4.1.2 Set up and cooperate with community groups

While chiefs are important for the humanitarian response, international organizations also organize consultations with community groups, including groups of persons with disabilities. One respondent explains:

Representative of a United Nations agency

There has been a push that people with disabilities are valued and listened to and to give them the opportunity to raise the issues that they have. It is not just a matter of saying, “Well, this person over here needs food assistance, because they have a disability and can’t leave their shelter”. It is actually a matter of making sure that they are part of the community. When you are having community meetings, they need to be included as well.

Where such groups are not present, organizations try to establish community groups or committees of persons with disabilities. Not only does this promote disability inclusion in the society, but the committees also strengthen the role of persons with disabilities in community governance, both inside and outside the IDP camps (formerly known as protection of civilian sites). A representative of an international agency summarizes:

Representative of a United Nations agency

We have disability committees inside the [protection of civilian] site. One of our key functions is to ensure that there is community governance in the sites. We help to facilitate elections; we help to make sure that each block has a representative and that there is some sort of gender balance. And having disability representatives has been really important. […] And they engage with humanitarians on their own basis. People with disabilities can communicate their needs to humanitarians through these communities, through these representatives.

These practices help to increase the participation of persons with disabilities in society and in the overall response.

Some international organizations have also begun to recruit skilled persons with disabilities to increase their diversity and enhance their organizational expertise on disability inclusion. Yet, to ensure true diversity, it is necessary to hire persons with disabilities at all levels of the organizations, including the higher management level. These ‘inclusion experts’ can raise awareness for the needs of persons with disabilities and give them a voice in project design and implementation.

Interestingly, concrete strategies on how to enhance the meaningful participation of persons with disabilities in the clusters do not exist. HI has tried to work on this in the past, but there has been no tangible outcome. OPDs were not interested or had limited funding to support the meaningful participation of persons with disabilities. One idea to address this gap in the future is to encourage the disability working group and the mental health and socio-social support working group to operate under the protection cluster. This would increase the visibility of persons with disabilities and push all actors to consider the needs and rights of persons with disabilities, particularly because OPDs lack the capacity to be regularly present in all clusters (interview with an inclusion-focused NGO). One respondent remarks:

Representative of an INGO

Within the protection cluster, there are several areas of responsibility. This includes child protection, gender-based violence, mine action and housing land and property. Then there are other subgroups and technical working groups. But two key ones that appear in protection cluster in other country operations, specifically the working group on persons with disabilities and another working group that relates to mental health and socio-social support, they are not under the protection cluster in South Sudan. This is one of the things that many people would like to change to make sure that the protection angle is well captured throughout the response. Maybe the fact that these working groups were never under protection before is what made people forget about a need to collect data on persons with disabilities and ensure that they reach them during the response, perhaps thinking that other actors were working on inclusion, or just not even thinking about this at all.