Johannes Trimmel,2 Claire Walsh3 and José María Viera4
In the summer of 2018, the first Global Disability Summit was held in the UK, and 170 commitments were made around the themes of ensuring dignity and respect for all, inclusive education, economic empowerment, technology and innovation, women and girls with disabilities, conflict and humanitarian settings, and data disaggregation (DFID, FCDO and Mordaunt 2018). These commitments looked to move the dial on the inclusion of people with disabilities and change how international development was done. At the 2018 Global Disability Summit, the UK government launched its flagship Disability Inclusive Development (DID) programme. Its intervention initiative, Disability Inclusive Development Inclusive Futures (hereafter Inclusive Futures) programme, is led by an international non-governmental organisation (INGO) and an Organisation of Persons with Disabilities (OPD), Sightsavers, and the International Disability Alliance (IDA).
The Inclusive Futures consortium is composed of INGOs from the mainstream and disability sectors, OPDs, a social enterprise, and research institutes: ADD International, BBC Media Action, BRAC, Humanity & Inclusion, the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), IDA, Leonard Cheshire (left the consortium in 2022), Light for the World, Sense International, Sightsavers, and Social Development Direct.
Inclusive Futures innovates and scales approaches to disability inclusion in health, education, and livelihoods and tackles stigma and discrimination in Bangladesh, Kenya, Nepal, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda. It explores how the legal obligations of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) can guide international development practice to be disability inclusive. Inclusive Futures partners with the Programme for Evidence to Inform Disability Action (PENDA) led by the International Centre for Evidence in Disability based at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, as well as IDS and the Sightsavers Research Centre, to generate rigorous quantitative and qualitative research, evidence, and learning on disability inclusion. The Inclusive Futures programme hypothesised that this partnership would deliver one of the smartest, most transformative investments in global aid.
Amina, founder of TIRKPOP Charity Foundation at a workshop on barriers to health care
Photo credit Andrea Pregel/Sightsavers
The decision to share the leadership of Inclusive Futures between an INGO and an OPD set the tone. OPDs are central actors in advancing disability-inclusive development. The CRPD establishes their unique role as representative organisations, mandated to bring the voices and lived experiences of people with disabilities into decision-making at all levels (UN 2006). However, despite this clear recognition, OPDs continue to face barriers to exercising leadership in mainstream development programmes, often being confined to advocacy or consultation roles rather than being positioned as equal partners in programme design and delivery.
The Inclusive Futures programme looked to change that and implemented requirements that supported INGO consortium partners to meaningfully include OPDs. The requirements ranged from integrating OPD engagement into design documents; prioritising the participation of OPDs in programme start-up workshops in partner countries; submitting an OPD engagement plan in the inception phase of projects; reporting against indicators that supported the measurement of OPD engagement during implementation; and participating in programme-learning initiatives that explored learning on the role of OPDs in enhancing disability-inclusive development in policy implementation and development projects.
However, Inclusive Futures did not develop central guidance on how to engage OPDs. This conscious decision not to standardise an approach to OPD engagement allowed consortium partners to develop and adapt their approach on a project-by‑project basis. The aim was to allow INGOs from the disability sector to refine their practice and INGOs from the mainstream development sector to develop it, drawing on peer learning, collaboration with OPD partners, and technical guidance on participatory approaches from IDS. This process supported the development of sustainable practices and strengthened consortium partnerships. For example, Sightsavers integrated Inclusive Futures programme learning into their internal guidance on OPD engagement.
Programme learning on OPD engagement was then harvested via participatory learning initiatives, engaging the consortium and downstream partners to explore learning on partnerships. In 2022, a series of round table discussions brought together INGO and OPD project staff – separately and jointly – from Bangladesh, Kenya, Nepal, Nigeria, and Tanzania. This learning exchange produced Creating Meaningful and Successful Partnerships Between INGOs and OPDs: Key Values and Attitudes and A Guide to Building Meaningful and Successful Partnerships Between INGOs and OPDs: What We’ve Learned from the Inclusive Futures Programme (Inclusive Futures 2023a, 2023b). Partnering for Disability Inclusion highlighted how partnership between NGOs, local authorities, and OPDs strengthened sexual and reproductive health and rights by collaborating on disability inclusion training for female community health volunteers (Inclusive Futures 2023c).
