From 29 June to 2 July 2026, development practitioners, thinkers, community leaders, and civil society actors will gather in Ghana for Repairing International Development: Amplifying Indigenous Development Initiatives from the Global Majority.
The conference is organized by African Futures Lab, Reform Initiatives (external link), Pawanka Fund (external link), and Deep South Solidarity Fund (external link).
The convening asks an urgent question: what would international development look like if it was shaped by the communities it claims to serve?
For too long, dominant development models have treated the Global Majority as a site of intervention, rather than a source of knowledge, repair, and political imagination. This gathering creates space to challenge that logic. It centers indigenous development practices, community-rooted knowledge, and reparatory approaches that move beyond extractive systems and narrow economic measurements.
The programme is framed around the 6Rs Framework for Repairing International Development: reconnection, re-education, repair, rebuild, reimagine, and resist.
Together, these six principles offer a path toward development that is grounded in land, community, memory, dignity, and collective well-being.
Day One: Reconnection
The opening day focuses on reconnecting people with their lands, communities, spiritual traditions, and local structures. Delegates will visit the **Nkyinkyim Museum in Ada**, where the programme will explore African spirituality, memory, and community development through a curated experience led by the museum.
This day invites participants to reflect on what foreign interventions have disconnected, and what must be restored for development to carry meaning within communities.
Day Two: Re-education
The second day examines the need to unlearn dominant ideas of development and recover liberatory forms of knowledge.
Drawing from Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy, the programme will explore how communities can move beyond neoliberal models that reduce development to individual gain, GDP growth, or technocratic reform. Re-education centers knowledge systems that are culturally grounded, communal, and connected to well-being.
Sessions will focus on community knowledge practices that remain relevant for today’s development work, including approaches that have been marginalized or almost forgotten within mainstream development spaces.
Day Three: Repair
The third day turns to the harms created by generations of foreign development interventions.
Repair means confronting the wounds left by systems that extracted resources, imposed external priorities, and undermined indigenous ways of organizing social, political, and economic life. Sessions will focus on how international development systems and structures can be repaired through Pan-African, indigenous, and community-led perspectives.
This day will bring together voices from across the Global Majority, including economists, academics, political leaders, practitioners, and affected communities working to reform the global order.
Day Four: Rebuild and Reimagine
The final day focuses on what comes after critique.
Rebuilding development means moving from growth-centered models toward human-centered approaches that expand people’s choices, reduce deprivation, and protect collective well-being. It calls for development frameworks shaped by indigenous, post-colonial, post-modern, and post-development perspectives.
Reimagining development through a reparatory justice lens means centering inclusion, equity, representation, and redistribution. It requires dismantling systems of power, reversing extractive capital, and amplifying indigenous voices and narratives.
The final day will showcase initiatives from the Global Majority that are already rebuilding and reimagining development in practice. These may include presentations, breakout sessions, film screenings, exhibitions, and community-led exchanges.
Resisting the Return to Business as Usual
The sixth principle, resistance, runs across the entire convening.
Repairing development requires more than new language. It requires guardrails that protect community gains, defend indigenous leadership, and prevent the collapse of alternatives when dominant systems push back.
To resist is to recognize that the current international development order will not transform itself. Communities need the tools, alliances, and political clarity to protect what they are building.
This gathering is a space to reconnect, re-educate, repair, rebuild, reimagine, and resist. It is also an invitation to take indigenous development seriously as a living practice, not a symbolic reference.
For more information on the speakers, programme highlights, and conference outcomes, visit: https://ridconference.org/