In this contribution we reflect on our experiences with oral storytelling as a practice of ‘doing decolonial development’. In our “Oral literature for Development”-project (Oral Literature for Development’ (OL4D)) we reposition oral literature from object of study to epistemological model. Rather than treating oral narratives as secondary cultural artifacts, we approach them as performative knowledge practices that articulate understandings of crisis situations – as these are often resolved in the course of the narrative. 

Our VLIRUOS Team project brings together scholars from Kenya, Ethiopia and Belgium to develop the OL4D approach as a method for (re-)connecting young people with living traditions of oral literature, particularly in contexts where formal education and technocratic development paradigms have marginalized these forms. 

Through theatre performances, community and school workshops, and collaborative analyses of genres in Gikuyu, Swahili, Digo, and Oromo, we explore how performative learning enables youth to negotiate gendered crisis, exclusion, poverty, disease, and ecological change through historically grounded narrative frameworks from their own past. 

By building interinstitutional South–South–North partnerships and co-developing educational tools, the OL4D project challenges dominant disciplinary hierarchies and encourages oral epistemologies as an entry into academia and development knowledge as generative sources of insight for development and scholarly inquiry.