Listening Better to Reach Inclusion: Beyond age, disability and gender
Humanitarian organizations can’t deploy without data. Yet approaches to data often increase the visibility of those already included, and entrench the invisibility of those who aren’t – often a significant proportion of the affected population. Even when organizations recognize the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion at work, they don’t always have the practical tools and resources to act on it. Looking at challenges in operationalizing inclusion across programming, Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability and Learning (MEAL) and advocacy, this session brings perspectives on various forms of marginalization to discuss how organizations can ask: what don’t we know, and who aren’t we seeing?
Speakers
- Emily Elderfield, CLEAR Global: Emily Elderfield is Advocacy Officer at CLEAR Global, formerly known as Translators without Borders, which works to ensure people can get information and make themselves heard, whatever their language. This work has included projects supporting language awareness and inclusion of marginalized language speakers in humanitarian action in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Somalia and Ukraine.
- Claire Thomas, Minority Rights Group: Claire Thomas is Co-Executive Director of Minority Rights Group. She initiated and oversaw an innovative methodology to assess whether exclusion linked to minority clan status took place in Somalia and if so, the exact degree and nature of its impacts. The study was funded by the Swiss MFA. The study is widely credited with focusing attention on continuing minority exclusion in Somalia and prompted many agencies to review their policies and procedures.
- Ibrahim Hassan, MCAN: Ibrahim Hassan is CEO of the Marginalised Community Advocacy Network (MCAN). He is an active and vocal spokesperson for minority communities at risk of marginalization in Somalia. He oversaw MCAN’s participation in a ground breaking minority inclusion study which documented the continuing impact of minority exclusion. Since 2022, he has been a full member of the Humanitarian Country Team and has raised issues of discrimination and exclusion that impact on ethnic and linguistic minority communities in Somalia regularly.
- Mirianna Budimir, Practical Action: Dr Mirianna Budimir is the Senior Climate and Resilience Expert at Practical Action, an international non-profit organization working in Latin America, Africa, and South Asia. Mirianna is part of the team that conceptualized and applied Practical Action’s Missing Voices Approach, which aims to capture first-person perspectives of marginalized people in order to inform disaster risk management.
The event will take place in English and be accessible to wheelchair users. This event is being organized as part of Humanitarian Networks Partnership Week, who is in charge of registration and some of the other logistics.
