that maintain poverty. 

Doing so also supports calls from critical international 

development scholars to move towards a more complex 

approach to development that centers different ways of 

seeing the world and acknowledges a multiplicity of 

ways of living, being, and living a full life. Before 



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Agyeman and Ranawana, From Development to Repair: 

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discussing different approaches to reparations, we first 

draw from our own research to explore this vital topic.  

As do many INGOs, Christian Aid believes that 

poverty results from structural and systemic power 

imbalances and misuse (Ghosh 2022). This has been an 

integral part of our global analytical framework at 

Christian Aid as it identifies the parties responsible for 

repairing the injustice. Poverty is evidence of the 

collective failure of society to honour, that is, to assign 

value to, its most vulnerable members. Poverty is thus 

political, determined by how resources are distributed 

in and amongst societies. Our response must therefore 

ask how reparations can enable us to better honour 

people living in poverty. The creation of poverty, as well 

as its repair, are thus both embedded in the structures 

and systems of power (including racism, patriarchy, and 

neoliberal capitalism), and reinforced through context-

specific ideologies. 

The misuse of power results in the manifestation 

of poverty across multiple dimensions of being. Whilst 

indices such as the UNDP’s Multidimensional Poverty 

Index and the World Bank’s Multidimensional Poverty 

Measure have brought nuance and complexity to how 

poverty is understood and assessed, enabling numerical 

comparison across ethnic groups, regions, and ages, 

and thus providing important information on patterns 

of poverty (Alkire and Santos 2010), such indices and 

measures are nevertheless limited in that they only 

capture factors such as monetary poverty, education, 

health, and basic infrastructure services, but do not 

necessarily expose how power exists and operates 

structurally and systemically. In addition, they measure 

poverty against the Sustainable Development Goals, 

goals that were developed based on norms and 

standards of what makes a “good life” according to the 

Global North (Ziai 2016).   

And yet, these broader and deeper aspects of 

power, especially power dynamics, are, for us at 

Christian Aid, central to understanding and addressing 

poverty. In addition to those material aspects of poverty 

represented in the aforementioned poverty indices, our 

understanding of poverty at Christian Aid spreads over 

three interconnected aspects of our being: spiritual, 

relational, and material. Together, these allow us to 

think of poverty holistically.  

 

The Spiritual Dimension of Poverty 
Multidimensional poverty is the state of being in 

which an individual, community, or entity can face 

multiple disadvantages at the same time concerning 

their income, gender, geographic location, caste, class, 

race, creed, psychological difficulties, physical 

disabilities, access to services, access to justice, ability 

for their knowledge to be acknowledged, their 

intergenerational trauma, loss of culture, the loss of 

spirituality, or multiple displacement. This list is not 

exhaustive. The journey “out” of poverty, therefore, is 

not linear, especially given how power shapes it. Where 

we see the multiple manifestations of poverty as a result 

of colonial extraction and dispossession, it is because 

our ways of socio-economic living continually create, 

maintain, and reproduce systems of marginalisation, 

exclusion, and silencing.  

Our research findings highlighted a relationship 

between spiritual dimensions of poverty that occur as a 

result of misused power. From a theological 

perspective, misused power is one outward 

manifestation of individual and collective sin that 

fractures relationships multidimensionally; it is the 

embrace of greed and therefore, turning away from 

God (Ranawana 2022; Rieger 1998). What begins 

spiritually in the hearts of humanity as the sinful desire 

to possess power and dominate soon manifests in 

relational dynamics, and eventually comes to fruition in 

the material through the unjust concentration and 

allocation of power and resources. This is how poverty 

can be understood in the spiritual sense, for it shows a 

movement away from a justice-centered spirituality. 

The rejection of the likeness and image of God in all 

humanity and the reservation of value and goodness to 

only a certain portion of humanity maintains a set of 

logics that have, both historically and into the present, 

made communities at the “lower end” of any social 

hierarchy more disposable.  

This was highlighted in our research in the topic of 

the oppression and dispossession of Palestinians by the 

state of Israel. In particular, the manifestation of 

intergenerational trauma, both individual and 

collective, was highlighted as a form of poverty that 

amplifies the sense of inferiority (and superiority) within 

individuals and groups. Elena Ruiz describes such 

structural trauma as “trauma by design” and argues that 

failures to understand “trauma as a functional, 

organizational tool of settler colonial violence amplify 

the impact of traumatic experience on specific 

populations” (2023). Our findings show too that 

poverty (and trauma) inhibits the dreams and ambitions 

of people experiencing it in that it exacerbates feelings 

of powerlessness, hopelessness, shame, stigma, and 

humiliation (Patel and Kleinman 2003). In the 

framework of our biblical prophetic vision focused on 

the restoration of a broken world and all its systems, 

such impacts become a serious issue, even though they 

are overlooked by traditional measures of poverty. At 

Christian Aid, our work must critically consider all the 

factors that paralyse the ability of people living in 

poverty to create a vision of a transformed world and 

the action needed to build it.  



