Despite the significant progress achieved, considerable challenges remain in order to meet the goal of the full enjoyment of rights by persons with disabilities and equal opportunities for them in all spheres. Disability rights need to shift from ‘nice to have’ to ‘must have’.
Setting more ambitious goals would benefit the sector significantly. There is a need to articulate our ambitions clearly and adopt a more sophisticated approach to setting priorities and goals. The lack of prioritization affects our capacity to achieve objectives and maximize resources. We must assess whether we are allocating our efforts and resources towards the most effective processes.
Political leverage and commitment need to be more visible at the leadership levels. Disability rights should be a non-negotiable priority both at the national and international levels. Governments must take a hard look at their normative frameworks, policies and implementation measures to ensure their compliance with the CRPD at national, local and community levels. The United Nations System has to walk the talk by ensuring that disability rights are a priority consideration in the mainstream human rights agenda, both within the institutional arrangements of the organizations and in the services and products they deliver. States can encourage this by bringing the issue to the attention of the heads of UN organizations.
Negative narratives and stereotypes about persons with disabilities persist. They have to be vanished. Unconscious biases and ableism are still pervasive, and disability rights education is limited. Increased awareness raising and a change of culture towards persons with disabilities is key to fostering change and building more resilient societies. Societies need to recognize that persons with disabilities are not only rights holders but also valuable actors who contribute positively to their communities. Governments, the UN and other partners have a duty to design and carry out measures to foster this cultural change, recognizing the broad diversity of persons with disabilities. In this context, more attention should be paid to the most marginalized groups of persons with disabilities, who are often overlooked.
Full accessibility for persons with all different kinds of disabilities remains elusive. Persons with disabilities continue to face barriers, including to the physical, digital and communications environments, which hinder their equal participation in all spheres of life, including in UN meetings and conferences. While accessibility has significantly improved in the premises, conference services and digital environments of the UN System, gaps persist. The UN should strive to be a role model on accessibility, including by becoming the employer of choice for persons with disabilities, by improving the accessibility of its recruitment practices and ensuring reasonable accommodation as well as adequate disability allowances and support to its staff with disabilities or staff dependents with disabilities. States should furnish the UNS with the necessary mandates and resources to become fully accessible, including by allowing the continuation of remote participation in meetings and conferences to foster greater participation, particularly of OPDs.
More and better disaggregated data is needed on persons with disabilities, to serve as a basis both for policy making and for advocacy. Further data needs to be collected and analyzed to objectively measure progress and identify gaps, to allow for the design of tailored solutions and approaches. Standards for data collection should be homogenized internationally, as much as possible, to facilitate comparative analysis. Data at the global, regional and country level should be connected and analyzed to find trends. A few significant figures were mentioned:
- Approximately 16% of the population worldwide is made up of persons with disabilities with one or more impairment. Among those, approximately 240 million are children;
- The unemployment rate among persons with disabilities is 40% higher than among the rest of the population. When persons with disabilities are employed, there is a higher risk of precarious and abusive working conditions;
- 80% of persons with disabilities are excluded from humanitarian responses; and
- The UN invests approximately 15 million USD on persons with disabilities annually.
Prioritization of disability rights means that more and better resources need to be allocated to this issue, both nationally and internationally. This is a challenge, in the context of concurring economic and financial crises and competing priorities worldwide. However, investing in persons with disabilities means investing in more inclusive, productive, resilient and sustainable societies, which in turn will help development and economic growth. On the other hand, the cost of exclusion is too high. Like governments, the UN System also faces a problem of resource constraints vs. constantly increasing demands. UNDIS implementation is largely dependent on voluntary contributions, which puts its sustainability at risk. Innovative solutions need to be found in order to ensure sufficient resources to advance disability rights, including by strengthening the Disability Inclusion Team at the UN Executive Office of the Secretary General, and ensuring its sustainable financing. Many solutions are not that costly and can be implemented incrementally.
At the country level, there are positive examples of CRPD compliant national public budgeting, which could be studied and replicated, so that public resources are explicitly allocated to disability inclusion.
While the participation of OPDs is increasingly recognized as a necessary element to the design, implementation and monitoring of policies and processes, there is a need to move beyond tokenistic engagement and to institutionalize mechanisms for the participation of OPDs at all levels of the UNS and States for their meaningful participation. This entails intentional outreach and inclusion of underrepresented groups such as women and girls, children and young people, refugees, indigenous peoples, those living in rural areas, persons with diverse sexual orientation, gender identity and expression and sex characteristics, persons with intellectual disabilities, persons with psychosocial disabilities, persons with albinism, persons with autism, Deafblind persons, among others.
Funding for organizations of persons with disabilities (OPDs) also faces many challenges. Given the existing regulations and practices around Official Development Assistance (ODA) grants, grassroots organizations are often not able to obtain such financing, particularly core-funding which would allow them to grow and strengthen their capacities. In light of the crucial work of grassroots OPDs at the community level, funding requirements and procedures should be made accessible and inclusive to enable their possibilities to access adequate financing on an equal basis with other civil society organizations and across a broad array of themes- not solely limited to disability-specific matters.
Stronger coordination, collaboration and communication is needed, to break down the silos and achieve systemic change. At the national level, responsibilities and efforts to protect and promote disability rights are often fragmented between the different government agencies, and between the national, provincial and local levels. More efforts are needed for all government institutions, at all levels, to take ownership of disability rights and better coordinate their work to mainstream them into all their activities. Enhanced collaboration is also necessary in the UN System among the different bodies, agencies and other entities. A better connection is required particularly between UN headquarters and country teams, for a continuity of commitment to disability inclusion, including to engage in active outreach to OPDs and persons with disabilities in the field. Resources dedicated to disability should be used more efficiently, avoiding overlap and duplication of initiatives, programs and projects.