Homophobia Costs India An Estimated $31 Billion Annually — Should Development Institutions Care?

Denis Largeron / Via denislargeron.com

“You reduce GDP by that much and you call it a recession,” said the economist who calculated this figure during a first-of-its-kind panel at the World Bank.

Homophobia has an annual cost to India of $31 billion or more, according to a draft report presented Wednesday at a forum at the World Bank’s headquarters in Washington, D.C.

This number is just a rough estimate, since economists lack the data to make a firm calculation. But the fact that the question is being asked by an institution like the World Bank is more significant than the number itself. If development institutions decide to make LGBT rights a priority — and could shape the billions of dollars that flow through them every year — LGBT rights advocates could have far more powerful allies than those they’ve won in institutions devoted to human rights.

The World Bank isn’t the first such institution at the table: The United States Agency for International Development (US AID), the United Nations Development Program, and the development agencies of several European governments already have been working on LGBT rights. But the World Bank’s size and reach mean it has the power to shift the global development agenda — it lends more than $35 billion annually, and serves as an important research hub for the development community.

Having a discussion about LGBT inclusion at the World Bank “may have a huge impact … for mainstreaming the issue,” said Luiz Loures, assistant secretary general of the United Nations and deputy executive director of UNAIDS, who traveled from India to participate in the panel discussion, which was moderated by BuzzFeed. Organizations like his only get so far by making the human rights and public health case; people like Loures believe framing the issue in terms of dollars could tip the balance.

But making the economic case for promoting LGBT rights is not easy, in part because good data does not exist in most countries quantifying the number of LGBT people, let alone their experiences. There is no census that collects sexual orientation or gender identity data — and in India, there are many local concepts of gender identity and sexual orientation that don’t neatly correlate with the idea of LGBT.

Full story here!