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Background: In low-income and middle-income countries women and girls with disabilities are more likely to experience violence than those without disabilities. Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and disabled people’s organisations (DPOs) can help to address this. However, in countries like Botswana we know little about the preparedness of NGOs and DPOs to increase inclusion in and access to programmes addressing violence.

Objectives: To explore the capacity and preparedness of NGOs and DPOs to ensure that women and girls with disabilities can participate in and access programmes addressing violence.

Methods: A qualitative study was undertaken using interviews with 17 NGOs and DPOs in Botswana to understand the organisations’ level of and ability to deliver programmes addressing violence against women and girls.

Results: Both NGOs and DPOs lack elements of universal design and reasonable accommodation, and thus are inaccessible to some people with disabilities. Some programmes address violence against women but lack skills and resources to accommodate people with disabilities. In contrast, DPOs work with people with disabilities, but lack focus on violence against women with disabilities. Participants identified opportunities to fill these gaps, including adaptation of policies and structural changes, training, approaches to mainstream disability across programmes, development of disability-specific interventions and improved networking.

Conclusions: Botswana’s NGOs and DPOs are well positioned to address violence against women and girls with disabilities, but need to increase their accessibility, staff knowledge and skills and disability inclusion. Training, resource allocation and participation of women with disabilities in NGOs and DPOs is needed to drive this change.

African Journal of Disability, Vol 9, 2020

Background: The call for institutions of higher education to foster interaction with communities and ensure training is responsive to the needs of communities is well documented. In 2011, Stellenbosch University collaborated with the Worcester community to identify the needs of people with disabilities within the community. How the university was engaging with these identified needs through student training still needed to be determined.

Objectives: This study describes the engagement process of reciprocity and responsivity in aligning needs identified by persons with disability to four undergraduate allied health student training programmes in Worcester, Western Cape.

Method: A single case study using the participatory action research appraisal methods explored how undergraduate student service learning was responding to 21 needs previously identified in 2011 alongside persons with disability allowing for comprehensive feedback and a collaborative and coordinated response.

Results: Students’ service learning activities addressed 14 of the 21 needs. Further collaborative dialogue resulted in re-grouping the needs into six themes accompanied by a planned collaborative response by both community and student learning to address all 21 needs previously identified.

Conclusion: Undergraduate students’ service learning in communities has the potential to meet community identified needs especially when participatory action research strategies are implemented. Reciprocity exists when university and community co-engage to construct, reflect and adjust responsive service learning. This has the potential to create a collaborative environment and process in which trust, accountability, inclusion and communication is possible between the university and the community.

African Journal of Disability, Vol 8, 2019

Purpose: Although cerebral palsy is the most prevalent health condition linked to childhood disability in Bangladesh, support and rehabilitation for this group is limited and intervention development is slow. An initiative to address these unmet needs was the development of a parent training programme for the rehabilitation of children with cerebral palsy. The aim of this study was to explore what was important in the everyday lives of children with cerebral palsy in rural Bangladesh and take their views into account in order to inform the parent/caregiver training programme.

Methods: Qualitative data was collected from12 children with cerebral palsy, between 5 - 14 years of age. The children were purposively selected from among those who attended the parent training programme. A participatory method called the ‘Feeling Dice’ was used to elicit children’s feelings about their everyday lives. The approach was easy to use, acceptable in the local context, the children enjoyed the activity, and it generated rich information.

Results: ‘Inclusion in play’ and ‘being able to attend school’ made the children happy and were their two main priorities, yet were not key issues for parents. The children were frustrated by their dependence on others for day-to-day activities such as feeding, bathing, and transport to school. Children also played an important part in encouraging their parents to attend the training course.

Conclusion: This study showed that valuable information can be gathered from children with cerebral palsy by using a simple and adaptable participatory research tool. Children’s views and priorities sometimes differed from those of their parents and carers, and could be useful for developing more relevant and valid interventions. Children need to be recognised as important ‘agents of change’ within their own rehabilitation. This methodology is in harmony with the UNCRPD recommendations, and supports inclusive and rights-based intervention development.

Purpose: This study aimed to investigate the experiences of people living with a psychosocial disability in rural India and Nepal, and to highlight key barriers and enablers for inclusion.

