Recently, the Federal Anti-Discrimination Agency published its new report on discrimination in education and employment. The report not only details how discriminatory and exclusionary the German education and employment landscape is, it also makes extensive recommendations for change.

A look at development policy institutions and organizations in Germany confirms that here, too, and especially here, these recommendations should urgently be taken note of. The newly founded umbrella organization Migration-Development-Participation e.V. (MEPa) emphasizes in a statement that they “miss an adequate integration of migrant experts in many federal states” and that they “do not see equal opportunities for migrants in the NGO structures at present”. AG Sporen lobal from Hamburg is even more specific. In an article entitled “One year of accusations of racism against Eine Welt Netzwerk Hamburg e.V.”, she looks back at how the accusation of structural racism against the state network was dealt with:
“A wall of silence surrounds the moveGLOBAL affair, like most discrimination cases in this country. The personalities in the former moveGLOBAL project advisory board cover EWNW’s back and sweep the affair under the carpet. The Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Landesnetzwerke in der Eine-Welt-Arbeit – agl – does not question its Hamburg member EWNW. The partly newly elected board of the EWNW is silent – as is the old one. The donor BMZ seems to have forgotten the issue. Business as usual – One year of accusations of racism against Eine Welt Netzwerk Hamburg e. V.”

A look beyond the development scene makes clear how important – but at the same time how contested and endangered – the participation of migrants and people of color is. In August, for example, the Migration Council Berlin Brandenburg (MRBB) and other signatory NGOs approached the Berlin Senate with an open letter. They write, among other things:
“We fear that the reorientation of Berlin’s ‘participation policy’ will not result in greater participation of Berliners* with a history of migration and their self-organizations, nor will it be able to provide the necessary services to people according to their needs in Berlin.”

As detailed background material, reference should also be made at this point to the publication “No We without Us. Life after migration” of the MRBB, in which a chapter on institutionalized racism expands the focus beyond the world of work.