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In an approach that values everyone and respects 

all voices, we need to take care to consider what healing 

from such trauma means for different groups, and 

whether there are locally based, indigenous resources 

that can be helpful in the healing and restoration 

process. As development organisations, we should 

resource these approaches courageously to promote 

holistic flourishing for people who are living in poverty 

(Peace Direct 2021). 

Another aspect of poverty understood in the 

spiritual sense is the complicity of missionaries and 

churches colluding with Empires in the European 

colonial project to construct racist hierarchies that were 

imposed on Indigenous peoples throughout the world 

(Cruchley 2020; Mukaria 2020; Carey 2011; Grimshaw 

and Nelson 2001; Dussell 1981; Etherington 2005). 

One of those is the Dutch cultivation system deployed 

in Indonesia as a forced crop delivery system that 

extracted coffee, sugar, and indigo (Bosma 2013). Such 

systems stratified labourers into “degenerate types” who 

were then subject to various systems of administration 

and instruction dependent on racial categorization 

(Schrauwers 2001). Jesse Mugambi, connecting 

colonial legacies to climate injustice, points to how this 

created a problem of “imbalance” wherein it is not an 

ignorance of poverty, but the subsummation to a culture 

of disposability, that ensures there is no political or 

moral will to transform a system that keeps some poor 

and others rich (2014). Throughout the world, 

churches were complicit in propagating this system 

because of a political choice to search for wealth and 

profit, and thus turn away from right standing 

relationship with God. One particularly horrendous 

manifestation was the “doctrine of discovery,” which 

established a religious, political, and legal rationalisation 

for colonisation and violent acquisition of land not 

inhabited by Christians (Miller 2019). Two papal bulls, 

in particular, stand out. The first, issued in 1455 by 

Pope Nicholas V, "Romanus Pontifex," served to grant 

trading monopoly to the Portuguese with Africa, and 

ultimately authorised the enslavement of Africans. The 

second Papal Bull was issued in 1493, by Pope 

Alexander VI. It affirmed Christian European 

“explorers’” claims to prominent geopolitical 

strongholds and the assertion of the superiority of 

European Christianity globally.  

One of the places where our research showed this 

was significantly apparent was in Zimbabwe, where 

many institutionalized Christian churches own a 

significant amount of land and hold major investments 

linked to agriculture and other sectors. The transferred 

ownership of some of this land was inherited from the 

colonial era (Edelman, Oya, and Borras 2016). In all 

this history in Zimbabwe, what we see explicitly is how, 

in the search for wealth and profit, churches turned 

away from the truth that all are made in the image of 

God to concentrate and increase their own power and 

influence. 

 

The Relational Dimension of Poverty 
Histories of the doctrine of discovery and countries 

like Zimbabwe connect directly to our views on the role 

of power in creating and maintaining poverty, especially 

in terms of how poverty must be understood as a result 

of exploitation. That is, poverty results from a complex 

set of social relations through which “value is 

appropriated from nature and labour and accumulated 

as wealth and capital” (Bernards 2023), a situation that 

has been labelled “relational poverty” (Lawson and 

Eldwood 2018). Entrenched within our social systems 

is the stratification of value based on race, and the 

reorganisation of society on this same basis. Racism can 

be understood as hierarchies of power, knowledge, 

value, and respect that are rooted in racial identity 

(including ethnicity, caste, colour, and tribe). These 

hierarchies are framed by collective systems and 

structures and manifest in our individual behaviours, 

and such historically structured racial lines continue in 

the present. The global political influence of racism 

(and other identity-based hierarchies) results in the 

inequitable and disproportionate distribution of 

resources along these stratifications, driving up racial 

inequality and poverty experienced by those at the so-

called “lower end” of this socially constructed 

hierarchy. Relational poverty, therefore, can be 

conceptualised as “the result of the different terms and 

conditions on which people are included in social life” 

(Lawson and Eldwood 2018).  

