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This report documents the experience of exclusion of people with intellectual disabilities and their families during the COVID-19 pandemic. These experiences reveal pre-existing structural inequalities that affected the lives of people with intellectual disabilities and their families before COVID-19, during the pandemic, and beyond, and this report raises up the voices of those most excluded in a time of global crisis and demands an inclusive COVID-19 recovery.

This report includes the experiences of people with intellectual disabilities and families across eight different issue areas. Across these themes, we examined how and why people with intellectual disabilities were left out and excluded in pandemic responses, what pre-existing conditions and inequalities contributed to their vulnerability and exclusion, and how future policy structures could begin to address both this immediate and systemic exclusion.

Together, these experiences and policy solutions form our global agenda for inclusive COVID-19 recovery, an action plan to ensure that government efforts to ‘build back better’ are inclusive of people with intellectual disabilities and their families.

Some strategies for dealing with COVID-19 employed by contributing self-advocacy organisations are discussed. Five panellists talk about work in their own countries, presenting and sharing knowledge, experiences and resources for all self-advocates everywhere.

This guide is part of a project on the right to vote and how people with intellectual disabilities can have their voice heard by the people who make laws and policies that affect us. 

Across the Inclusion International network, many individuals and organisations took part in workshops, surveys and interviews to report:

• what self-advocacy means to them
• what good support is 
• how organisations can be more inclusive
• the vital role that families play in empowering self-advocacy.

This report provides a snapshot of work, and has some useful information for self-advocates, supporters, organisations and families. As well as containing the results from the global survey, interviews and workshops, this report also provides some useful guidance for anyone who wants to make the world more inclusive for people with intellectual disabilities.

A website (www.selfadvocacyportal.com) has been developed to share good practice and resources.

This toolkit has been developed as part of an Inclusion International project, Accessing the Ballot Box, funded by the UN Democracy Fund. The project was designed to address the limited political participation of people with intellectual disabilities in Kenya, Zanzibar and Lebanon.

It sought to identify and challenge the barriers people with intellectual disabilities face in exercising their right to civic engagement and political participation and increase the awareness and knowledge of project stakeholders (people with intellectual disabilities, their families and representative organizations, service providers and governments) on building inclusive democratic processes.

This information toolkit is designed to explore how to support people to access the ballot box before during and after elections and to support people with intellectual disabilities and their families, governments and partners to ensure people with intellectual disabilities are able to exercise their right to political participation.

In this resource, intellectually disabled people and their families speak out about social exclusion and poverty. The broader scope of this work is to understand why this group has not managed to benefit from the millennium development goals and examine regional barriers to change. This document concludes with a set of recommendations and best practices from NGOs, civil society members and government officials. This resource would be useful for anyone with an interest in social exclusion disability and development