What Happened: For its first class selected in November 2023, a majority of Fellows live in sub-Saharan Africa, with low representation in Latin America and Asia.

 

How Mountaintop Responded: Even though many candidates applied in their native language and used Mountaintop-hired interpreters for the interviews, Mountaintop believes that Mountaintop staff's lack of language skills is serving as a major obstacle for global inclusivity, especially in certain regions like Latin America. Mountaintop is working to provide language skill development for existing staff and hire new staff with language skills in order to update the website, marketing materials, and application in other languages. While maintaining a strong commitment to Sub-Saharan Africa, Mountaintop also plans to more actively recruit hosts and Fellows from other regions.

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Mountaintop's Learning and Commitment: Mountaintop has learned that to overcome natural self-selection biases, it will have to make a proactive, targeted effort to enhance the global diversity of its fellowship cohorts. This includes not just geographic diversity but also other areas of diversity such as gender, ethnicity, ability, etc.