This was a key point of discussion in our research 

exploring how race and poverty were related in 

Zimbabwe. One case examined unequal race relations 

between Chinese business owners and Black 

Zimbabwean workers within the mining and 

construction industries and how the imbalance of 

power between these groups exacerbates poverty 

outcomes. Research participants we spoke with noted 

that there is a sentiment and perception of Chinese-

owned companies in Zimbabwe as exploitative of the 

labour of black Zimbabweans and referred to it as a 

form of neo-colonialism. Zimbabwean labourers 

working for Chinese firms are often underpaid and 

work in unsafe conditions, according to a Zimbabwean 

legislator who is challenging Chinese companies that 

abuse workers and do not generally adhere to local laws 

(Chingono 2022). Negligent mining and construction-

site practices in particular increase pollution and 

contaminate water supplies, which increase the risk of 



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detrimental health outcomes and diminish livelihood 

security (Siziba 2022).  

The rights of workers and residents are also 

affected by a lack of accountability within the national 

government. Left unchallenged, inequality and unequal 

power relations based on race and colour work together 

to dehumanise and sustain the exploitation of black 

Zimbabweans. The racial inequality that has so greatly 

marked the national identity of Zimbabwe both before 

and throughout the colonial period now forms the 

building block of continual racial inequality evident 

today in the relationship between black Zimbabweans 

and Chinese business owners. Arguably, the neglect of 

rights and the failure to protect Black people in 

Zimbabwe from wealthy Chinese migrants is propped 

up by implicit racial hierarchy that perpetuates the 

exploitation, suppression, and oppression of Black 

people, within Africa and around the world. In this 

context, a critical question one of our participants posed 

was “What does the Black Lives Matter movement and 

the decolonial journey mean for Black people in 

Zimbabwe who are on the sharp end of both poverty 

and racism?” To this, we would add the following 

question: “Does the movement run the risk of only 

being meaningful for Black people in Western 

contexts, or is this an entry point to affirm the rights and 

resources of Black people everywhere?” Relational 

repair requires us to interrogate the implications of 

privilege and power in who is afforded racial justice in 

this sense. Such critical reflections are important for 

how the aid sector thinks about reparations. Watershed 

moments of social justice movements cannot neglect 

the well-being of people who bear the greatest weight of 

racism, poverty and inequality. 

Another example from our study comes from 

Bangladesh. In conversations with research 

participants, we discussed the tensions resulting from 

the liberation struggle of the 1970s, and how the rights 

of ethnic and other minority communities are either not 

recognized or otherwise contested. Activists working at 

these interstices in Bangladesh generally agree that such 

tensions are connected to struggles over lands that had 

been owned by minority communities, but were then 

taken by majority communities after liberation. 

Research participants, as well as scholars and activists 

working in the region, also point to the challenges raised 

by the constitution of Bangladesh that make the 

recognition of ethnic minority issues difficult. In 

particular, the constitution designates Bengali as the 

sole state language and declares that Bangladeshi 

citizens would be known as Bengalis (Article 6), leaving 

little room for diverse identity markers that are not 

Bengali (Van Schendel 2020). Observers note that 

ethnic and religious minorities continue to face 

persecution, land dispossession, and violence, with 

successive governments neglecting to address their root 

causes (Lam 2006; Christian Aid and EIDHR 2022). 

Ethnic and religious minorities are thus impeded from 

participating in political life and from accessing 

educational and other social resources and services that 

could support their social well-being.  

During interviews, comments were often made 

about “fairness,” “lightness,” and how, rooted in the 

Brahmin caste system, lighter skin tones are regarded 

as superior, a view that has been reinforced through 

imperialism and coloniality across South Asia. When 

talking about the complexity of conceptualising race, 

complexion, and colour, one participant reflected: “It is 

not as clear as ‘Black versus White’, but it is [a] socially 

constructed issue of lighter complexion and dark 

complexion.” The socially constructed nature of these 

colonial and racist ideologies reinforces deeply unequal 

systems that position people with darker complexions 

as inferior. This makes them more vulnerable to 

mistreatment and more likely to be excluded from basic 

services, such as education and healthcare, and 

therefore more likely to live in poverty. Research 

participants we spoke with noted how such racist 

ideologies become internalized. In conversations with 

colleagues, we also discussed how this mirrors much of 

the landscape in South Asia. 

 

The Material Dimension of Poverty 
When discussing material poverty, we understand 

it as the consequences and physical impacts of the 

oppression and exploitation of people relegated to the 

lower end of socially constructed hierarchies. An 

example from Sierra Leone illustrates well how these 

socially constructed hierarchies entrench material 

poverty. Participants highlighted the link between 

poverty and what they called “ethnoregionalism,” which 

has increasingly become part of the socio-political 

relations within Sierra Leone and is in many ways, as 

one participant noted, “a nomenclature for tribalism.” 

