Humanity & Inclusion (HI) strongly aligns with DGD’s approach to gender and intersectionality,

taking this into account in all interventions, within the federation and institutional policies. This
is made clear in the organization’s Disability, Gender and Age Policy (2019), which states that an
intersectional approach recognizes that it is a combination of multiple individual characteristics
and environmental (or societal) factors which intersect to shape a person’s:
 Experience
 Roles and responsibilities
 Access to and control over resources including basic services for example health,
education
 Experience of power and the ways they may exercise power
 Capacity to respond to different barriers and opportunities.

To compliment the DGA Policy, HI has developed a Disability, Gender, Age marker. The
objectives of the marker are to determine whether a project is sensitive, transformative or not,
to highlight gaps and to initiate corrective actions. On the one hand, the marker is intended to
be a learning tool with a specific focus on disability, gender and age issues. At the macro level,
HI is using the marker to set ambitions for sensitive and transformative programming on
disability, gender and age, and to establish time-bound goals. Additionally, the marker is
intended to be a support for reflection and learning for teams with regard to disability, gender
and age sensitivity. Finally, by using tools such as the DGA marker and the methodological
guidance tools, new practices are being developed and implemented within HI’s programs to
make them even more inclusive of gender, age and disability.

HI strives to include everyone, focusing on the most vulnerable and including people and
groups discriminated against or at high risk of discrimination, and champion each person’s
fundamental rights. HI advocates for the inclusion and meaningful participation of all,
upholding diversity, fairness and individual choice. In its actions, HI pays specific attention to
nine factors generating inequalities: disability, age, gender, sexual orientation, socio-economic
status, geographical location, ethnic origin, religion, political opinion. These factors generating
inequalities tend to reinforce each other when they intersect, combining into situations of
multiple vulnerabilities and exclusion. HI chooses to focus on certain of these factors depending
on the context and the goal of the intervention, prevailing perceptions and beliefs and existing
and ingrained power relations.

For example, gender refers to the socially constructed expectations, roles, behaviors, attributes
which are constructed for men and women by a given society and which each given society
considers most appropriate and ‘valued’ for men and women. These constructs are learnt from
families and friends in the home and reinforced at school, the community, workplace as well as
by the media, religion and the government. They shape how people define themselves and how
they are defined by others. Such as, how women and men are expected to act, speak, dress and
conduct themselves based upon our assigned sex (e.g. in patriarchal societies girls and women
are generally expected to dress in typically feminine ways and be polite, accommodating,
nurturing, emotional, subservient; men and boys are generally expected to be strong,
aggressive, fearless and independent). HI acknowledges that expectations around gender roles,
attitudes and behavior vary within and between societies and change over time (both positively
and negatively).

Just as important, HI’s programming considers gender norms: the standards and expectations
to which women and men generally conform within a range that defines a particular society,
culture and community at that point in time. These norms are powerful ideas about how
women and men should be and act. Internalized early in life, they can establish a life cycle of
gender socialization and stereotyping. Gender norms affect how we perceive ourselves and our
potential, and how others view and treat us; both informally and formally, such as in the law.
Failure to comply with gender norms can trigger strong social sanctions, such as ridiculing,
ostracizing or even violence; or less visible punishments, such as exclusion from employment
opportunities or marriage. People also self-regulate their own behavior in order to conform to
what they think is expected of them by others. Discriminatory gender norms and stereotypes
are harmful because they don’t allow people to fully express themselves and their emotions.
It’s also a way of maintaining unequal power relations, systematically disadvantaging women
and girls who have less power in relation to men and boys.

Therefore, HI acknowledges, among other factors generating inequalities and that need to be
considered, that:
 Disability, gender and age as socially constructed norms can be observed in any human
group, within which produce different outcomes between people;
 Disability, gender and age are key factors to understanding different people’s capacities,
needs, and exposure to risks in any context or crisis. HI therefore commits to paying
systematic attention to disability, gender and age-based inequalities in its analysis and
to how they interact with other inequality-generating factors. Consequently, the HI
network develops programmatic strategies that allow people encountering
discrimination on the grounds of disability, gender and age to benefit from
humanitarian action and development opportunities on an equal basis with others.
To this end HI’s commitments in the framework are:
 Participation, equality and nondiscrimination, accessibility and safeguarding are guiding
principles.
 HI promotes a two-pronged approach: – To be disability-, gender- and age responsive in
all areas of HI work. – To be transformative wherever possible in order to achieve
effective inclusion.

Using an intersectional approach, for example, recognizes that a girl’s exclusion from education
is caused by multiple intersecting, compounding factors. These can include: the individual
characteristics of her sex, age, disability status, nationality, language; her household-location
and its composition; the socio economic status of her family and environmental factors, for
example the accessibility of the school buildings; the availability of safe and appropriate toilet
facilities; attitudes of her parents and caregivers towards her right to education; social attitudes
which discriminate against the rights of girls to education and institutional capacity. Individual
and environmental factors also intersect to impact on the capacity an individual or group has to
respond to a social vulnerability.