Dozens of international development and humanitarian organizations who signed onto an anti-racism declaration by Cooperation Canada earlier this year are lagging in their efforts to fight discrimination, according to a recently released survey by the humanitarian sector advocate. 

“Currently, there is a widespread lack of coherent, accountable and specifically anti-racist efforts across signatory organizations,” reads Cooperation Canada’s report. It surveyed 70 organizations who signed onto its 2021 Anti Racist Framework, a declaration calling on the international development and humanitarian organizations to track racial disparities in their hiring, advocacy practices, and programming. 

Cooperation Canada decided in 2020 to investigate exactly how its members perpetuate racism, especially given Canada’s own colonial history of land theft and cultural genocide. But it also decided to investigate how member organizations could craft their own anti-racism policies to actively resist — rather than simply acknowledge — colonial practices. Their findings suggest that Canadian humanitarian organizations have a long way to go before they can claim to be actively anti-racist. 

“What was most interesting to me was seeing that though a lot of organizations were starting to do this work, there wasn’t a clear end point, there wasn’t a coherent strategy,” Tiyahna Ridley-Padmore told Future of Good in an interview. Ridley-Padmore is a policy advisor at World Vision Canada and co-led the task force that wrote the report, along with Musu Taylor-Lewis, director of resources and public engagement at Canadian Foodgrains Bank. 

The report further analyzes survey responses and makes recommendations in three key areas: organizations’ internal anti-racism practices, their external communications, and their program design.  

A need to look inward

The report (and Cooperation Canada’s Anti Racist Framework, signed by all survey participants) emphasizes the importance of collecting race-based data about an organization’s board members, staff, and volunteers. “If we ignore, for example, the race, gender, age, nationality or ability of employees, we cannot begin to address the ways in which employees experience the workplace unequally,” reads a passage from Cooperation Canada’s framework. Just over a quarter of survey respondents reported collecting race-based data about employees in staff and volunteers, while just under 40 percent say they do so for members of their board. “Several respondents noted that they do not formally collect race-based data, but they do keep track of racial diversity within their organizations,” the survey says. 

When it comes to parsing race-based data about pay, Cooperation Canada’s findings were abysmal. “Furthermore, only 1 percent of those surveyed reported collecting and analyzing salary data disaggregated by race, and only 3 percent reported collecting and analyzing promotion and retention trends among staff disaggregated by race,” read a passage from the survey’s results. 

Another aspect of equitable employment is fair hiring. There appears to be a disconnect among Cooperation Canada’s survey respondents between the equity training staff receive and an organization’s formal hiring practices. According to the survey, 84 percent of respondents did not have explicit references to anti-racist principles in their hiring policies and practices, but 51 percent said hiring managers had completed anti-oppression training. “In other words, roughly half of respondents have hiring staff trained in anti-racism yet most organizations do not have hiring policies in place to reduce racial bias,” the survey found. 

It seems many of Cooperation Canada’s survey respondents care about equity: the survey found 84 percent of organizations have staff or volunteers who participate in DEI or anti-racism working groups of some kind, either within or outside their doors. Much of this participation, however, appears to be optional. Just 20 percent of survey respondents said anti-racism training for leadership positions is mandatory, and only one respondent told Cooperation Canada they only hire candidates who already have anti-racism training or values. 

Formal accountability structures for many of these organizations also appear to be lacking. 71 percent of Cooperation Canada’s survey respondents admitted they don’t have mechanisms to receive confidential feedback on their organization’s anti-racist practices, although there may be some confusion over the scope of the questions. “A large number of respondents answering in the negative noted that they had mechanisms for general discrimination but were not specific to racial discrimination,” the survey found. “Other respondents with general anti-discrimination mechanisms may have answered yes to this question even if their mechanisms did not specifically include race, making interpretations of answers to this question difficult.” 

Ridley-Padmore and Taylor-Lewis both said it was important that the task force emphasized that organizations need to turn their anti-racism and decolonization efforts inward — and not just focus on how they’re interacting with communities. “Anti-racism work can’t be done in siloes. It requires a whole-of-organization, whole-of-sector approach. If we’re just looking at changing our external policies…without also reflecting that back inside, I don’t think we’re going to achieve the change we’re looking for,” Ridley-Padmore said.

