Working to Advance
Health Equity in Africa

Time to bring people with disabilities into development

Time to bring people with disabilities into development

Throughout the world, people with disabilities are often ignored, sidelined or effectively disenfranchised – “out of sight, out of mind”, as it were.’ However, there is one arena in which one would expect the opposite: development thinking and planning. After all, the mainstays of development — education, health, employment and participation in society on an equal basis with others — are a constant struggle for people with disabilities, who comprise 15% of the world’s population. Yet our thinking about the relationship between disability and human development remains stuck in a charity niche, an afterthought to ‘the big issues’. What we should rightly regard as a scandal is also a simmering crisis.

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