OPD engagement was also a cross-cutting learning question that featured in the Inclusive Futures learning products on education, health, safeguarding, and programme operations. In education, OPDs were at the forefront of working with families of children with disabilities and communities. Their work raising awareness and sharing their lived experience to achieve the buy-in needed to address stigma and discrimination was a game changer. Inclusive Futures’ work with local government also proved to be effective in bridging sectors, acknowledging that the lived experience of people with disabilities cannot be compartmentalised. To succeed in the inclusion of children with disabilities in a mainstream classroom, it meant connecting the education system to the health system, social protection provisions, and livelihood opportunities for the parents.
The Inclusive Futures Driving Change: Six Principles for Disability Inclusive Development learning product reviewed 12 projects from the innovation phase and found that partnership was a key principle for inclusive development. Principle 6, ‘Don’t try to do it alone – form partnerships’, quoted an OPD leader (Inclusive Futures 2024: 24):
A few years on [from the start of the innovation phase]… it’s not just the OPD partner who has to say ‘what about meaningful engagement?’ but other [Inclusive Futures] partners are mentioning it – this is a real achievement.
By 2025, the Inclusive Futures programme had worked with over 200 OPDs and channelled 10 per cent of its total programme funding (FCDO 2025) to downstream OPDs.5 It had produced over 300 publicly available products spanning blogs, webinars, videos, research articles, policy briefs, and learning products. Over 100 dissemination events targeting donor and mainstream development audiences, not usually reached by disability inclusion, took place. Almost 3.5 million people with disabilities and 15 million people without disabilities were reached. As a Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office A-rated programme, Inclusive Futures delivered on its commitment to use the power of partnership to deliver real change for people with disabilities and share its learning.
But how will Inclusive Futures research, evidence, and learning inform political decisions, policy formulation, policy implementation, and development programming in the future?
In 2025, the progress on disability inclusion is under threat by diminishing Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) budgets. Globally, there is a shift to militarisation, and government spend on international aid is under major scrutiny. Shrinking fiscal space means that disability inclusion is also slipping off the government’s agenda in many countries.
The Inclusive Futures programme has proved that disability-inclusive development is achievable. It’s not a far-off goal to be examined after all other problems are solved. While being far from perfect, Inclusive Futures made a difference to the lives of many people with disabilities, their families and communities. This is a qualitative difference which in many cases is possible to realise in mainstream settings. For example, continuing professional development schemes and peer support mechanisms are a regular feature for teachers in the education sector; these can easily include elements on inclusive education and child-centred learning without an extra price tag. Or, to integrate disability-disaggregated data into sector management information systems, you may need the tools – some of which are publicly available – and to train cadres. But when implemented, it becomes part of business-as-usual data management and analysis.
The Inclusive Futures Nepal inclusive education project set a precedent by getting a commitment for all new enrolled children being assessed for disability using the Washington Group Questions, and embedding disability into the Education Management Information System. Investing in disability inclusion produces sustainable change.
While the Inclusive Futures programme focused on supporting people with disabilities and generating evidence on what does and does not work for disability inclusion, all initiatives worked within existing systems, settings, and policies. Rather than creating perfect islands of disability inclusion outside of existing government systems, we identified entry points and ways to make existing systems more disability inclusive. Pivotal to this approach was the engagement of OPDs, which was resourced and included reasonable accommodations (Inclusive Futures 2025). However, it also included tackling stigma and the discrimination of service providers and in communities (Inclusive Futures n.d.), linking to available social protection and support services outside of the sector, and investing in data disaggregation, amongst other strategies.
