Don’t ask us to overcome barriers; remove them

There is a quiet violence that rarely makes headlines.

It does not arrive with weapons or sirens. It arrives as a registration form that a blind person cannot complete. A health facility where staff speak but never sign. A protection system designed to help survivors that a survivor with a disability simply cannot access.

This is the violence that point 9 of the Youth Ten-Point Plan for Change, which young people presented at the Global Partnerships Conference in May, names directly: equality and violence. It demands that we stop treating inclusion as an afterthought and start treating it as architecture.

I have seen this up close in Sierra Leone, as a young disabled person working alongside children and other young people living with disabilities. Again and again, we encounter gender-based violence response structures that assume a survivor can walk in, speak up and navigate bureaucracy without support. Protection mechanisms that were never designed to see disability at all.

This is not accidental. It is structural.

The path to true disability inclusion

The global community has already agreed on paper that this must change. Article 16 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities obligates governments to ensure that protection services are accessible and disability-inclusive. The African Union Protocol on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in Africa reinforces this regionally, calling on member states to address the unique vulnerabilities of persons with disabilities within protection systems.

These are not aspirational clauses. They are binding commitments.

The 10-point plan is clear: don’t ask us to overcome barriers, remove them. And while removing barriers is necessary, it is not sufficient. Systems must be co-designed with us because lived experience cannot be substituted by good intention.

For governments, this means budgets that reflect intersectionality. For donors, it means funding disability-led voices, not just mentioning disability in log frames. For all of us in civil society, it means refusing spaces that speak about us without speaking with us.

We are not a gap to be filled in someone else’s programme. We are the architects of the systems we deserve.

If the world is serious about addressing global challenges, success cannot be achieved while leaving important groups of people out of the decision-making processes that shape them.

Disability and development
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The path to true disability inclusion

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