More than 13 years after the entry into force of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), persons with disabilities remain at a high risk of being neglected and marginalized in humanitarian action. However, the Agenda for Humanity from the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit, with its commitment to leave no one behind, has accelerated efforts to include persons with disabilities in all humanitarian response efforts, especially at the international policy level.
The Charter on Inclusion of Persons with Disabilities in Humanitarian Action was launched during the World Humanitarian Summit as a tool to initiate the process of developing the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) Guidelines and pressure states parties of the CRPD to meet their obligations under its Article 11, which introduces the right to protection in humanitarian emergencies and situations of risk. To date, more than 220 stakeholders have endorsed the Charter. Signatories pledge to:
To facilitate the implementation of the Charter in humanitarian practice, IASC, the highest humanitarian coordination forum in the United Nations system, established a time-bound task team to support the development of system-wide guidelines on disability inclusion.2 Three years later, in 2019, after numerous meetings, technical workshops, regional and thematic consultations and the evaluation of a comprehensive online survey among humanitarian, development and disability actors, the IASC Guidelines on the Inclusion of Persons with Disabilities in Humanitarian Action were officially launched in New York and Geneva. They reflect the input of more than 600 stakeholders and have been translated into Arabic, Spanish and French, including their respective braille and easy-to-read versions. They define four key objectives, namely to: 1) provide practical guidance on disability inclusion in humanitarian programming and coordination; 2) increase the capacity of humanitarian actors; 3) raise their awareness on their accountability to include persons with disabilities; and 4) increase the participation of persons with disabilities in preparedness, response and recovery. To meet these objectives, the Guidelines establish four concrete ‘must do’ actions, which apply to all humanitarian sectors and contexts:
The question arises of the extent to which humanitarian agencies and organizations have begun to use and apply these four ‘must do’ actions in their country operations. To shed light on this question, and to detect challenges and progress towards disability-inclusive humanitarian action, including for persons with intellectual and psychosocial disabilities, who are most at risk of exclusion, this research report examines the implementation of the four ‘must do’ actions in South Sudan, site of one of the largest and most complex humanitarian crises in the world.