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Contribution short abstract

Drawing on lived and professional experience in the MENA region, this contribution demonstrates how individuals from conflict-affected and marginalized backgrounds are central to development work yet often excluded from formal careers.

Contribution long abstract

My contribution to this roundtable draws on both lived and professional experience across the international development and humanitarian sector in the MENA region, with a particular focus on refugee-led and community-based actors. While the 2025 report highlights socio-economic exclusion within the UK development profession, my experience suggests this dynamic is even more pronounced globally, especially for people from conflict-affected, displaced, or economically marginalised backgrounds. In contexts such as Lebanon and Syria, those with lived experience of poverty, displacement, and insecurity are often over-represented as volunteers and community responders, yet systematically under-represented in formal NGO, donor, and academic roles.

I will contribute evidence and reflections from participatory research, workshops, and coordination spaces with RLOs, highlighting barriers such as unpaid or self-funded internships, language hierarchies, restrictive mobility regimes, lack of credential recognition, and opaque recruitment pathways shaped by Global North educational and professional capital.

I will also reflect on how current data systems fail to capture these trajectories. Many people with lived experience enter the sector through informal pathwaysvolunteering, local coordination, or crisis response, yet remain invisible in datasets focused on postgraduate education, formal internships, or entry-level employment within institutions such as the FCDO or its international counterparts.

Finally, I will propose practical approaches to improve evidence-gathering, including participatory career-path mapping, collaboration with refugee-led and grassroots organisations as knowledge partners, and re-framing “entry into the profession” beyond formal employment to include informal, community-embedded, and crisis-driven development work.