Tâmara Andrade’s motivation to fight for has increased even further, ever since she became the mother of a daughter. “According to the United Nations it will take centuries for us to realise gender equality around the world. I want this to happen more quickly, not least because of my daughter,” the 36-year-old from Brazil says.

Tâmara Andrade is currently living in Germany, together with her daughter who is a year and a half and her husband. She is a German Chancellor Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and will be advising the German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS) in Bonn until spring 2025. Among other things, she has compiled a handbook for preventing sexual harassment and discrimination for the IDOS academy, as well as organising workshops on this issue. Before the end of her stay, she plans to complete preparation of a tool kit for NGOs from the social sector that wish to transform their leadership structures to promote diversity.

Education is life-changing

It was far from obvious that Tâmara Andrade would one day embark on an international career. When she was a child, her parents moved to São Paulo from a disadvantaged region, to improve their children’s education opportunities. “I am the first in my family to study at a university. This is how I found out about the impact that can have on somebody’s life,” she says.

However, while studying psychology, Tâmara Andrade also learned that education alone does not open every door. Alongside her studies she was involved in conceptualising leadership development and training programmes for the private sector, and found out that many groups of people are excluded from accessing these types of programme from the outset. “The criteria were frequently discriminatory. Only graduates from certain universities were accepted, or people would be required to have good English skills, even if this wasn’t actually necessary, for example,” Tâmara Andrade explains. She encouraged her clients to change this and achieved a broader circle of potential candidates for leadership positions. “The programmes turned out to represent society better than was the case in the past. The performance of the training groups improved, too, because more perspectives and ideas were contributed.”

Equal opportunities are a human right

It was scientifically proven a long time ago that diverse and inclusive structures increase the level of creativity and innovative power in companies and organisations, as well as leading to better decisions. However, there is another aspect that Tâmara Andrade is passionate about: “It is a basic right that every person should have the same opportunities.” In 2015, Tâmara Andrade was a co-founder of the NGO “Motriz” in Brazil, which campaigns for greater and inclusiveness in the public sector. By now, Motriz has consulted local and state institutions in all Brazilian states on matters related to the promotion of young talent and leadership development. The initiative’s programmes address the selection procedures, as the choice of knowledge tested here tends to put certain groups in a more favourable position, Tâmara Andrade explains. She adds that women and Black people in particular are not represented appropriately. “By adjusting the criteria, we were able to contribute to a significant increase in equality of opportunity in many Brazilian administrative bodies in recent years. Representative leadership structures can therefore lead to representative decision-making.”

Organisations in Germany can learn from other countries

She believes that convincing as many people as possible of the value of inclusive structures is a decisive factor towards achieving greater diversity. “It is not enough if the topic is discussed by people that already campaign for greater diversity. We have to get the others on board, too,” Tâmara Andrade points out. NGOs in Germany are now benefiting from her experience. In North Rhine-Westphalia, for example, she is cooperating with organisations from the social sector to start a voluntary initiative for inclusion and diversity.

“I think that an exchange of views between the Global North and the Global South is very important in this context,” says Tâmara Andrade. Germany, for example, has exemplary parental leave arrangements, she says, adding that Germany on the other hand could learn a lot about decolonisation of organisations from Brazil. Tâmara Andrade would like to promote and improve this type of discussion in future. She has not yet decided, whether she will be doing this from Germany or from Brazil.