Between Knowing and Doing: Reflections on Feminist Praxis in Ghana’s WISE Woman Project

 

Between Knowing and Doing: Reflections on Feminist Praxis in Ghana’s WISE Woman Project.

For decades, development research has wrestled with a fundamental question: who defines problems, designs solutions, and represents the realities of the Global South? Postcolonial scholars such as Mohanty, Spivak, and McEwan have long shown how development discourse often silences local voices, recasting women in the Global South as passive subjects rather than knowledge producers. These critiques have inspired a move toward approaches that not only rethink how we write about development but also reimagine how development is practiced. I found these debates especially resonant while examining the WISE Woman Project, led by Dr. Gloria Aidoo-Frimpong during her 2025 fieldwork in Ghana. Designed to improve awareness and uptake of HIV self-testing (HIVST) and pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) among young women, the project transforms research into a site of co-creation and feminist empowerment. Through participatory methods, particularly the Nominal Group Technique (NGT) and Human-Centered Design (HCD), it redefines what it means to know, intervene, and empower. While HIV prevention is its practical goal, the project, at a deeper level, challenges colonial logics of expertise by centering Ghanaian women’s lived experiences and wisdom as the foundation for social innovation. In this post, I read the WISE Woman study as a case of feminist praxis that turns postcolonial critique into participatory action. I argue that the project shifts the paradigm from development for women to development with women.

From Postcolonial Critique to Participatory Praxis

Postcolonial feminism emerged to correct Western feminism’s universalizing tendencies and mainstream development’s technocratic assumptions. In Under Western Eyes, Mohanty (2004) critiques Western feminist scholarship for producing a singular image of the “Third World Woman,” erasing difference and local agency. While Spivak (1988) asks whether the subaltern, those structurally excluded from power, can ever truly speak within colonial frameworks, McEwan (2001) urges feminist practice to move beyond critique by reconfiguring research relationships and ethics. Other decolonial thinkers such as Mignolo (2009) and Tuck & Yang (2012) extend these insights, calling for epistemic disobedience, which in most part refers to refusing Eurocentric categories of knowledge. They also call for pluriversality, which refers to the coexistence of multiple epistemologies. Collectively, these frameworks converge on one imperative: research should be done with people, not about them. The WISE Woman Project operationalizes this ethic through participatory co-design.

WISE Woman: Context and Vision

HIV remains a pressing challenge in Ghana, disproportionately affecting young women who account for over 80 percent of new infections (GSS, 2023). Despite the effectiveness of HIVST and PrEP, uptake remains low due to stigma, gendered norms, and inadequate youth-friendly services. WISE Woman addresses this gap through a culturally responsive, women-centered intervention for Ghanaian women aged 18–35. Workshops were held in Aburi, which represents a neutral, stigma-free site accessible from both Greater Accra and the Eastern Region. The project brought together young women, community partners, and health workers to identify barriers and co-create solutions. The venue and setting itself symbolized what Homi Bhabha calls a “third space,” a zone where new meanings and relationships emerge beyond colonial binaries of researcher and researched.

The project’s name itself is a metaphor for empowerment. WISE can be read as Women’s Informed Self-Empowerment or Women-Inspired Solutions for Empowerment. More succinctly, the project is grounded in women’s lived experiences as agents of change (W), expands access to information and inclusive knowledge-making (I), promotes self-testing and self-determination (S), and aims to expand women’s autonomy and equity in decision-making (E). WISE operates both as an acronym and a philosophy that situates HIV prevention in the wisdom, creativity, and collective agency of Ghanaian women. It shifts the paradigm from treating women as objects of intervention to acknowledging them as producers of knowledge.

Two approaches in this project stood out: The nominal group technique and the Human-Centered Design.

Nominal Group Technique: Democratizing Knowledge

The Nominal Group Technique (NGT) is a structured method for collective brainstorming and prioritizing ideas. Participants first generate ideas individually, share them in turn, discuss them for clarity, and finally rank them anonymously to build consensus. In WISE Woman, NGT guided the participatory workshop in Aburi, where ten young women and five community partners collaboratively identified gender-specific barriers to HIV prevention and prioritized feasible strategies. Each participant’s contribution carried equal weight, ensuring that social status or education did not determine whose ideas mattered. This process democratized knowledge creation, where women became theorists of their own experience, articulating insights about stigma, confidentiality, and gender power relations. Here, Spivak’s question about the ability of the subaltern to speak meets a pragmatic answer. Through structured participation, the subaltern not only speaks but also shapes the research agenda.

b    Human-Centered Design: Designing With, Not For

Complementing NGT, Human-Centered Design (HCD) translates participant ideas into tangible prototypes. Rooted in empathy and iterative feedback, HCD involves understanding users’ needs, generating ideas, and testing prototypes collaboratively. After the NGT session, participants designed and refined intervention components such as peer-led discussions, community outreach models, and WhatsApp-based education campaigns. By positioning women as co-designers, WISE Woman reclaims development from the technocratic logic of external expertise. The iterative process ensured that solutions were not only feasible but culturally resonant. In this sense, HCD enacts McEwan’s call for feminist praxis that is reflexive and locally grounded while realizing Mignolo’s notion of epistemic disobedience by privileging experiential knowledge over imported models. Moreover, the project’s use of WhatsApp, an everyday communication tool in Ghana, illustrates that transformation does not mean rejecting modernity but embedding technology within familiar cultural and digital ecologies.

What does all this mean for development practice?

The theoretical foundations from our Gender and Development seminar come alive through WISE Woman. The critique of Western feminist universalism is countered by the project’s attention to difference. It does not assume a single Ghanaian woman’s experience but allows multiple voices to coexist. The challenge of the subaltern’s silence finds resolution in structured participation. The increasing insistence on redistributing power in knowledge production is realized through NGT’s egalitarian method. Finally, decolonization is embodied by enacting workshops that return control of research design to the community itself. Critique attains meaning only when translated into relational, context-specific action.

The WISE Woman Project also illustrates that feminist approaches to development are not abstract ideals but actionable practices. By centering Ghanaian women’s experiences, employing participatory methods, and reframing “WISE” as an ethic of empowerment, the project redefines global health intervention. Where traditional models operate through extraction and external authority, WISE Woman builds through co-creation and mutual accountability. It transforms critique into a praxis of unlearning colonial habits of knowing and doing. To make development wise is to make it reflexive, inclusive, and grounded in the wisdom of those it seeks to serve. Solidarity begins not with sameness but with mutual recognition of difference. In that spirit, the WISE Woman Project stands as an invitation to imagine development as a collaborative space where knowledge flows from the ground up and women’s collective insight becomes the foundation of change.