Disability-inclusive WASH: Practice within Water for Women

Launched in International Day of Persons with Disability 2022, this brief consolidates learning from Water for Women around what it takes to engage meaningfully with people with disabilities in their full range of diversity and highlights how more marginalised people with disabilities can be successfully reached, even when disability inclusion is relatively new to an organisation or team.

To enable all people with disabilities to participate and benefit from WASH processes and services on an equal basis with others requires:

• a combination of mainstream actions and disability-specific actions in and outside the WASH sector
• a transformative framework that engages with power dynamics and supports the social empowerment and inclusion of people with disability well beyond the sector’s traditional approaches
• staff capacity building to understand the needs and interests of people with disabilities.
  
  

Read our #IDPwD insight

Transforming from “us” and “them” to simply “us”

This brief answers the following key learning questions:

• What have we learnt about engaging meaningfully with people with disabilities in their full range of diversity, and enabling people with disabilities to participate in water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) processes on an equal basis with others?
• What have we learnt about reducing inequalities between people with disabilities and people without disabilities in WASH access?