Regularly, the Dutch Coalition on Disability and Development (DCDD) organises exchange sessions with various panellists to share knowledge among the different consortia and organisations that are part of our coalition. The objective is to create interest in disability and to make NGOs and governmental agencies more aware of the steps to take to better include people with disabilities in the aid and development sector. On the 25th of April, DCDD en WeAreAble! held a webinar aiming to bridge gaps between the Gender and Disability movements. Indeed, DCDD strongly believes that our struggles for inclusivity need to be intersectional to fully comprehend the stakes of this matter. Advocacy for inclusivity should take into account the differences created by one’s gender, skin colour, ethnicity, disability, appearance, etc. and how it affects their inclusion in society. To better understand the relationship between gender and disability advocacy, we wanted this webinar to showcase practical examples of women with disabilities’ involvement at the international, national, and local levels and provide practical tips to overcome barriers. For this reason, we were pleased to welcome Virginia Ossana, Firehiwot Siyum en Gloria Patience Babirye, three women that advocate for better inclusion of persons with disabilities. They also work in NGOs linked to gender and disability. This webinar aimed to provide ideas of how it is possible to strengthen collaborations between the disability and the gender movements, notably because disability-focused NGOs do not collaborate much with gender-focused NGOs and vice versa, even though they face many common issues.
This session was also an opportunity to explain the disability movement structure and its diversity. We also wanted to underline the importance of Organisations of Persons with Disabilities (OPD), which are representative and membership-based organisations which support the rights of people with disabilities by people with disabilities themselves. The point was to highlight how gender-focused NGOs can collaborate with OPDs to better include people with disabilities in their programmes, following the idea of “Nothing about us without us”, which stresses the need to listen to people with disabilities to create inclusive spaces. These elements led us to discuss how people with disabilities and disability focussed NGOs advocate for intersectionality. Gloria Patience Babirye showed how self-advocacy in the disability movement, especially regarding access to sexual healthcare, plays a key role. Then, Firehiwot Siyum highlighted how NGOs could support the local disabled community, how they encourage them to join OPDs and what can be done to make OPDs more intersectional. Finally, Virginia Ossana explained the importance of intersectionality and how to make it happen, especially at the international level. All these elements are linked to OPDs, gender and intersectionality, each showing the bridges between the gender and the disability movements. So, let’s focus more precisely on the stakes underlined by our panellists.
Gloria Patience Babirye: “When I’m giving a practical example of how to lobby for intersectional reproductive rights and health, I look at myself.”
Gloria Patience Babirye is a Youth Panel Representative of “Make Way Uganda”, an NGO that works to make intersectionality for health equity, justice and sexual and reproductive rights a reality in Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, and Zambia, at regional and global levels. She talked about the stakes of advocating for reproductive rights for youth with disabilities, especially in Uganda, where she is involved in the Make Way programme.
To advocate for herself but also for other persons with disabilities, she uses her own experience to highlight the challenges people with disabilities can face to access reproductive rights and health. For instance, she and other deaf/hard-of-hearing persons are not well informed about their sexual reproductive health because the information available does not use captioning. Thus, they are deprived of key information about their health because it is not shared in an inclusive way. By advocating, she wants to ensure that people with disabilities are considered in the national, regional, and global context because that is not the case currently. She wants the disabled community to access information because this is their right to know how to take care of their health, and she works to make that happen. To facilitate the inclusion of people with disabilities in gender-related topics, she recommends collaborating with organisations of people with disabilities and talking about accommodating the needs of people with disabilities because they vary. According to her, it is also important to strengthen the capacity of youth with disabilities to speak for themselves. It is necessary to empower young individuals with disabilities thanks to the funding of inclusive projects and innovations. To sum up Gloria Patience Babirye intervention, people with disabilities need to be informed of their rights and should be able to access information like their non-disabled peers, so projects should be inclusive and encourage empowerment.
