Nicola Banks

Catch Nicola on Do Radio: It's Not About Trees with John Lunn 22-28th December 2025.

Professor Nicola “Nikki” Banks is a development economist and social innovator focused on reshaping how the world thinks about and funds global change. As a Senior Lecturer at the Global Development Institute (University of Manchester), she has spent more than a decade researching why traditional aid models — despite vast funding — often fail to deliver lasting transformation for the communities they aim to serve.

Her work highlights the structural issues that keep power, resources, and decision-making in the hands of distant institutions rather than the people closest to the challenges — community leaders, local organisations, young changemakers. Instead of incremental fixes, Nikki advocates for a paradigm shift: development as partnership and solidarity, not charity.

Driven by this conviction, she co-founded One World Together — a new grassroots giving movement that empowers everyday people to pool small contributions into a collective resource for community-led organisations around the world. It is a practical effort to rebuild trust, shift agency, and demonstrate that locally owned solutions deliver deeper, more resilient outcomes.

Nikki is known for combining rigorous evidence with optimism grounded in action. She believes young people hold the keys to the next era of systemic change — not as future leaders, but as leaders already reshaping the narrative today.

Across her teaching, research, and venture-building, Nikki embodies a simple truth:

the answers to global challenges are already alive in communities everywhere — we just need to trust and fund them.

Show Notes

Professor Nicola Banks brings both academic rigour and activist energy to the question:

Why does so much global aid achieve so little lasting change?

She explains how the development sector has become overly professionalised and centralised — dominated by large NGOs, complex compliance requirements, and funding structures that keep power far from the communities they claim to serve. As a result, billions are spent — but agency isn’t built.

Nicola describes a more hopeful path emerging: localisation — shifting resources, trust, and accountability to locally rooted organisations that understand the realities of their communities. This includes new models of solidarity funding like her initiative One World Together, which empowers everyday people to pool micro-donations and directly fuel community-led solutions.

She warns that we are in a pivotal moment. Public trust in foreign aid is falling. Government development budgets are shrinking. The old model isn’t coming back. But within this uncertainty is opportunity — to redesign systems that belong to the people they serve.

And crucially, Nicola sees young people as the accelerators of a better future — not just future leaders, but today’s innovators.

This is a grounded, energising conversation about power, participation, and how to shift from “doing development to people” toward creating change with them.