Ethnoregionalism is the socio-political construction of 

cultural and regional groups that bears a significant 

influence on the political identity of individuals, 

families, and communities, which in turn actively 

shapes political ideologies, practices, and participation 

across regions within the country (Kabba 2018), and 

which have tangible implications for where power is 

concentrated and how it is exercised in Sierra Leone. 

The ethnocentric divide can be traced back to the 

transitional period of independence in the 1960s, and 

has deep and complex roots in Sierra Leone’s social 

and political context. While all groups in society have 

varying senses of their own power (related to the 

understanding of their rights, entitlements, behaviours, 



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rules of engagement, and the structural and systemic 

inclusion or exclusion and inequality that characterises 

their community) (Gaventa 2006),
 

our interviews 

spotlighted the ways in which material poverty is shaped 

by ethnoregionalism in Sierra Leone. One colleague 

explained that this happens when “people see 

themselves as belonging to particular ethnic groups and 

as a result they should advance the cause of that group 

to be in power and governance. And once they are in 

governance it's all about their own sets of priorities.” 

What we then see is that resources, basic services, and 

economic benefits across the country are unequally 

distributed, with communities and ethnic groups 

(particularly minority groups) that are not represented 

in spaces of political power more likely to be 

underserved by political leaders and, therefore, to 

experience greater poverty.  

The measurement, monitoring, and reporting of 

material dimensions of poverty have received the most 

attention and resources within the aid sector (Sen 

1999). Indices such as the Oxford Poverty and Human 

Development Initiative’s (OPHI’s) MPI can be tools 

that countries use to analyse where poverty is 

concentrated, who experiences it, and how, but 

understanding how both the legacies of colonialism and 

attendant ethno-regionalism influence the process of 

resource distribution further enables INGOs 

meaningfully to respond to the depth of poverty that 

people experience. 

 

Multiple Forms of Reparation 
Considering this concept of the multi-

dimensionality of poverty, reparations become a 

holistic healing of human relationships that result in 

spiritual, relational, and material repair. The work of 

healing relationships requires attention to the 

multidimensionality of poverty and an understanding of 

colonialism, slavery, and the attendant legacy of 

structural oppression, imperialism, extraction, and 

exploitation. Considering what the sinful system of 

racism has broken, what do reparations mean for 

persons living in poverty and what are the implications 

for development actors, especially those who are part of 

historically dominant “mission” churches like Roman 

Catholic or Anglican churches? To frame what forms 

of repair are needed, we use the four levels of racism 

framework developed by the Multicultural Council of 

Saskatchewan (2021) to illustrate how different types of 

brokenness demand different kinds of repair.  

The first is repair of structural racism. Structural 

racism is the process by which hierarchies are 

established and engrained in society as normative. For 

Christian INGOs, it is important to challenge ideologies 

that normalise racialised inequality and the 

disproportionate concentration of poverty within 

minoritized and racialised groups globally. Structural 

repair requires us to actively dismantle and disrupt 

socially constructed hierarchies and systems that 

oppress people based on identity and thus work to 

uphold equality for all people as image bearers of God. 

Actions consistent with this goal include, for example, 

continued global advocacy to end caste-based 

segregation in South Asia. Addressing structural racism 

shifts the collective understanding of who lives in 

poverty and why, towards a collective responsibility to 

protect the most vulnerable in our society.  

Second is the repair of institutional and systemic 

racism, which must also take on multiple approaches. 

Institutional or systemic racism is embedded in policies, 

practices, and programmes of public and private 

sectors—which is where Christian INGOs may find 

significant influence. Two lenses can be applied: one is 

the examination of thematic priorities of Christian 

INGOs, and another is the examination of our 

organisational functions and roles within the aid sector 

more broadly. A thematic priority that may contribute 

to the repair of institutional and systematic racism, for 

example, is “debt justice.” Debt has become an 

insidious framework for both the challenges and 

proposed solutions that face governments, national 

organisations, and households in economically 

dispossessed countries in the Global South. The world 

over, debt is often seen as a kind of individual failure, 

and non-payment is met with punishment. We must 

shift our frameworks for understanding debt and its 

consequences to see indebtedness as a human rights 

issue. If we view poverty as multidimensional, and 

linked to the legacies of colonialism and racism, we 

must understand that countries in the Global South face 

insurmountable debts because of other societal failures, 

including coloniality, and we should start with this 

understanding as we reshape our responses to debt.  

