Like so many international development professionals, Tom Wein, a director at IDinsight, was drawn to the work because he wanted to help people.
“But I very quickly came to find that, while some of that work was a lot more fulfilling, certainly there were projects where it felt deeply unsatisfying, like it wasn’t doing any good,” said Wein, who is based in Nairobi, Kenya.
Over time, he discovered that it was respect for dignity — or in other words, the recognition that all people hold equal value — that made the difference.
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With some notable exceptions, global development organizations rarely prioritize respect for dignity. IDinsight, which helps governments, NGOs, and foundations maximize their social impact using data and evidence, on Monday announced its new dignity initiative, which Wein will lead. It aims to equip global development leaders with tools both to measure to what extent they are affirming people’s dignity and to make their interactions more respectful.
While it is in its early stages, the initiative could bring powerful convening power to calls for a re-imagining of aid that centers dignity and respect.
In 2018, Wein launched the Dignity Project. He worked to make the philosophical literature on dignity more accessible to global development leaders, conducted a range of studies to build up a body of evidence on what more respectful international development looks like, and created open-access tools to help organizations measure the extent to which they are treating people with respect for dignity.
Ruth Levine, the CEO at IDinsight, had followed Wein’s work on Twitter.
“I was really interested in the dignity framing and really impressed that one human being could sort of, by dint of his intellectual force, really be starting an interesting conversation,” she said.
Levine said IDinsight was interested in building on work it had done in partnership with GiveWell to incorporate the preferences of program participants into funding decisions, based on a survey of people living in poverty in Kenya and Ghana.
Wein joined IDinsight last month, and he is in the process of building tools to help organizations ensure their programs respect the people they serve.
Examples include a dignity audit, using interviews and process evaluation techniques to help organizations go through all of their interactions to identify pathways to being more respectful. Wein is also borrowing techniques from so-called human-centered design to ensure the full participation of people who ought to be in charge of how these programs are delivered. Finally, efforts are underway on a survey that allows people to share — on a scale from “Strongly disagree” to “Strongly agree” — whether they have been treated with dignity in receiving aid.
The new dignity initiative will be identifying organizations that are committed to measuring the respectfulness of their programs — including how choice, equality, and representation play into the way they are delivering services — and building a culture of dignity.
IDinsight will also be examining how it respects the people it serves, to ensure that it sets a positive example as it works to progress the dignity agenda.
“Ultimately, that promise to the people development is supposed to serve has to be arbitrated, it has to be judged, by those people,” Wein said. “Development is rife with good intentions, but we have to ensure all the work we’re doing is yielding the hoped-for results.”
Wein is by no means the first person to call for dignity as a central value in international development.
In fact, he has organized some of the leading thinkers on dignity in development in a working group called the Dignity Collective, which he plans to continue growing in his new role at IDinsight.
“It would be meaningful if international development organizations were asked: ‘What are you doing to ensure that dignity is respected?’”
Diana Skelton, head of mission, ATD Fourth WorldMembers include Jonathan Glennie, the author of “The Future of Aid: Global Public Investment”; Neela Saldanha, the executive director at the Yale Research Initiative on Innovation and Scale; and 'Dapo Oyewole, a co-editor of “Development as Dignity.”
“Conventional development approaches are so dehumanizing,” said Alicia Ely Yamin, a senior fellow at Harvard Law School, senior adviser on human rights at Partners In Health, and member of the Dignity Collective.
The voices of people who are most affected by this work are “completely invisible and marginalized,” she continued.
While the measurement tools that the new dignity initiative is developing may allow international development organizations to reflect on their actions and make some changes, “the root causes of those violations of dignity are structural,” Yamin said.
“It’s a valuable undertaking to develop these tools,” she said. “But I also think awareness-raising, and tools in a vacuum, may not have their intended consequences.”
Wein agreed that structural change is needed, but suggested improvement is impossible without measurement.
“We see an opportunity for all types of development actors to start adopting a commitment to dignity, to translate that into a culture of dignity, and to add to that measurement to ensure these hopes for changes are being enacted,” he said.
The COVID-19 pandemic has led the international development sector to not just talk about the need to shift power, but also to make real changes, Wein maintained.
The Dignity Collective includes leaders who are working to deliver programs in a dignified way, measure whether they are succeeding, and build greater respect into their interactions.
For example, GiveDirectly is an organization that allows donors to send money directly to people in extreme poverty. Studies have shown that cash transfers increase feelings of autonomy and respect, as compared with other development interventions. Still, the organization is seeking to improve its services based on input from the people it aims to serve.
GiveDirectly currently provides $1,000 cash transfers in two lump sums over the course of 12 months, said Caroline Teti, director of recipient advocacy at GiveDirectly and a member of the Dignity Collective.
Now, she is collaborating with colleagues on GiveDirectly’s research team to explore whether that timing works for recipients.
Many global development organizations talk about the importance of understanding what people want, but “most of the time, that remains on paper, or is lip service, and is rarely implemented,” said Miriam Laker-Oketta, director of research at GiveDirectly.
Both Teti and Laker-Oketta said they hope to see NGOs go beyond making changes within their own operations and invest in advocacy, so that host governments can mainstream respect for dignity into policy.
Another example is ATD Fourth World, whose name stands for “All Together in Dignity.” It takes an approach of “inclusive participation” in its work to end poverty.
“Dignity is at the center of the projects we run,” said Diana Skelton, head of mission at ATD Fourth World. “We want relationships built on equality, so people don’t think, ‘I’m dependent, and therefore I’m not going to speak my mind.’”
Skelton, who is also a member of the Dignity Collective, said she doesn't want to see “dignity” become another empty buzzword in international development.
“But I don’t think we’re anywhere near that yet,” she said.
She mentioned “sustainability” as a useful parallel, because while it has become a buzzword, organizations still have to be prepared to talk about their sustainability.
“It would be meaningful if international development organizations were asked: ‘What are you doing to ensure that dignity is respected?’” she said.