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This collection and review of evidence aims to illustrate how the COVID-19 crisis triggers disproportionate risks and barriers for men, women, boys and girls with disabilities living in humanitarian settings. It highlights recommendations for humanitarian actors, to enhance inclusive action, aligned with existing guidance and learnings on disability inclusion. It is based on evidence, including testimonies, collected by HI programs in 19 countries of intervention. Special efforts were made to reflect the voices of persons with different types of disabilities, genders and ages, residing in different geographical areas and living circumstances, including refugee and internally displaced persons’ settlements and host communities.

Evidence has been collected through primary data collection among HI teams and partners, working in countries impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic in April/May 2020. Data was extracted from assessments conducted by HI and partners in Bangladesh, Egypt, Haïti, Indonesia, Philippines, Jordan, Lebanon, Somaliland and Togo. Testimonies from affected communities, staff and partners were collected in Kenya, Myanmar, Pakistan, Palestine, Philippines, Somaliland, South Sudan, Rwanda, Thailand, Uganda and Yemen.

This report aims to examine the extent to which Rwanda’s activities aimed at achieving the goals and targets set out in the SDGs include and consider people with disabilities and comply with its commitments under the CRPD. 

Information for this report was obtained from two sources: the first source was the available documents including government policies, laws and reports, as well as a variety of other documents and reports from other sources. The second source of information was interviews conducted with people with disabilities from three different regions of the country, namely Musanze district, Nyagatare district, and the city of Kigali.

This report focuses on five SDGs which were selected after a series of consultations with people with disabilities and their organisations. These are:

Goal 1: End poverty in all its forms everywhere;
Goal 3: Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages;
Goal 4: Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all;
Goal 5: Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls;
Goal 8: Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all.

This report identifies a wide range of barriers persons with disabilities experience in accessing social protection to be overcome. It calls for better data on disability, disability-specific and old age pension schemes and expanded coverage; adapting communications about social protection schemes; and improving disability assessment mechanisms. The project involved a review of the literature, an analysis of household survey datasets, and consultations with key stakeholders and persons with disabilities in seven low- and middle-income countries: Brazil, India, Kenya, Mauritius, Rwanda, South Africa and Zambia.

Barriers and pathways to the inclusion of persons with mental and intellectual disabilities in technical and vocational education and training (TVET) programmes in four East African countries (Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, and Uganda) were explored, in order to pave the way to greater inclusion. An explorative, qualitative study including 10 in-depth interviews and a group discussion was conducted with coordinators of different programmes.

Disability and Rehabilitation, 42:4, 536-544

https://doi.org/10.1080/09638288.2018.1503729

This newsletter contains a variety of articles about inclusive education in several countries around the world. The topics focus mostly on funding, managing and sustaining inclusive education; engaging and empowering beneficiaries in finding solutions; facilitating parental and child involvement and early childhood education

Enabling Education Review, issue 4

In this paper I problematize knowledge on reducing the ‘gap’ in treatment produced by 14 national mental health policies in Africa. To contextualize this analysis, I begin with a historic-political account of the emergence of the notion of primary health care and its entanglement within decolonization forces of the 1960s. I unpack how and why this concept was subsequently atrophied, being stripped of its more revolutionary sentiments from the 1980s. Against this backdrop, I show how, although the 14 national mental health policies are saturated with the rhetoric of primary health care and associated concepts of community participation and ownership, in practice they tend to marginalize local meaning-systems and endorse a top-down framework heavily informed by colonial medicine. The policies thus end up reproducing many of the very Eurocentric assumptions that the original primary health care notion sought to transcend. More specifically, the paradigms of evidence-based research/practice and individualised human rights become the gatekeepers of knowledge. These two paradigms, which are deeply embedded within contemporary global mental health discourse, are legislating what are legitimate forms of knowing, and by extension, valid forms of care. I argue that a greater appreciation of the primary health care concept, in its earliest formulation, offers a potentially fruitful terrain of engagement for developing more contextually-embedded and epistemologically appropriate mental health policies in Africa. This in turn might help reduce the current ‘gap’ in mental health care treatment so many countries on the continent face.

Disability and the Global South (DGS), 2015, Vol. 2 No. 3

This brief is an introduction to the lessons learned document on good practices about the inclusion of disability in HIV policy and programming. Good practices and processes concerning the inclusion of disability issues in HIV policy and programming are highlighted, drawing on specific experiences in Senegal, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda and Cambodia and on lessons learned at international AIDS conferences

LL No 7 Brief 

"This document aims to capture some of the key lessons learned from Handicap International’s New Partnership Initiative project in Rwanda, which started in 2008 with the objective to integrate persons with disabilities in HIV and Sexual Violence (SV) prevention efforts and service provision generally. It is the result of qualitative, multi-stakeholder study about how change occurred within the project and how the experience could be modelled for adaptation or replication in Rwanda or other contexts"
SD/LL 08

The implementation of national health insurance reforms designed to move towards universal health coverage by 9 low-income and lower-middle-income countries in Africa and Asia  is reported. Five countries at intermediate stages of reform (Ghana, Indonesia, the Philippines, Rwanda, and Vietnam) and four at earlier stages (India, Kenya, Mali, and Nigeria) are considered. These countries’ approaches to raising prepaid revenues, pooling risk, and purchasing services are described using the functions-of-health-systems framework. Their progress across three dimensions of coverage: who, what services, and what proportion of health costs is assessed using the coverage-box framework. Patterns in the structure of these countries’ reforms including use of tax revenues to subsidise target populations and steps towards broader risk pools are identified. Trends in progress towards universal coverage, including increasing enrolment in government health insurance and a movement towards expanded benefits packages are reported. Common, comparable indicators of progress towards universal coverage are needed.