The second approach, examination of our 

organisational role and function, requires a critical 

reflection of the power Christian INGOs hold and 

exercise. This involves critically reflecting on the nature 

of our international partnerships, and our work with 

communities living in poverty. First, we must recognise 

our own collusion in imbalances of power, and then 

work toward transforming, redistributing, and 

relocating power more equitably (Bond 2023). This 

speaks to the theological principle of “repentance,” 

which does not simply represent concepts of sorrow 

over wrongs, but is characterised by intentional acts that 

restore what has been broken. Walter Brueggeman 

encourages us by noting that when we begin to reflect 

deeply on repentance, opportunities that arise may be 

disguised as inconveniences, but are indeed gifts 



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(Brueggeman 2020). The relational repair that happens 

in the space of repentance bears material benefits in 

that the work against poverty and inequality is anchored 

in deeper and more sustainable transformation (Judson 

2022). 

There is also a need for the repair of damage 

caused by interpersonal racism, including the beliefs, 

attitudes, and behaviours of individuals, both conscious 

and unconscious. Holistic repair cannot happen 

without honouring and making room for the 

knowledge, wisdom, and theology of people who have 

been most affected by racism, poverty, and 

colonisation. Indeed, they must have the leading role. 

Kikuyu uses the African philosophy of “Ubuntu” to 

illustrate this relational co-dependency:  

 

Ubuntu is a recognition that the most valuable 

aspect of our existence is in our relationships, 

and that human beings are inextricably bound to 

one another, making our relationships the 

essence of life (2022b).  

 

Finally, internalised racism is a fundamental aspect 

of repair that responds to internalised beliefs of 

inferiority and superiority in individuals. Repair here 

requires dismantling and replacing beliefs of inferiority, 

(such as colourism or anti-Blackness), or superiority 

(such as Whiteness and the normalisation of White 

racial identity) with relational ways of being that redeem 

the goodness between one another (Mokuria et al. 

2023). The result, from a Christian theological 

perspective, is the recentring of the Imago Dei. It is 

imperative for Christian INGOs to resource 

approaches for reparations that respond holistically to 

spiritual, relational, and material forms of poverty 

caused and maintained by racism.  

Anti-racism with integral intentions can be an act of 

reparation that is liberative as we actively dismantle 

hierarchies steeped in racism, like those based in 

coloniality, ethnocentrism, and caste. For faith-based 

organisations, this liberation enables us to transform 

power and develop new futures and alternative 

relationships to realise the just and healthy world 

envisioned by and with people living in poverty. 

 

 

 

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915. 
 

 

Ann-Marie Msichili Agyeman is an advisor at 

Christian Aid dedicated to disrupting racialised 

hierarchies, the legacy of colonisation, and how these 

shape poverty and inequality globally today. As a 

Zambian living in the UK, an integral part of her work 

is remaining sensitive to the tension of being of the 

Global South but benefitting from proximity to 

European power whilst domiciled in the UK. 

 

Anupama Ranawana is a research advisor for Christian 

Aid. She is an anticolonial feminist, who researches 

and writes on feminist storytelling, race and poverty, 

and the intersection of religion and politics. 

 

Author emails: 

annmarie.agyeman@gmail.com 

ARanawana@christian-aid.org  
 

https://www.christianaid.ie/resources/our-work/song-prophets-global-theology-climate-change
https://www.christianaid.ie/resources/our-work/song-prophets-global-theology-climate-change
https://www.christianaid.ie/resources/our-work/song-prophets-global-theology-climate-change
https://mcos.ca/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Levels-of-Racism-scaled.jpg
https://mcos.ca/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Levels-of-Racism-scaled.jpg
https://mcos.ca/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Levels-of-Racism-scaled.jpg
about:blank
about:blank
http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3561121
about:blank#:~:text=Locals%20allege%20that%20some%20Chinese,of%20US%2440%20per%20month.
about:blank#:~:text=Locals%20allege%20that%20some%20Chinese,of%20US%2440%20per%20month.
about:blank#:~:text=Locals%20allege%20that%20some%20Chinese,of%20US%2440%20per%20month.
about:blank#:~:text=Locals%20allege%20that%20some%20Chinese,of%20US%2440%20per%20month.
about:blank#:~:text=Locals%20allege%20that%20some%20Chinese,of%20US%2440%20per%20month.
about:blank#:~:text=Locals%20allege%20that%20some%20Chinese,of%20US%2440%20per%20month.
https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/46915
https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/46915
mailto:annmarie.agyeman@gmail.com
mailto:ARanawana@christian-aid.org

