The U.K. Department for International Development published Wednesday its first-ever Disability Framework, which reflects its ambitious vision to deliver disability-inclusive development. It signals the first step in DfID’s commitment to making its programs systematically inclusive of and accessible to people with disabilities.
It identifies a number of practical steps and actions which will help change the way the agency operates, strengthening its capacity to work on disability inclusion. Specifically, the framework sets out a clear process of accountability with the commitment to carry out an “annual stocktake to assess the extent to which DfID programs are including disability.” The department will also track which programs are collecting data on disability, and whether this is increasing.
This is alongside DfID’s commitment to advocating for the use of the U.N. Washington Group’s questions on disability in DfID-supported surveys, and influencing partners to do the same. In October, the department hosted a conference to encourage a shared understanding among bilateral and multilateral donors, civil society organizations and academics, and discussed what integrating a disability component into broader statistical data collection efforts would look like.
About the author
Pauline Thivillier
Pauline Thivillier is a program delivery monitoring officer at Sightsavers. She has previously worked for UNHCR, Mines Advisory Group and Fair Trials International. She holds two master’s degrees, one on European litigation in Université Panthéon Assas (Paris II) and another on international and European law from the University of Manchester. She is currently based in the United Kingdom.
