Anti-discrimination policies and programmes in low-and middle-income countries: Experiences in political participation, education and labour markets

This report presents the findings of a rigorous review of evidence on anti-discrimination and affirmative action policies and legislation in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). It focuses on three areas: political participation, education and labour markets. The starting point is a theory of change that suggests reductions in marginalisation and therefore greater inclusion will come from reshaping institutions to reduce structural exclusion, changing discriminatory social norms and building the capacities of marginalised groups. This will, it is expected, lead to reduced discrimination and increase marginalised groups’ political representation, and improve their educational and labour market opportunities. Change is not necessarily linear and is likely to be iterative and incremental. Evidence was gathered through an extensive literature search using search terms to reflect the focus of the study. The evidence was then reviewed according to defined quality criteria relating to the robustness of the methodology and the full explanation of findings. One important inclusion criterion was that the study should focus on the implementation of policies or programmes operating at scale. This resulted in the exclusion of research on many small initiatives undertaken by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) at programme or project level. The evidence in this study is highly methodologically diverse and our conclusions involve both some observations on the dataset and some on the substance of the evidence.