Lovemore Rambiyawo
Introduction

Although people with disabilities suffer from lack of access to fundamental freedoms and rights that other people in society take for granted, paradoxically, disability continues to be systematically excluded in development interventions worldwide and international development-defining policies such as the United Nations development framework and the Millennium Development Goals.

While the Millennium Development Goals are an international blueprint for development that hold a lot of scope for committing governments to ”making the right to development a reality for everyone and to freeing the entire human race from want”, the MDGs are inherently flawed – disability is not mentioned in any of the 8 MDGs, the 18 targets and the 48 indicators, effectively leaving out people with disabilities out of the development loop.   By excluding a large part of society (people with disabilities constitute 15% of the world’s population according to WHO estimates), the MDGs have ensured that  people with disabilities are mostly  unable to benefit from the achievements made in attaining the MDGs.

Against such a background of all-encompassing exclusion, international development focus is now focused on mainstreaming disability as a panacea for ensuring disability inclusion in all societal activities.

Mainstreaming disability

While there is currently no officially accepted definition of mainstreaming disability, the experience with defining gender mainstreaming provides us with a ready example to borrow from. By substituting ‘gender’ with disability, we come up with the following definition:

“Mainstreaming a disability perspective is the process of assessing the implications for [people with disabilities] of any planned action, including legislation, policies and programmes, in all areas and at all levels. It is a strategy for making people with disabilities’ concerns and experiences an integral dimension of the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of policies and programmes

in all political, economic and societal spheres so that [people with disabilities] benefit equally and inequality is not perpetuated. The ultimate goal is to achieve disability equality.” » Read more: Why should Civil Society Organisations mainstream disability?

Nine civil society organisations working broadly in the area of civic education with a specific focus on elections have made a commitment to include disability in their programmes and policies in an effort to advance ongoing disability inclusion efforts in the country.

The commitment to disability inclusion follows a disability mainstreaming workshop which was recently convened by the National Association of Societies for the Care of the Handicapped (NASCOH) in Harare recently that brought together civil society organisations who are implementing the ongoing HIVOs- IMS electoral interventions, to map out strategies for disability inclusion in their respective programmes.

Organisations that attended the path-charting workshop were the Zimbabwe Association of Human Rights (ZIMRGHTS), Zimbabwe Civic Education Trust (ZIMCET), Zimbabwe Elections Support Network (ZESN), Civil Network (CIVNET), Artists for Democracy in Zimbabwe Trust, Musasa  Project, Envision Zimbabwe Women Trust, Zimbabwe Association of Doctors for Human Rights (ZADHR), and Local Government Development Trust (LGT). » Read more: Civic society organisations agree to mainstream disability