Disability Inclusion: Policy to Practice

Disability Inclusion: Translating Policy into Practice in Humanitarian Action documents positive practices and ongoing challenges to promote disability inclusion across UNHCR’s and its partners’ work in multiple countries and multiple displacement contexts. The report provides lessons and recommendations for other organizations and the wider humanitarian community on engaging persons with disabilities at all levels of humanitarian work. It draws on consultations with over 700 displaced persons—including persons with disabilities, their families, and humanitarian staff—in eight countries.

The report includes:

• Key protection concerns of persons with disabilities
• Implementation of UNHCR Guidance on Disability
• Institutionalizing disability inclusion across UNHCR operations

It also includes recommendations for advancing disability inclusion in humanitarian action, specifically tailored for:

• UNHCR: The next steps
• Humanitarian actors: Build on successes
• Disability actors: Expand skills to enhance protection
• Donor governments: Fund technical capacity

In creating Disability Inclusion: Translating Policy into Practice in Humanitarian Action, we gathered information directly from displaced persons with disabilities, as well as humanitarian field staff who work with them. The report highlights their concerns, as well as their ideas and suggestions for making humanitarian programs more accessible to persons with disabilities. It cuts across a variety of humanitarian settings, including urban and camp refugee contexts, internal displacement and complex large-scale crises, such as the Syrian refugee response. Consultations were conducted in eight countries: India (New Delhi), Uganda, Thailand, Bangladesh, Nepal, Ethiopia, Philippines (Mindanao) and Lebanon.

This work was the result of a partnership between the Women’s Refugee Commission and the UN Refugee Agency, concerning the global rollout of UNHCR’s guidance on Working with Persons with Disabilities in Forced Displacement. The WRC provided technical support and training for staff in UNHCR country offices, their implementing partners and disability organizations. We facilitated participatory workshops reaching over 390 humanitarian actors, promoting knowledge-sharing and action planning to translate guidance into practice at the field level. Refugees with disabilities played a central role in these workshops, bridging the gap between themselves and humanitarian actors.

Download Disability Inclusion: Translating Policy into Practice in Humanitarian Action in English, Arabic, French, and Microsoft Word formats above. 

 Refugees with Disabilities: Increasing Inclusion, Building Community

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