Method: Participatory action research approaches and Photovoice methodology were employed to investigate the lived experience of 32 participants in rural India and Nepal. There were 12 participants and 4 caregivers of people with psychosocial disability from each of the two countries. Semi-structured interviews with study participants were transcribed and analysed thematically to answer the study question.

Results: The findings revealed themes related to various supports, meaningful engagement in activity, and community awareness. Among these categories were both enabling and impeding factors to inclusion, the presence or absence of which was typically associated with improvements or worsening of symptoms respectively.

Conclusions and Implications: This study underscores the need for integrated community-based approaches that are multisectoral, inclusive of family, and strengthen community responses. Photovoice was also shown to be a feasible research methodology for providing insights into the lived experience of people with psychosocial disability and for fostering their empowerment

The ideology of Emancipatory Disability Research (EDR) reflected in the phrase ‘Nothing about us without us’, was first put forward in the 1990s. Although it aimed to place research control in the hands of the ‘researched’, i.e., people with disability, this rarely happens even today, 25 years later.

The Community Action Research on Disability (CARD) programme in Uganda embraced and modified the EDR approach, recognising the need for including people with disability in the research process from concept to outcome, and nurturing participation and collaboration between all the stakeholders in achieving action-based research. The research teams always included people with disability and staff from Disability People’s Organisations (DPOs) as well as academics and service providers. It endeavoured to generate and carry out research around issues that mattered to people with disability and their families. Leadership roles were assigned by team members. The objectives of the CARD programme were: (1) to fund teams to carry out action-based research on disability in Uganda; (2) to develop research and administrative capacity to manage the initiative within the academic registrar’s office at Kyambogo University; (3) to incorporate new knowledge generated from the studies into the ongoing local community-based rehabilitation and special education courses; and, (4) to ensure wide dissemination of research findings to all stakeholder groups.

CARD ran for 5 years, commissioning 21 action research studies in the field of disability and community-based services. This paper describes the process, presents the 12 completed studies, examines the extent to which the objectives were achieved and evaluates the experiences of the participating research teams, particularly in relation to the inclusion of its members with disability. It concludes with recommendations for future initiatives designed to promote validity, good value and inclusive approaches in disability research.

In previous research, meeting places have been favourably addressed by service users, but they have also been contested as exclusionary. In this participatory explorative study, we sought to perform a contextual analysis of meeting places in Norway based on a discourse analysis of three focus group discussions with 15 staff members. We asked the following question: how do meeting-place employees discuss their concrete and abstract encounters with service users and their experiences? We focused on service user involvement, which was largely analysed as neoliberal consultation and responsibilisation. Service users were positioned as resisting responsibility trickling down and defending staffed meeting places. Social democratic discourse was identified in the gaps of neoliberal discourse, which is noteworthy given that Norway is a social democracy. This relates to global concerns about displacements of democracy. We suggest that meeting places appear to hold the potential for staff and service users to collaborate more democratically.

This paper considers performance poetry as a method to explore lived experiences of disability. We discuss how poetic inquiry used within a participatory arts-based research framework can enable young people to collectively question society’s attitudes and actions towards disability. Poetry will be considered as a means to develop a more accessible and effective arena in which young people with direct experience of disability can be empowered to develop new skills that enable them to tell their own stories. Discussion of how this can challenge audiences to critically reflect upon their own perceptions of disability will also be developed.

Purpose: By exploring the level of knowledge about HIV/AIDS and attitudes towards persons with HIV/AIDS among deaf people in Ghana, this article aims to identify and correct possible gaps in awareness.

Method: A participatory sexual and reproductive health (SRH) needs assessment was conducted, targetting deaf people who were fluent in the Ghanaian Sign Language (GSL). The study design was a two-phase, sequential, mixed methods approach. Three focus groups assisted in the development of a survey, which was then implemented for needs assessment data collection. The 179 study participants consisted of 26 focus group participants, 152 survey respondents and 1 key informant. Of the focus group participants, 7 were executives of Ghana National Association of the Deaf (GNAD), 10 were adult males, and nine were adult females. Apart from the key informant, all the participants were deaf persons.

Results: The study indicated that many respondents still had misconceptions about HIV/AIDS and had difficulty identifying preventive methods, but their attitudes towards persons with HIV/AIDS was generally positive.

Conclusion: More attention needs to be paid to the requirements of the deaf community and to designing HIV/AIDS programmes and services that are deaf-friendly and accessible.