Department for International Development (DFID)

September 2005

This 22-page policy paper was produced by the Department for International Development (DFID) based on research and consultations to consider how to build on existing efforts to tackle social exclusion in developing countries. DFID believes that social exclusion, whether on the basis of race, religion, ethnicity, disability, gender, caste, age or sexuality, is important because it denies certain groups of people opportunities to participate equally in society, and this is a major cause of poverty and insecurity.

Executive Summary

There are groups of people in all societies who are systematically disadvantaged because they are discriminated against. Discrimination occurs in public institutions, such as the legal system or the education and health services, as well as in the household and in the community.

Men, women and children who are discriminated against often end up excluded from society, the economy and political participation. They are more likely to be poor. They are more likely to be denied access to income, assets and services. These people suffer from social exclusion – and poverty reduction is harder as a result.

Poverty reduction policies often fail to reach socially excluded groups unless they are specifically designed to do so. This paper is about the challenges posed by social exclusion, and the ways governments, civil society and donors can help to tackle them. These include:

• creating legal, regulatory and policy frameworks that promote social inclusion;
• ensuring that socially excluded groups benefit from public expenditure as much as other groups;
• improving economic opportunities and access to services for excluded groups;
• promoting their political participation in society, and their capacity to organise and mobilise
  themselves;
• increasing accountability to protect citizens’ basic human rights; and
• tackling prejudice and changing behaviour.

It also recommends ways in which DFID can do more in this area, including stepping up its efforts to:

• analyse the impact of exclusion on poverty reduction in all our country programmes, in order to
  decide priorities for work by region, country and sector;
• promote exchanges of best practice between national and regional organisations;
• work with other government departments and development partners to include analysis
  of exclusion as a cause of conflict and insecurity in our approaches and responses to conflict
  prevention and reduction;
• identify opportunities to address social exclusion in fragile states;
• strengthen the collection and analysis of statistics on excluded groups;
• work with the World Bank and regional development banks, United Nations agencies, the European Community and other donors to make development work better for excluded groups;
• increase the inclusiveness of our own human resources practices and strengthen the diversity in
  our workforce;
• commission new research and ensure adequate attention is paid to exclusion, inequality and
  rights in all our research on natural resources management, HIV and AIDS, education and other
  relevant areas;
• broaden and deepen our engagement with civil society to strengthen the contribution it can
  make to tackling exclusion; and
• be accountable for implementation of the policy set out in this paper by evaluating progress
  in 2007-08.