Dignity in
development.
Dignity is something people everywhere value, and are too often denied. I build the tools that help organisations measure it, find where they fall short, and put it right.
Disrespect is common, and it is harmful. When development promises to treat people with dignity and then fails to, it breaks faith with the people it set out to serve.
Figures from Focusing Dignity (IDinsight, 2026).
Dignity in healthcare, in Kenya and India
That is where the need and the opportunity are greatest. And we believe progress depends on building community among the people already doing this work, and on backing fellowships focused squarely on what works.
The Dignity Ecosystem
Many people work on dignity, but they do not know one another. This interactive map plots the organisations working on dignity worldwide — who is doing what, and how they connect — so the field can find its allies and act together.
Tools I’ve built for dignity
Dignity Self-Assessment Tool
A ten-minute diagnostic. Answer for your organisation and see how you score across four dimensions: how you set priorities, how you treat people, your internal culture, and your commitment to learning.
Take the assessment →The Dignity Measurement Tool
Choose the right way to measure respect for dignity in your work, and put it to use. The tool walks you to the metric that fits your project.
Open the tool →What Works for Dignity
A searchable library of the interventions shown to uphold dignity — what has been tried, where, and how well it worked. A place to start when you’re deciding what to do.
Browse the evidence →The Dignity Framework
Our attempt to define and operationalise a slippery idea, so that organisations can actually design for dignity and measure it — rather than only declaring they value it.
See the framework →The self-led Dignity Workshop
A workshop kit that project teams run themselves. It helps them find the dignity hotspots in their work, talk them through honestly, and commit to acting on them.
How it works →The Dignity Literature Atlas
An interactive map of the academic literature on dignity and respect — over 1,100 authors across nineteen disciplines, plotted by how they cite and write with one another. A way to see the shape of the field and find your place in it.
Explore the atlas →The Dignity Report
A yearly account of what we are learning about dignity and how to uphold it. The 2026 report, Focusing Dignity, set our direction: concentrate on health, the sector with the strongest foundations for this work; begin in Kenya and India; and build community among the public-sector leaders already championing dignity — through fellowships, rather than one-off training.
A research agenda for dignity
At the 2022 Dignity Symposium, researchers from many disciplines agreed five questions to guide the study of dignity — set out in the Dignity Research Agenda consensus statement.
- 1How is dignity to be defined?
- 2How can respectfulness be measured?
- 3How do dignity and respect operate?
- 4What acts increase perceptions of respectfulness, and what are the consequences?
- 5How do actors and sectors regard dignity, and what will increase support for a dignity agenda?
Lives of Dignity: How Aid Can Treasure Humans
My next book — how aid can repair its broken promise of respect, told through the stages of a life. Three of nine chapters are written.
Bring dignity into your work.
We help funders and practitioners make respect a measurable part of what they do.
Tom Wein 