ABSTRACT
Highlighting innovations from low-income countries is only the beginning of a decolonization process in healthcare innovation because the logic underpinning it is still that the mainstream episteme is a Western episteme. Decolonization, in its deepest sense, requires a fundamental questioning of power, language, history, lenses used, and voices heard. It is about how things are read as well as what is being read. It is about who is in control of the enunciation of knowledge, being conscious of power relationships, acknowledge and address colonial pasts, be open to, and invite new knowledge and expressions of knowledge. This chapter looks at Eurocentrism and its epistemological dominance; modernity and how it is complicit with violence around the world; the Western university’s negation of other ways of knowing; and the legitimized subjugation of the other. We will begin to see that decolonization of global health innovation begins with thinking about access and diversity but ends with a fundamental levelling of ways of knowing.
