Our next Humanitarian Leader paper for 2025 is ‘Colonial Financial Power: The hidden architecture of a failed promise’ by Laurence Olanrewaju Sholola Polo
In this article, Polo puts forth a new analytical framework for examining the excuses for why, despite decades of ‘localisation’, the transfer of financial power to the Global South has stalled—which he labels Colonial Financial Power (CFP). This framework explores how colonial legacies are actively perpetuated in humanitarian finance through direct coercive control, bureaucratic exclusion, an architecture of inequality and the production of narratives that legitimise domination.
"This paper challenges leaders to stop fixing the symptoms of a broken localisation agenda and start diagnosing the disease: Colonial Financial Power. It provides a new analytical framework to understand financial barriers not as isolated technical problems, but as deliberate features of a system designed to maintain control. This demands moving beyond procedural tinkering to confronting the ideological roots of financial inequality, enabling leaders to shift the conversation from "capacity" to "control" and begin the necessary work of redesigning humanitarian finance based on trust and sovereignty, not suspicion."
By reinterpreting financial barriers through this lens, Polo’s paper offers leaders a new language to diagnose the problem, challenge the status quo, and forge a path toward a genuinely decolonial humanitarian system.
