Our organizational strategy—MSI 2030—sets out our commitment to DEI. Our first three-year Global Diversity, Equality and Inclusion Strategy (2022-2025) is informed by conversations and insights from team members in 15 different countries.
MSI works in 36 countries across six continents, and DEI looks different in every country.
While MSI’s global DEI goals outlined in our strategy provide a solid framework, each country office has developed its own ‘DEI action plan’ to ensure that their initiatives and priorities are appropriate to their own context. A major strength of MSI’s DEI program is how it is led and driven locally, and supported globally (mirroring how we operate and deliver services).
Gender equality is a universal human right and is foundational to MSI’s mission of ‘children by choice not chance’.
As a health care provider and advocate for human rights, MSI recognizes that gender inequality impacts an individual’s needs, choices and access to health information and services. Understanding inequalities and the power relations that exist within families, communities and wider societies is essential to developing programs that increase access to services, improve reproductive health outcomes and reduce stigma.
Our commitment to gender equality is informed by the Sustainable Development Goals, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, and the International Conference on Population and Development Programme of Action.
Our commitment to gender equality is part of our broader intersectional approach to diversity and inclusion. This is based on the understanding that gender inequality intersects with other forms of discrimination that can act as barriers to healthcare, such as race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, age, marital status, disability, socio-economic status, sexual orientation, caste and social class. MSI recognizes that gender is not binary, and that rigid gender norms and hierarchies systematically privilege some groups over others.
Sexual and reproductive health and rights are key to gender equality. For more than 40 years, MSI has delivered de-medicalized, client-centered services that aim to give adults and young people choice and control over their sexual and reproductive lives. Reproductive health services based on respect and informed choice can strengthen people’s agency, challenge negative gender norms and help to improve their social and economic position. However, we acknowledge that this does not happen automatically; every aspect of service delivery and advocacy must be designed in a way that recognizes and aims to challenge the prevailing power dynamics, inequality and discrimination that exist. This is particularly important when designing programs to reach individuals who have traditionally faced significant barriers in accessing health services, such as people living in extreme poverty, adolescents, people with disabilities and sex workers.
To deliver our commitment to gender equality, MSI has established a Global Diversity, Equality and Inclusion Panel, an institutional advisory board responsible for identifying and communicating opportunities for MSI to sustain a DEI-focused culture within its leadership and organizational design. This includes (but is not limited to) a commitment to achieving greater female representation in leadership and supporting our staff and partners to integrate gender equality into the way we work. As MSI seeks to apply a ‘gender lens’ to our programming, Gender Equality and Social Inclusion Advisors support the implementation of gender-transformative and inclusive activities; and as a critical component of quality of care ensure programs use gender-responsive approaches including training, safeguarding and first line response to sexual and gender-based violence. Working in 36 different countries, we recognize that we work across many societies and cultures at varying stages of the gender continuum. MSI is committed to taking an approach which considers this and nuanced cultural and societal barriers to achieving equality.
