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One of the fundamental rights that is often denied to persons with disabilities is the right to employment. Based on 35 years of work with persons with disabilities in more than 60 developing countries, Handicap International has decided to study this issue of employment and disability. It challenges ten developing country teams to reach out to their local partners to capture the reality of employment today. This qualitative study gives very useful information about country teams’ vision of decent work for persons with disabilities in those environments where specialized resources are rare and inclusive policies remain in their infancy. Despite many obstacles, it identifies some positive promises and future tracks for better practices and efficient services. Many stakeholders, like local business and employment bureaus, are piloting innovative ways to get people to work, and to retain their skills as this positive dynamic evolves. Bringing these experiences to different audiences is the main goal of this document. Hopefully it will be the first piece of a more comprehensive data set and bank of best practices that reinforce access to decent jobs for people with disabilities wherever they happen to live in our global world.

The way in which Value for Money (VfM) is understood and implemented has been a concern of the Bond Disability and Development Group for a number of years. In our experience, programmes that include people with disabilities are often assumed to represent poor VfM – mainly because they have a higher cost per beneficiary when compared to non-inclusive programmes. This paper makes the case for inclusion and argues that interventions that exclude people with disabilities do not represent good VfM. It then provides practical guidance on how to assess the VfM of programmes in an inclusive way. The paper is not about pushing back against the need to achieve VfM. Instead it is about avoiding conflict between VfM analysis and disability inclusion, and progressing the agenda in an inclusive way. We hope it will be a useful resource for those who use VfM assessments including donors, members of the Bond Disability and Development Group and the wider NGO sector. 

Background: Uganda has embraced inclusive education and evidently committed itself to bringing about disability inclusion at every level of education. Both legal and non-legal frameworks have been adopted and arguably are in line with the intent of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) on education. The CRPD, in Article 24, requires states to attain a right to education for persons with disabilities without discrimination and on the basis of equal opportunities at all levels of education.

Objectives: Despite Uganda’s robust disability legal and policy framework on education, there is evidence of exclusion and discrimination of students with disabilities in the higher education institutions. The main objective of this article is to explore the status of disability inclusion in higher education and strategies for its realisation, using evidence from Emong’s study, workshop proceedings where the authors facilitated and additional individual interviews with four students with disabilities by the authors.

Results: The results show that there are discrimination and exclusion tendencies in matters related to admissions, access to lectures, assessment and examinations, access to library services, halls of residence and other disability support services.

Conclusion: The article recommends that institutional policies and guidelines on support services for students with disabilities and special needs in higher education be developed, data on students with disabilities collected to help planning, collaboration between Disabled Peoples Organisations (DPO’s) strengthened to ensure disability inclusion and the establishment of disability support centres.

The goal of this article is to analyse the intersection between a social gender and disability, and identify differences between both the perceived and attached identities of women with disabilities. Two qualitative research studies on women with disabilities in Lithuania reveal ambiguity in the relationship of women with disabilities, towards factors that form their identities. Disability here is realised on a deeper level: it structures respondents’ self-perception and self-reflection. The research also points to the fact that this part of an individual’s identity is straightforwardly perceived in their society and more profoundly ruminated by the women themselves. The ‘invisibility’ of the womanhood here suggests that this part of an identity is perceived as a ‘natural’, unquestionable aspect, which is beyond criticism. Such an attitude absorbs rather than transforms normative provisions and hinders the development of practises directed at subordination of gendering structures.

From the perspective of a normative subject, disability and womanhood have equal weights, since both these aspects of identity represent deviation from the ‘norm’, as well as other differences and subordination. However, both these aspects have different meanings in the self-perception of women with disabilities. The social model of disability acknowledges various obstacles in the environment, which hinder personal independence or create disability. Gender on the other hand, is often naturalized, and a systemic gender-based discrimination remains unmentioned. Hence, discriminatory structures related to disability are targeted, but gender subordination remains unchallenged.
 

This article explores the effect of the paraolympic games on driving social inclusion and an understanding of disability and disability rights around the world. Highlighting the poor conditions before the Bejing games in 2008, the article explains how perceptions and awareness within society have changed. The article also highlighted the United Kingdom as a leader in the field of disability rights and equality thought protection of those rights. 

"Financial inclusion has recently become a globally acclaimed policy objective. This provokes the need to review policy in this sector, particularly in light of the tensions that arise between donor approaches founded on market modernism and governments with more activist leanings. This is done here in the context of efforts to move donor development policy beyond ‘best practice’ institutional blue-prints to those which are ‘good enough’, which seek to understand underlying political economy dynamics in order to find space to engage with governments. In doing so, it is argued that there is scope for ‘working with the grain’ and harnessing the political economy of government policy in order to produce financial inclusion outcomes." 

Amir, a nepalese boy aged 16, is an example and a great source of inspiration for all people. Born without the use of his arms and legs he creates beautiful art envolving poetry, songs and paintings.

The Priority Assistive Products List (APL) aspires to follow in the footsteps of the WHO Model List of Essential Medicines, which creates awareness among the public, mobilises resources and stimulates competition. The Priority Assistive Products List is similarly intended to be a catalyst in promoting access to assistive technology. It is not a restrictive list but aims to provide each Member State with a model from which to develop a National priority assistive products list. 

The List includes hearing aids, wheelchairs, communication aids, spectacles, artificial limbs, pill organizers, memory aids and other essential items for many older people and people with disabilities to be able to live a healthy, productive and dignified life.

The APL is part of the Global Cooperation on Assistive Technology (GATE)

“This paper systematically reviews the evidence on whether persons with disabilities in low- and middle-income countries are adequately included in social protection programmes, and assesses the financial and non-financial impacts of participation. Overall, we found that access to social protection appears to fall far below need. Benefits from participation are mostly limited to maintaining minimum living standards and do not appear to fulfil the potential of long-term individual and societal social and economic development. However, the most notable finding of this review is that there is a dearth of high-quality, robust evidence in this area, indicating a need for further research.”