The beginnings of LGBTI and development

Some of the earliest thinking of how sexual orientation and gender identity fit into international development frameworks was undertaken by the Swedish International Development Agency in the early 2000s. With the help of Andrea Cornwall and Suzy Jolly at the Institute for Development Studies, they looked at the intersection of sexuality and development and issued some groundbreaking research. Still, their approach did not focus on development outcomes of LGBT people. Rather, they looked at how the human rights of LGBT people impacted development. SIDA programs focused primarily on human rights advocacy by LGBT people in the global south.

At that time no international organization with significant global reach (at least none that I could find), aside from SIDA/IDS, was looking at issues of development and LGBTI people, and no one in international development was looking at how to track and improve human development outcomes for LGBTI people. Invariably, discussions of LGBTI people were funneled through the lens of MSM, which obscured the role of identity in creating disparities and avoided issues of human rights for LGBTI people. At the same time, while I was very enthusiastic about the goal of human right for LGBTI people, I knew it was insufficient. The anti-discrimination framework helped create the conditions for destructive identity politics, and often equality meant that LGBTI people had the right to be treated just as badly as everyone else.

I remember when I was a legal services director a distraught client called from his car parked in front of his workplace to tell me that he was going to be fired from the only job he could find, where he was facing relentless harassment. He was talking to me while lying across the car’s front seats so people would not see him cry. The last thing he needed was the opportunity to file a lawsuit. He needed a job to pay for food and rent and healthcare — good development outcomes. Even LGBTI people living in the most legally protective countries still faced unemployment, food insecurity and homelessness. Hoping that governments would embrace human rights, not just formally through laws, but through a deeper values-based caring for LGBTI people, was naive. I knew then, and still believe now, equality is not enough.

Around 2009 I started having discussions with LGBTI advocates and development agencies about development outcomes of LGBT people. At that time, heated arguments about the use of metrics in LGBTI advocacy were at their peak, and opposition to the use of metrics often shut down any discussion of data collection and outcome tracking. Many people in the international development community also felt LGBTI issues were too political. Advancement on the issue seemed to stall.

In March of 2011, in order to broaden conversation, I invited about 80 development agencies and LGBTI groups to meeting in New York. I knew that talking about potential new funding would increase attendance, so in the invitation I noted that 0.1% of annual overseas development aid could pay for all of the largest global LGBT groups for the next 100 years. I included the following questions in the invitation:

• Should we develop separate development indicators for LGBT people?

• Is development aid reaching LGBT people?

• How do you define LGBT for development purposes? (the data collection question)

I also distributed a memo entitled “That which is measured is funded: Human Development Indicators for Lesbians and Gay Men” (the memo focused on LGs because at that time there were well-tested ways to classify and track outcomes for LGs, but not so much for other groups, otherwise the meeting itself addressed all LGBT people). The memo included initial thoughts about applying the development framework, tracking outcomes, and creating a legal equality index.

PDF - That which is measured is funded: Human Development Indicators for Lesbians and Gay men

The reactions at the meeting varied from high levels of interest (particularly among people dealing with women and children’s health), to those (mostly development practitioners) that said LGBTI issues were too political, to those (mostly human rights advocates) that said tracking development outcomes would turn the LGBTI movement into a data-driven nightmare akin to the British NHS, to M&E folks that said LGBTI populations were too hard to reach, to some people who felt that the development framework was a distraction from human rights advocacy.

Over the next few years the discussions on these issue got more serious. I worked with a few development agencies to strengthen inclusion of LGBTI people and people with disabilities. I also tagged along with colleagues working with projects supporting small landholder farmers, dairy farmers, and sustainable income strategies for midwives in east Africa, as well as a number of corporate social responsibility projects. I worked closely with Claire Lucas, who was appointed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as an Advisor to USAID, to help her design and launch USAID’s global LGBTI development partnership, and eventually I moved to the Williams Institute, a premier research institution that focuses on understanding human development outcomes of LGBT people in the United States. While there I was able to do some empirical and theoretical work on the LGBTI human development framework. I also worked with economist Lee Badgett on the economic cost of exclusion, and spent time teaching at UCLA’s international development studies program.

It’s been over a decade since that meeting and the issue of development has slowly gained traction. Reflecting back, my focus on development as a funding source may have been a strategic misstep. Many people now see development solely as a way to access a new and very large pool of funding to support the same goals that international LGBTI advocates have had for years. Its clear to me this approach will fail, and the activists that follow this view will be left discouraged and sour. Development the process of first understanding someone’s lived reality and then figuring out how to improve it. Development is a different way of working, with different goals and a very different view of the role of the State. I think activists on the ground working in (not just with) local communities understand the value of this, and many have been working within this framework all along. I still continue to think that globally, an expansion from human rights to development will constitute the next wave of global LGBT activism, and that by 2030, we will see LGBTI issues incorporated into many development programs.