Launching the Decolonise MSF Website and 2021 Survey: Dignity at MSF

Greetings everyone.

Decolonise MSF is a young and growing grassroots network of more than 1,000 members composed of current and former staff on Facebook and Whatsapp. We are united by a commitment to abolish all forms of discrimination at the organisation and to empower labour in the service of this goal. Our movement supports survivors of abuse and discrimination, shares educational resources, provides a channel for testimonies and the sharing of experiences, and coordinates calls for action for a better MSF in the future - for staff, communities, and patients alike.

It has been one year since the 2020 Open Letter to Senior Management and Staff: Beyond Words to Anti-Racist Action. Despite over 1000 signatures, leadership has not formally recognized this letter or acknowledged its demands. Our aim at Decolonise MSF is to create real platforms for honest exchange through direct and transparent communication, including openly challenging MSF leadership where required. We do this in the spirit of making MSF more respectful, more humane and better.

Today we are launching two initiatives, the Decolonise MSF website (www.decolonisemsf.com) and our 2021 Survey: Dignity at MSF (https://msf.me/survey), which is open to all current and former MSF staff and runs through July 2021.

The website allows us to reach and support an even greater number of staff and serves as a central resource to get involved. It contains an archive of articles, testimonies, collected media, a new blog, and serves to coordinate calls to action when we need to organize for change - a likely scenario given that the La Mancha agreement is now more than 15 years old and its vision, to us, remains unfulfilled.

As Decolonise MSF reflect and plan for the future, we want to give you - current and former staff - a space to tell us if and how your experiences with racism and discrimination have changed over the past twelve months. We want to hear from you in HQ, you in projects, and you who no longer are working with us.

We consider this survey a bold experiment to try to hear as many voices and views as we can. Rarely - if ever - has our global base been surveyed on these questions. They will give us a true sense of the scale and scope of discrimination within the movement only if enough people answer.

Like any good experiment, we aim to be fully transparent about this process and our results by August 2021.

You can find the survey here: https://msf.me/survey and in the calls for action section of this website. The survey will take approximately 20 minutes to complete. Translation is expected shortly.

Please share the link widely within your networks.

MONICA MUKERJEE & ARNAB MAJUMDAR

07.01.21