Evidence-based insights to shift norms, values , practices, and behaviours that create and sustain everyday forms of inequality, social injustice and rights-based exclusions.
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Informing and evaluating public, private, and civil society sector policies, strategies, and programmes aimed at transformative change.
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Bringing local voices and viewpoints to development narratives and practices of decolonisation.
Nomthunzi Mashalaba: 6 Moments of a Life Referenced
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Putting decision-makers in touch with local voices, perspectives, and lived realties that algorithms and big data can neither hear, see, nor understand.
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Contextually relevant, culturally resonant, localised.
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Research focus areas
what we do
EthnoEquity generates evidence-based insights that uncover the myriad ways in which knowledge, attitudes, practices, and behaviours that perpetuate local and global inequality are woven into the ordinariness of everyday life.
Shedding light on how this ordinariness is normalised and institutionalised across all sectors of society, including through blindspots, cultural biases, and established wisdom is a core focus.
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We do this by centring the perspectives and voices of the social actors that are directly involved in the day-to-day interactions and encounters that create and sustain unequal power dynamics. This deepens decision-makers' understandings of how inequality and exclusion actually operates within institutional, organisational, and community contexts.
We are skilled in ethnographic, qualitative, survey, and mixed methods.
EthnoEquity offers decision-makers a unique vantage point for seeing the everyday dimensions of inequality and social injustice through the eyes and lived experiences of directly affected local actors, allies, and other stakeholders.
Senzeni Marasela: Covering Sarah
In 'Covering Sarah' (above), the artist depicts herself and her mother exposing and redressing the traumatic history of Sarah Baartman, the Khoisan woman who was exhibited as a curiosity in Europe. Its references to past [and present] forms of sexual and gender-based violence, harassment, and discrimination at intersections of race and other lines of difference are unmistakeable. It also makes the point that uncovering gender and diversity related inequality in all its guises is imperative if its wounds are to be dressed, healed, and transformed. To do this , specialised ways of looking that see its ordinary everyday facets - often hidden in plain sight and missed by cultural outsiders - are vital. This is at the heart of the research that EthnoEquity does.
Focus Areas and Project Experience
The focus areas that we have worked in include:
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Gender-based violence
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Discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation
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Models and practices of African philanthropy and international development aid
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Black economic empowerment
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Women's economic empowerment
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Financial inclusion for marginalised communities
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Social and behaviour change communication for HIV and AIDS prevention, sexual and reproductive health and rights, and anti-homophobia campaigns
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Corruption in public sector institutions
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Local government capacity
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Consumer culture
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Diversity marketing
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Our most recent project involves research, documenting, and learning for an internationally funded pilot programme on community engagement and civic participation in South Africa's public accountability processes and platforms.
who we are
EthnoEquity is a social impact research consultancy that is committed to eradicating inequality and social injustice within all spheres of society.
We focus on the socio-economic and cultural aspects of this inequality. This entails uncovering the norms and values that drive it, and the knowledge, attitudes, practices, and behaviours that normalize, routinize, and institutionalize it within the humdrum of regular life.
Our work pays particular attention to the intersectional dimensions of inequality, examining unfair discrimination on a range of diversity related grounds, including gender, sexual orientation, race, socio-economic status, citizenship, and stigmatized health conditions.
Ethnography, anthropology's signature descriptive method, and ,
a specialized mode of interpretive analysis that uncovers novel insights that are not obvious to the untrained eye, are among EthnoEquity's core skills.
Name and Logo
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‘Ethno’ from the Greek word ethnos - meaning the study of people and human connection across cultural and social difference.
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‘Equity’ deriving from the Latin word aequitat – meaning treatment that is fair, equal, and free from bias.
The name 'EthnoEquity'
The EthnoEquity logo:
Inspired by Africa's many-faced and many-headed ceremonial masks, the EthnoEquity logo is a reference to the many faces, shapes, and forms that gender and diversity related inequality has, not least when it intersects with exclusions along multiple lines of difference.
The EthnoEquity logo also pays respects to the mask as a symbol of vision, especially ways of looking that see from the inside out. For instance, among the Lega people of the DRC, the many-headed mask is historically associated with an inner eye and the knowledge, insight, and wisdom that is acquired through life-long processes of learning.
Philosophy and Guiding Principles
EthnoEquity is not in the business of 'extracting' data from the people who we expect to answer our questions and participate in our research. Rather, we strive to practice our craft in ways that do not undermine the knowledge and authority of research participants. Our reflexive skills, honed through academic training and extensive applied research, are instrumental in helping us to do this. Together with our expertise in sense-making, this is part of the toolkit that we use to manage researcher bias and its distorting effects on facts, findings, and evidence. Our analysis and reporting is thus less likely to be skewed through our own cultural prejudices and assumptions. This is critical for integrity in research.
Impetus for EthnoEquity
Credit: Ashraf Hendricks (September 2019)
​Aware that much of the existing data, including various inequality indices, provide insufficient insight into the socio-cultural complexities, nuances, and invisible barriers that hinder transformative change
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Frustrated by the fact that crucial beyond-the-surface insights are often missed by normative ways of looking and listening that reflect the very status quos and prejudices that shape inequality
Inspired by innovative forms of local and global activism and solidarity that constantly find ways to push against injustice and hold space for the marginalised
EthnoEquity comes forward at a critical time with crucial expertise to inform, evaluate, and document processes and practices of change.
How we work
Depending on the scope and nature of the work, EthnoEquity collaborates with other organisations, agencies, consultants, and stakeholders throughout the project design, implementation, and dissemination phases.
