Minding the Gap: Collecting Data on Diversity in the Development and Humanitarian Sector

Overview

For many organizations in the United States, attention to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) increased exponentially after the brutal killing of George Floyd in the summer of 2020 and the massive racial justice mobilization that followed. It was equally visible in international development and humanitarian organizations, a  sector that also grapples with legacies of systemic racism and colonial attitudes.  Many issued statements condemning the violence, pledged to support changes within and embarked on increasingly tangible pursuits of greater organizational diversity, equity, and inclusion.

However, there have been few concrete efforts at the sectoral level to document the extent of the DEI challenge. For years, a lack of public, sector-wide data on diversity hid the pervasiveness of the problem and thus limited the extent to which individual organizations addressed it.