A twin-track approach to the inclusion of people with disabilities must not be understood as separate, isolated pillars, providing support to people with disabilities and the disability movement on one side, while on the other side continuing to operate mainstream programmes that include people with disabilities but without making the necessary provisions to allow for full and equal participation and access. Mainstream programmes need to integrate learning from programmes such as Inclusive Futures and make meaningful and significant change to their systems, attitudes, and processes to allow for inclusion to happen, and to become inclusive by design.
If governments continue to cut development aid budgets and allocate less resources for people left the furthest behind, we must be cautious that a call to ‘mainstreaming disability’ is not a call to disinvest in inclusion, rolling back progress made to include people with disabilities and their representative organisations in disability-inclusive development. Mainstreaming will be a shallow exercise if it is not accompanied by investment in disabilityspecific actions and OPDs; this would perpetuate the exclusion. INGOs must act and continue to budget for OPDs to meaningfully engage throughout the project cycle, provide reasonable accommodations, and invest in inclusive accountability mechanisms.
Mainstreaming can work if the mainstream commits to meaningful change and invests in disability-inclusive practices and the empowerment of OPDs. Otherwise, do not call it mainstreaming.
1 This issue of the IDS Bulletin was supported by UK aid under its flagship Disability Inclusive Development (DID) programme. The DID programme was delivered through two separate programmes. The eight-year consortium intervention, Disability Inclusive Development Inclusive Futures (Inclusive Futures) programme, led by Sightsavers and the International Disability Alliance, ran from August 2018 to March 2026. It has reached more than 19 million people and generated almost 300 learning and evidence resources to inform policy and practice on disability-inclusive development. The evaluation programme, the Programme for Evidence to Inform Disability Action (PENDA), was delivered by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. The opinions expressed are the authors’ own and do not reflect the views of the funders.
2 Johannes Trimmel, Programme Director, Disability Inclusive Development, Sightsavers, Austria.
3 Claire Walsh, Deputy Programme Director, Disability Inclusive Development, Sightsavers, Canada.
4 José María Viera, Executive Director, International Disability Alliance, Canada.
5 For the purposes of calculating this figure, downstream partners are defined as organisations outside the DID consortium partners. The International Disability Alliance is not included in the calculation as they are a consortium partner and not a downstream partner.
DFID, FCDO and Mordaunt, P. (2018) Global Disability Summit – Final Summary, UK government (accessed 4 December 2025)
FCDO (2025) Disability Inclusive Development Programme – Annual Review 2025, Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (accessed 27 January 2026)
Inclusive Futures (n.d.) Tackling Disability Stigma (accessed 4 January 2026)
Inclusive Futures (2025) Budgeting for Inclusion: Lessons from Inclusive Futures on Effective Reasonable Accommodation Budgeting (accessed 4 January 2026)
Inclusive Futures (2024) Driving Change: Six Principles for Disability Inclusive Development (accessed 4 December 2025)
Inclusive Futures (2023a) Creating Meaningful and Successful Partnerships Between INGOs and OPDs: Key Values and Attitudes (accessed 4 December 2025)
Inclusive Futures (2023b) A Guide to Building Meaningful and Successful Partnerships Between INGOs and OPDs: What We’ve Learned from the Inclusive Futures Programme (accessed 4 December 2025)
Inclusive Futures (2023c) Partnering for Disability Inclusion (accessed 4 December 2025)
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© 2026 The Authors. IDS Bulletin © Institute of Development Studies | DOI: 10.19088/1968-2026.155 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited and any modifications or adaptations are indicated.
The IDS Bulletin is published by Institute of Development Studies, Library Road, Brighton, BN1 9RE, UK. This article is part of IDS Bulletin Vol. 57 No. 1 March 2026 ‘Building Disability-Inclusive Futures’; the Introduction is also recommended reading.