In its list of recommendations, Cooperation Canada says humanitarian organizations need to consider a clear, coherent, and critically reflective anti-racist strategies with clear goals. “Organizations should begin by researching both the systemic and historical underpinnings of colonialism and racial injustice that permeate international cooperation as well as the leading conceptualizations of anti-racism that have emerged as a deliberate practice to counter these legacies,” the report suggests. 

White saviourism in fundraising and communications

One of the easiest ways to tell if an organization takes anti-racism seriously is its communications, marketing, and advocacy efforts. Some of the most infamous examples of colonial practices in the humanitarian sector, particularly white saviorism, shine through in fundraising material (World Vision’s early 2000s TV ads are perhaps the most blatant). According to Cooperation Canada, 80 percent of respondents admitted they did not require anti-racism training for staff or volunteers working communications, fundraising, or stakeholder relations. 

“Where respondents did report on training, it was often framed as anti-discrimination/anti-bias training rather than with a clear focus on anti-racism,” Cooperation Canada’s report says. “Further, some organizations did mention offering training in ‘intercultural sensitivity’, ‘cultural competency’, ‘ethical communication’, ‘anti-oppression’, ‘unconscious bias’, ‘feminist principles’, and ‘power, intersectionality, oppression’.” Nearly two-thirds of survey respondents said they had shared explicitly anti-racist communications in the past two years which varied from Black Lives Matter solidarity statements to “the creation of an institute on racial inequalities.” 

Embracing consistent terminology around anti-racism work is one of Cooperation Canada’s recommendations. The report notes terms such as “diversity”, “anti-discrimination”, and “inter-cultural sensitivity” were used interchangeably with “anti-racism” in survey responses. “While each of these principles can be important components of, and related to, anti-racism work, none are sufficient on their own,” the report reads. “A lack of cohesion in terminology and approach to anti-racism risks obscuring its meaning and stunting the potential for collaborative, meaningful and transformative shifts in the sector.” 

Colonial program design

Humanitarian organizations that operate in Global South countries may do so with the best of intentions, but Cooperation Canada’s report says they are still capable of ignoring the priorities and values of local populations in favour of their own (often white-centric) views. “In too many cases, unchecked power imbalances in international cooperation have enabled situations of exploitation, manipulation and abuse,” the report says. 

According to Cooperation Canada’s report, decolonizing the international aid sector “requires an intentional commitment to anti-racism that acknowledges that the global hierarchies that continue to characterize inequality in international aid are the same power imbalances that have created the conditions necessitating aid.” Yet out of 70 survey respondents, just three told Cooperation Canada that anti-racism was explicitly mentioned in their project development or monitoring practices. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, 70 percent of respondents also said that anti-racism is not part of the training they offer for staff, volunteers, or consultants who do project management of operations work, although just over half of respondents also said they’d provided this training to at least some of their personnel within the past two years. 

Ensuring that humanitarian organizations actually work with international organizations to develop anti-racist approaches is another critical recommendation in Cooperation Canada’s approach. “In-country staff, in areas where Canadian organizations are working, must be involved in determining the type and shape of interventions at every stage of program development, communications, and reporting,” the report says. 

Moving forward 

Now that the work of the task force Ridley-Padmore and Taylor-Lewis co-led is wrapped up with this report, another sub-committee — a working group, also made up of representatives from Cooperation Canada member organizations — under Cooperation Canada’s anti-racism advisory group will take over. The working group will support signatory organizations as they work to implement the reports recommendations. It’ll also share resources on anti-racism in the sector, create learning opportunities for signatories, and generally carry out its mandate of turning the reports findings and recommendations into concrete change. “I’m really holding out to see what comes out of this,” Taylor-Lewis said, “and very hopeful that there will be some concrete steps taken.”

But Taylor-Lewis and Ridley-Padmore both said they don’t see a future in which Cooperation Canada requires members to sign onto the Anti Racist Framework and report on their progress. “We didn’t want it to be a punitive or enforcement model, because then anti-racism becomes a checkbox, and that’s not what we want. We want organizations to be proactively committing to real change,” Ridley-Padmore said. 

And Taylor-Lewis said she hopes that kind of enforcement won’t even be needed. “My hope is that the signatory organizations form a critical mass of organizations that are producing a proof of concept on this approach,” Taylor-Lewis said. She said that many of the organizations that didn’t sign onto the framework refrained because they didn’t think they could commit to the change it would require, so she hopes “organizations and this hub as a whole will be able to provide a proof of concept that encourages others to sign.” 

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