The brainchild of Stephanie Kimou of Population Works AFRICA in 2018, Black Women In Development #BWID is an online platform where black women working in the development sector can support each other.
A mighty group that started with about forty women about two years ago has grown exponentially numbering upwards of four thousand black women spanning the globe to include Africa, US, Europe, the Caribbean and Latin America.
BWID started as a safe space to share information about the development sector, to discuss how we – black women show up in the world of international development and humanitarian aid and how we navigate both overt acts of racism as well as the microagressions that follow.
Very quickly we recognized that the ever widening gap between black women and the network of champions necessary to support our careers meant that we needed to take control of our own destinies. We decided to build our own network, to act as our own internal champions, to provide referrals of black women for speaking engagements, to identify black women with different areas of expertise and to share their names in professional settings.
We hear all too often from large international institutions that “ the candidate pool for the top jobs is not diverse because of the lack of expertise among black candidates”.
We know this is patently false although it has been the prevailing narrative in the sector for decades. As BWID – we can assure you that the expertise exists, and we will be vocal in challenging this false narrative.
BWID is a source of a highly educated talent pool to include researchers, keynote speakers and panelists, advocacy experts, lawyers, development/fundraising specialists and content experts. While BWID still lives online, we collaborated with the Center for Global Development (CGD) in October of 2019 to host a public event.
See link:
https://www.cgdev.org/
For more info on BWID – please email me at
(L) Stephanie Kimou – Creator of #BWID and Founder of Population Works Africa.
(R) Angela Bruce-Raeburn, DiverseDEV