Firehiwot Siyum: “It is important to bring together women with disabilities for two reasons: one is patriarchy, the other is ableism.”
Firehiwot Siyum is a Project Officer at the African Disability Forum and is involved in the program WeAreAble! that focuses on disability Inclusive Food Security in Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Sudan and Uganda. She came to this session to represent the African Disability Forum, a continental OPD that strengthens and unifies the representative voices of Africans with disabilities.
She also has highlighted how WeAreAble! promotes disability-inclusive advocacy thanks to three pathways. First, they focus on mobilising persons with disabilities to know their rights and become members of OPDs that are at the local level. They also raise awareness about the rights of persons with disabilities. Secondly, they build the capacities of existing OPDs while also supporting the establishment of new OPDs that are not represented at the local level. The third step is to engage local authorities by introducing them to the local inclusion agendas and international, national, and continental instruments that promote disability inclusion and disability rights. Something that she thinks is important regarding gender and disability is the 2, step: WeAreAble! supports the establishment of new OPDs started and led by women with disabilities. Indeed, numerous OPDs are male-dominated, affecting women’s involvement in these organisations, thus putting gender issues on the back burner. It is also important to consider that the feminist movement does not address specific issues that women with disabilities face. Consequently, it is important to engage with women with disabilities to make them aware of their rights and encourage them to take leadership positions to truly bridge the gaps between gender and disability. “It’s important for women to have that space and their own OPDs to bring their own issues in to discuss their agendas at that level”, she insists. To sum up her speech, it’s important for the feminist movement to collaborate with local OPDs, specifically women-led OPDs, but not limit themselves to women-led OPDs so they can increase the participation of women with disabilities. That way, according to her analysis, it is possible to ensure a truly intersectional approach to the stakes related to disability and gender.
Virginia Ossana: “It is crucial that the intersectional approach comes from the International level”
Virginia Ossana is a person with a disability and a Programs Advisor at Women Enabled International, an NGO working to advance human rights at the intersection of gender and disability worldwide. She took the floor to explain the importance of the intersectional approach at the international level, especially in the UN spaces, because those places will likely guide national, regional, and local policies.
She asserts that every place where decisions are taken should ensure human rights for people with disabilities. It means that accessibility should be a priority in order to let people with disabilities speak for themselves and advocate for their needs. She talked about the Generation Equality Forums held in 2021 to highlight how even a place talking about inclusion excluded people with disabilities: there were no screen reader accommodations, no one monitoring the session, no one could provide technical assistance, and there were no captions or interpretation. It means that just to be at the talking table, she had to lobby to be there and enter the room. Her experience at the forum is symptomatic of the barriers that people with disabilities face to advocate for their rights: they must fight to get accessibility before even being able to do lobbying. To avoid these situations, she recommended using the Feminist Accessibility Protocol, which was created by the Generation Equality Collective. This protocol is dedicated to organisations hosting events on gender equality to ensure that whenever gender equality is discussed, people with disabilities are included. It includes 13 commitments on accessibility. She insisted on the importance of budget accessibility in order to be truly inclusive: it is necessary to take into account that some accommodations need time and budget; they cannot be improvised and need to be thoroughly thought out to be efficient. But she also reminded the audience that being inclusive does not mean a huge cost; some measures can be free and just need a great organisation prior to the event. To sum up her intervention, it is important to focus on accessibility, especially at the international level, to encourage intersectionality and efficient inclusion of women with disabilities.
We were glad to welcome these three disability advocates for our webinar as their interventions led to great discussion during the questions and answers session. Their participation gave our partners and the consortia advice on how to encourage empowerment, intersectionality, and inclusion. Having people directly concerned by the stakes of the cross-movement of gender and disability enabled our discussions to highlight the current dysfunctions in the development sector and how to provide accessibility in feminist spaces to encourage the involvement of women with disabilities. We were pleased by this session and hoped the consortia liked it too! We will keep you posted on our next webinar/exchange session about disability and the aid sector.
