LGBTI Livelihoods Project
Even where human rights are expanding, low-income LGBTI people are often left behind. They have high rates of food insecurity, employment discrimination, poverty, and health challenges, and these inequalities have been magnified by the COVID pandemic. Unfortunately, we still know much more about those problems than we do about the solutions.
How can we increase opportunities for higher incomes, more education, and access to jobs? Inclusive public policies help, like nondiscrimination laws and decriminalization, but we need more strategies for improving people’s lives and livelihoods.
The LGBTI Livelihoods Project is a new effort to build ideas and knowledge about how LGBTI people can gain economic power and better lives. One path involves inclusive development projects that provide valuable skills and resources in the hands of LGBT people to improve their standard of living and to become empowered and respected in their communities and families. Another pathway might focus on creating innovative funding mechanisms to support social enterprises and LGBTI entrepreneurs.
The LGBTI movement is a resourceful one, and at least some LGBTI organizations are starting to use these strategies for change. Three colleagues and I recently collected data on projects that seek to improve the livelihoods and economic power of LGBTI people, and we found 59 projects in 23 countries. Most of them have been created by LGBTI people and organizations from the grassroots, not by top-down efforts of development agencies. These projects help LGBTI people build new vocational skills, provide support with finding a job, use microfinance loans to start small businesses, and learn to start or grow a business (including through impact investing).
You can download the working paper here: Identifying Effective Strategies to Improve Livelihoods of LGBTI People.
Sign up here to join us for a presentation of this research on March 3, 2022, at 9 am EST.
For more on this project, see my commentary in The Advocate: “Who is Fighting the Economic Oppression of LGBTQI+ People?”