Center for Values in International Development

Please take a look at the latest blog on our website, at https://lnkd.in/ex76V9Rf

Today is the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia, and Biphobia. As the only American-based nonprofit international development organization that was started and is led by a transgender woman, we remind all readers that while it is very important - indeed necessary - to advocate strongly against discrimination and persecution of marginalized persons including but not limited to LGBTQI persons, it is every bit as important to stand in solidarity with and advocate for expanding the opportunities, participation, and respect for all who are marginalized. C4V has encountered a remarkable dearth of any obvious solidarity and support from colleagues among international development donors, philanthropies, INGOs, and practitioners over our 4 years. It hasn't been for a lack of outreach and intensive marketing. We continue to struggle to achieve sustainability and traction as unique advocates for universal human dignity and the significance of applied ethics - but it keeps feeling like it should not be this hard. As LGBTQI people have exemplified consistently over many years, we are resilient. C4V will continue to push forward as long as we can. But some more tangible solidarity would help!

Having had the distinct pleasure to hear this remarkable thinker and eloquent commentator speak at Yale University on the state of international development (and international relations) as it affects public health policy, programming, and results, C4V strongly endorses the upcoming Summer Institute that he will be leading (online). Participating in it would be an excellent investment for anyone who is concerned about the direction of public health globally, the essential need to orient ourselves to core values such as the recognition and respect of universal, equal human dignity, and how much (overdue) thinking we in the Global North need to do about localization and locally-led development.

The Center for Values in International Development (C4V) is pleased to call your attention to Madhukar Pai and his outstanding keynote address “Building Equity in Global Health: The Role for Global North Actors”, which he delivered recently at the Yale Institute for Global Health Symposium. To C4V as development ethicists, his talk exemplifies the power and importance of moral and ethical messaging in addressing needed reforms in foreign aid and international development, and what he presented has a great deal to do with how the major practitioner institutions of development and humanitarian response ought to be situating themselves to be leading allies to the Global South in this work. Given his audience at Yale University, his pitch centers on academia, but it takes very little shifting for development practitioners, researchers, development policy makers, funders and philanthropies, all to see the direct relevance in his argument. To meet priority moral and ethical goals in the framing of development work in the Global South, the changes that need to happen are systemic and profound – and of a fundamentally different nature than what you see in the advocacy of groups such as Unlock USAID. As the Global South becomes more vocal and demanding in the context of localization, appropriate change will have to happen. Whether those in the existing Global North development industry are allies in that change, or reluctant (or even obstructive) gatekeepers in that process has everything to do with seeing and properly responding to the moral assertions contained in Dr. Pai’s talk. C4V is comforted to note how much we have been pushing a similar message, albeit without matching Dr. Pai’s clarity, brevity, and eloquence. Building equity and advocating for an elevated focus on human dignity, human rights, and social justice is what C4V is all about, and creating the institutional receptivity among both the leadership and the rank and file to move in that direction is what our work in values mapping seeks to facilitate.

C4V is pleased to announce that our president, Chloe Schwenke, will serve as plenary speaker at the opening of the SAIS Global Women in Leadership Annual Conference on April 5th at 2pm. All are welcome to register and attend.

The C4V just successfully completed a weeklong training in Washington DC of USAID staff from Missions in Laos, Kenya, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as well as from here in Washington. This was the first training USAID has ever held on development ethics (which is NOT the same as ethics of compliance). In the time that we had, we dove deep into the moral, ethical, and dignity dimensions of Artificial Intelligence and localization, and why the cultivation of moral discernment and judgement are so important in these contexts. The enthusiasm and strong engagement of the trainees made this pilot training week so special - and we have reason to believe that this won't be the last such development ethics training carried out by the C4V. C4V trainers Lori Keleher (philosopher) and Chloe Schwenke (ethicist) carried the week, which also featured the release of a new video from the C4V (with help from our subcontractors DMV productions), and an amazing interactive dashboard generated using AI (with help from our other subcontractor, DevelopMetrics), to allow us to explore how deeply USAID's core values have left their footprint in the Development Experience Clearinghouse's treasure trove of project documents from the past 70 years (the finding - not deep at all 😯). Special thanks to USAID Counselor Clinton White and Senior Advisor Tina Balin, who made all of this possible.