Our work ethic emphasises co-creation and exchanges of knowledge and learning. As far as possible, we design and produce texts, visual materials, and other products with research participants, valuing them as voices of authority on the issue being examined, and essential in decision-making that impacts them.
EthnoEquity works with experienced field researchers who are familiar with local contexts, cultures, and languages. Among them are field researchers that EthnoEquity's founder and head of research, Veronica Sigamoney, has mentored and trained over the years. On occasion, EthnoEquity also creates space for postgraduate students to apply and further develop their research skills in projects that align with their areas of specialisation. This contributes to knowledge sharing and capacity strengthening.
Founder and Head of Research
Veronica Sigamoney
Veronica Sigamoney is EthnoEquity's founder, resident anthropologist, and research specialist. With long time exposure to academia, notably in the fields of anthropology and gender studies, and applied research experience that spans more than a 20-year period, Veronica thinks of herself as a 'pracademic'.
Veronica's research has explored wide ranging social phenomena; most recently undertaking research, documenting, and learning for an internationally funded project that explores community participation and active citizenship in public accountability platforms in South Africa.
She has also contributed to the research scholarship on gender and diversity related discrimination, sexual and gender-based violence, the social aspects of HIV and AIDS, the cultural dimensions of language and communication in social and behaviour change messaging, and models and practices of solidarity-based philanthropy and development funding.
Veronica's writing has also been published in the popular press.
approach + methods
Through expert application of the approach, EthnoEquity uncovers the meanings that diverse social actors attach to behaviour, social interactions, and encounters, generating the kind of people-centered insights that are crucial for interventions aimed at behaviour change as well as broader social and culture change.
EthnoEquity uses a wide range of that are designed to generate
The ethnographic method is our hallmark.
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Blessing Ngobeni: Blind Eyes
Sense-making
For people-centered insights
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Sense-making is exactly what it sounds like - an interpretive approach for understanding how diverse social actors make sense of what they - and others - say, do, and see. This goes a long way towards uncovering the meanings that they attach to behaviour, social interactions, and various other encounters with people as well as things. In turn, the norms and values that drive these meanings become evident, as do the cultures of violence and inequality that these norms and values create and sustain across a range of identity and diversity variables. With access to such insights, decision-makers are able to better see and understand the problem, gap, or need, from the point of view of those whose lived realities they seek to intervene in.
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Cutting through biases
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In centering these points of view, sense-making therefore acts as a check on the biases and assumptions of the untrained eye. This minimises the assumptions, blindspots, and distortions that occur when change agents and external observers filter what they see and hear through their own cultural lenses and frames of reference.
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Policies, strategies, and programmes aimed at transformation, localisation, and development may well be self-defeating if - as an unintended consequence - they reflect and perpetuate the unconscious biases and hidden prejudices that reference the very inequalities they seek to change.
Thick data
'Thick data' draws from what anthropologists call, 'thick description'. Made popular by the renowned anthropologist Clifford Geertz, it tells us WHY something is happening in CONTEXT. This puts WHAT is happening at SCALE into perspective. How does thick data do this? By telling context specific stories about complex social phenomena that are thick with detail, nuance, and texture, notably stories that bring to light the worldviews and lived realities of the diverse social actors within those contexts, along with the meanings that they attach to human behaviours, practices, and relations. Thick data is therefore essential to an analytics of understanding. It is also a powerful medium for rich insight into how to disrupt norms, values, and technologies that enable the continuation of harm. It is not easy to quantify. Yet, without it, the numbers, regardless of how robust and representative, can only offer 'thin' measures of problems such as gender-and-diversity-based inequality.
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EthnoEquity's research is anchored in methods that, separately, or in combination, support the generation of thick data. We make use of a wide range of qualitative methods. We are also skilled in the use of mixed methods that incorporate both qualitative and quantitative components. With mixed methods, qualitative data gives context and meaning to numeric patterns and generic measures generated by surveys and other big data instruments, and quantitative indicators help to link human stories to what is happening at scale. Ethnography, birthplace of thick data, and our hallmark method, is unparalleled in providing the kind of deep immersive insights that can only emerge through insitu observation and other ethnographic techniques. This method, especially important since what social actors say they do isn't always what they actually do, gets up close and personal with the lived realities of others. In so doing, it not only sheds light on the everyday ways in which phenomena such as gender-based violence manifest in words and action, it uncovers what these words and actions mean to those that enact, witness, and/ or experience them. A key benefit is that insights that address the WHY question, and that may otherwise remain hidden, overlooked, and unknown, become evident.
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Qualitative, mixed, and ethnographic methods
Data collection techniques include:
Skilled at adapting these techniques, EthnoEquity tailors them to best suit project specific contexts, constraints, and requirements. In several of the projects that Veronica has designed, this has contributed to the development of innovative tools and materials that have produced cutting-edge insights, not least on difficult topics and hard to engage populations.
Observation and documenting
Indepth interviews, key informant interviews, diary research, life histories
Textual and content analysis
Ernest Mancoba: Untitled
Focus groups
Case studies
Photovoice and photo-elicitation
Surveys
Document/ literature reviews
Archival research
How might the design and implementation of policies, strategies, and programmes be better informed by the perspectives of the culturally and socially diverse people whose lives they are intended to impact?
When thick data meets sense-making
CONTACT
47 Bath Ave, Rosebank, Johannesburg, 2196
+27 (0)82 3766 924
ETHNOEQUITY RESEARCH INSIGHTS