4.2.1 Remove attitudinal barriers

Raising awareness among humanitarian actors is one of the best ways to address attitudinal barriers. Consequently, inclusion-focused organizations use every opportunity to give presentations on inclusion in cluster coordination meetings, share documents and guidelines, and support capacity-building, for example, by helping organizations with the development of a disability inclusion policy or strategy. HI, in cooperation with the International Organization for Migration’s [IOM] Displacement Tracking Matrix, also carried out barriers and facilitators assessments in various regions across South Sudan to increase the understanding of the situation of persons with disabilities among humanitarian actors.13 Moreover, in May 2020, HI South Sudan published a tip sheet for organizations on including persons with disabilities and elderly persons in the COVID-19 health response.14 In 2021, HI, together with the community engagement working group and OCHA, organized a workshop for all cluster coordinators on accountability to affected populations that also addressed the issue of accountability to persons with disabilities (interview with a United Nations agency). In the same year, HI and the community engagement working group carried out a community engagement survey, which asked 98 organizations if they included persons with disabilities in their community engagement activities. Most organizations replied that they involved persons with disabilities in community meetings and focus group discussions. One respondent summarizes:

Representative of a United Nations agency

We recently did a community engagement survey for our humanitarian partners. One of the questions was: “Do you include persons with disabilities in your community engagement activities? And if so, how?” Most of the 98 responses indicated some awareness on disability inclusion. They did not necessarily respond to community engagement, but about their projects in general. They were saying, “Yes, of course, when we go to the communities, we talk to persons with disabilities, and we make sure we have focus groups with them, etc.” […] Several organizations also had projects that targeted persons with disabilities […] There are certainly NGOs and agencies that have projects that are specifically dedicated to people with specific needs.

While the survey did not provide any evidence on precisely how organizations included persons with disabilities and whether they had the intention of empowering them, it nevertheless reconfirmed that many organizations already have some awareness on inclusion. In fact, the number of organizations engaging with persons with disabilities is quite remarkable, but their actual implementation of inclusion requires more research. Indeed, it is highly likely that persons with intellectual and psychosocial disabilities are not included in these projects. For any future community engagement surveys, instead of asking organizations about their engagement with ‘persons with disabilities’ in general, it will be important to use the Washington Group Short Set of Questions . In this way, it is possible to learn more about their activities vis-à-vis persons with different types of impairments.