Over the last five years, the World Bank has finally recognized the importance of including persons with disabilities in the development agenda and acknowledged that it cannot achieve its twin goals of ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity without disability inclusion. Despite the positive impact the Bank’s Environmental and Social Framework and 2018 Global Disability Summit (GDS) commitments have had on increasing references to persons with disabilities in project documents, the design and implementation of many projects remain inaccessible, preventing persons with disabilities from accessing project benefits. In our conversations with Bank teams, many stress that they don’t know how to make projects disability-inclusive and are therefore unable to fully implement the Bank’s disability commitments. Fundamentally, the Bank will not be able to achieve its existing GDS commitments without proactively and meaningfully engaging persons with disabilities because they are instrumental to understanding how the Bank can make education, post-disaster reconstruction, and urban mobility and rail projects, among others, disability-inclusive. As engagement with organizations of persons with disabilities is a key theme of the second GDS, which is taking place February 16 – 17, 2022, now is the time for the Bank to develop a robust plan to meaningfully consult persons with disabilities and their representative organizations.
The Bank-funded National Agricultural Advisory Services (NAADS) project in Uganda exemplifies how engaging persons with disabilities and organizations of persons with disabilities directly impact project outcomes. In one district where the National Union of Disabled Persons of Uganda (NUDIPU) actively engaged the district government, persons with disabilities benefitted, but in another district where NUDPU was not engaged, persons with disabilities were unable to benefit from the project. While the Bank has produced a Guidance Note that defines what “disability-inclusive” means in education projects and recognizes stakeholder engagement as a core pillar for disability-inclusive education, our discussions with Bank teams demonstrate that robust engagement is still not happening systematically in education projects nor other sectors with GDS commitments.
To help task teams and implementing agencies foster meaningful engagement with persons with disabilities and fulfill disability commitments, we recommend the Bank:
For more information on BIC’s disability inclusion work, visit our disability rights webpage.
