Decolonising women’s health innovation

Tiffany Nassiri-Ansari and colleagues set out how a decolonial feminist approach to innovation could produce greater gender equality and health equity The field of women’s health innovation is growing rapidly, yet it has focused mainly on technological solutions. Despite the global scope and ambition of advocates and innovators, feminist and decolonial perspectives remain largely absent. These perspectives are vital to discover whose voices and priorities shape innovation, and to improve how the field allocates funding, directs investments, and ensures inclusive representation and leadership. For too long, communities have had “innovative” solutions imposed on them under the banners of novelty and progress, without regard for contextual fit1 or alignment with local priorities.2 In addition to being a potential waste of often scarce resources, such interventions often reinforce power imbalances, sustaining top-down decision making and restricting opportunities for affected communities to shape the solutions that affect them. In many cases they have perpetuated, rather than dismantled, the inequities they claim to tackle. Centring decolonial feminist values in gender and health innovation is not a new idea. Where activists, community leaders, researchers, and funders have rejected exclusionary, top-down processes in favour of collective, inclusive ones, tangible improvements in health and wellbeing have followed.3 Building on that tradition, this article, part of the BMJ Collection on Women’s Health Innovation (bmj.com/collections/womens-health-innovation), calls for a deliberate reimagining of how women’s health innovation is defined, developed, and delivered. To understand why such a shift is necessary, it is essential to consider how the enduring structures and logics of coloniality shape health systems, research, and innovation and, in turn, the health and wellbeing of women and gender diverse people worldwide. Coloniality refers to the enduring systems of power, knowledge, and being that emerged from colonisation and which continue to shape the modern world. These structures …