DFID’s approach to disability in development

Review

ICAI published this rapid review in May 2018, acknowledging that around one in six people in developing countries live with a disability. As a group, they tend to be poorer, and suffer more discrimination, exclusion and violence than the rest of the population. As a rapid review, it was not scored, but ICAI made six recommendations.

Findings

This review found that DFID has made a useful start to developing an approach to disability and development and is scaling up activities ahead of the global disability summit, but a step change is needed to mainstream disability across the department.

DFID senior management has provided clear leadership since 2017 and DFID has put a range of mandatory requirements into its programme management processes, but its disability-targeted programming in key sectors is too modest in scale and reach to be likely to deliver transformational results.

DFID has taken a leadership role internationally, and has rightly focused investment on research and on filling a key data gap created by the lack of robust and consistent methods for counting the number of people with disabilities. DFID is beginning to develop a research strategy but it is not clear how far people with disabilities will be involved in steering DFID’s disability research.

DFID has not yet aligned its research agenda with its policy priorities, and currently there is no plan to mainstream disability into broader research despite the positive experience of an earlier cross-cutting disability research programme. DFID has also not yet been specific on how far people with disabilities will be involved in steering research.

The review also found that DFID staff have limited guidance on how to address disability in programming. The proposed Disability Inclusive Development programme will promote research uptake, but could be complemented by a structured exchange of learning between country offices on the more practical aspects of mainstreaming disability, a community of practice of staff working on disability and a plan for evaluations.

DFID’s commitment to disability inclusion requires more staff with disabilities, especially as the UK civil service has a goal to be the most inclusive employer in the UK by 2020.

Recommendations

1. DFID should adopt a more visible and systematic plan for mainstreaming disability inclusion. The plan should be time-bound with commitments and actions at the level of programming, human resourcing, learning, and organisational culture.
2. DFID should increase the representation of staff with disabilities at all levels of the department, and increase the number of staff with significant previous experience in working on disability inclusion.
3. DFID country offices should develop theories of change for disability inclusion in their countries. These should propose a strategy for the country office, with a particular focus on influencing and working with national governments.
4. DFID should engage with disabled people’s organisations on country-level disability inclusion strategies, advocacy towards partner governments, capacity building, and the design of programmes, including research programmes.
5. In order to deliver its existing policy commitments, DFID should increase its programming on (i) tackling stigma and discrimination, including within the private sector, and (ii) inclusion of people with psychosocial disabilities and people with intellectual disabilities, noting that these are two different groups who face different sets of challenges.
6. DFID should create a systematic learning programme, and a community of practice, on the experience of mainstreaming disability into DFID programmes.