6 June 2026, This story was originally published by The New Humanitarian.
In the pursuit of diagnosing what’s wrong with humanitarian storytelling, the Decolonise How? podcast has named extractive narratives, critiqued the politics of pity, and exposed how suffering is simplified, decontextualised, and even sometimes commodified.
But there’s a harder question: What does it actually take to change how crises are spoken about in newsrooms and humanitarian organisations? How do you build systems and processes that centre impacted communities?
“Really, what we’re talking about is about acknowledging power and making efforts to undermine existing power structures,” Jess Crombie, a leading voice in ethical humanitarian storytelling, tells host Patrick Gathara on the latest episode. “The bigger stuff around narrative, and the recognition of the impact that narrative has in the world, that is not being tackled as it should be.”
Nearly a decade ago, Crombie’s research, The People in the Pictures, was the first major study to actually go back and ask people featured in humanitarian communications what they thought about how their stories were told.
In response, she developed a contributor-centred storytelling methodology, which recognises that there are three sets of people involved in storytelling processes: the makers, the communicators, and those with lived experience. The methodology allows “each group to have equal amounts of say in how the story is told and what story is told,” Crombie explains.
Chika Oduah, a journalist, editor, and founder of Zikora Media & Arts, says this methodology “turns on the head this colonial legacy that journalism is still rooted in, and the way we practice journalism”. Mainstream journalism being dictated by the Western world exposes a power imbalance, Oduah believes. “I know that a lot of journalists from the Global North or higher-income economies like to pretend it doesn’t exist, but it does exist,” she says. “It’s very much there.”
In this episode of the podcast, Oduah and Crombie discuss the legacy of colonialism on storytelling. “It affects everything we do as journalists,” Oduah says. “I really feel like we need to flip this on its head. And the way to do that is to have these sometimes uncomfortable conversations.”
Crombie says her life is full of such conversations. “One of the reasons that a lot of the people in the humanitarian sector in the UK and the US and Europe who I work with are comfortable with working with me is partly because I’m a white woman from Britain,” she says. “And so, they can admit these uncomfortable things they’re thinking about to me in a way that they might not want to to someone else.”
What she comes up against a lot when she works with journalists “is people saying: oh, but if you work in this way, it won’t be accurate”, Crombie explains: The idea of accuracy and integrity have become intertwined. “I think you can have integrity in your storytelling, and you can be accurate in your storytelling, but you can also be doing that by listening, as well as telling,” she says.
Oduah walked away from mainstream outlets “after just being fed up”, and set up Zikora Media & Arts with a mission to “Africanise” journalism by writing a new code of ethics: “I saw that I need to be part of being a solution.” As Africans, or as Global South storytellers, “we need the boldness and the self-awareness,” Oduah believes. “We have to fuel the space. We have to really saturate the space with our desires, our needs.”
Guests: Jess Crombie, researcher, scholar, and consultant for the development and humanitarian sector, and Chika Oduah, journalist, editor, and founder of Zikora Media and Arts.
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The New Humanitarian puts quality, independent journalism at the service of the millions of people affected by humanitarian crises around the world. Find out more at www.thenewhumanitarian.org.
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