INEE Statement on Anti-Racism and Racial Equity

The INEE Secretariat commits to addressing racial inequity, power imbalance, and lack of diverse representation in our staffing and network spaces and to redoubling our efforts to pursue our existing Strategic Priority 4: to strengthen and diversify INEE membership.

Racial prejudice, discrimination, and violence exist around the world in our communities, our laws, and our institutions. While it is uncomfortable for many of us to admit, the international humanitarian aid community is not exempt from this reality. We, the INEE Secretariat, want to speak up about these problems in our field and commit to being part of the solutions, beginning with addressing our own failings.

We recognize and acknowledge that we are a part of a global humanitarian system that, while holding good intentions for the world’s most vulnerable, is implicitly colonial in nature. Because of this, the INEE Secretariat acknowledges the ways in which we reinforce and perpetuate white supremacy culture and institutional racism through some of our structures and actions. It is essential that we face these flaws in our systems – and ourselves – head-on and take steps, to dismantle these structures and take more inclusive and racially responsive actions to advance our mission of ensuring the right to a quality, safe, and relevant education for all who live in emergency and crisis contexts. 

To this end, INEE commits to addressing racial inequity, power imbalance, and lack of diverse representation in our staffing and network spaces and to redoubling our efforts to pursue our existing Strategic Priority 4: to strengthen and diversify INEE membership.

The INEE Secretariat commits to:  

1. Work with INEE’s hosting agencies to affect change in hiring practices with the aim of changing the composition of the INEE Secretariat to reflect the diverse contexts we support and the membership we serve.  
2. Develop modalities for diverse representation on INEE’s governing body, the INEE Steering Group, by changing selection criteria to ensure effective representation that reflects the diversity of our membership.
3. Redefine, expand, and improve diversified representation in existing and future INEE network spaces, in both purpose and participation.
4. Support the primacy of the voices of the affected populations in all our work and, specifically, support the localisation agenda to redress power imbalances by empowering national education actors and affected populations.
5. Make our events open and accessible by expanding our invitation practices, ensuring events are multilingual or that parallel events are available in several languages, and including opportunities for participants to speak.
6. Address our own inherent bias and build our capacity to lead in the EiE sector by participating in anti-racism and equity training.
7. Engage with our host agencies’ and members’ emerging anti-racism forums.
8. Review existing and developing all new INEE resources with an anti-racism and racial equity lens.
9. Support our members to address anti-racism and equity in EiE programming.
10. Report to the INEE membership regularly (annually at a minimum) on the progress we make on our commitments.

We recognize we have work to do. We will set out further commitments and actions as our work on equity and anti-racism progresses, and we will regularly report on the progress we make, understanding that this will be an ongoing process. As with all of our work, we welcome input, support, and guidance from our members as we take this necessary work forward. If you would like to send us your thoughts or feedback, or simply would like to share your experience with racism and discrimination in the humanitarian sector, we urge you to reach out to us via [email protected].