Despite progress in recent years, political conflict, recurrent climate shocks, disease outbreaks, large-scale evictions and increasing poverty are devastating the people of Somalia and Somaliland. Recently, especially drought and famine have increased the internal displacement and the number of persons in need of humanitarian assistance and protection.
According to the Humanitarian Needs Overview (HNO 2022), persons with disabilities are among the most excluded from humanitarian assistance. The stigmatisation of persons with disabilities in the community and the limited capacity of humanitarian actors to include persons with disabilities in programming and coordination exacerbate vulnerability and further exclusion.
Disability-Inclusion in Humanitarian Response
Due to a poor identification of persons with disabilities, humanitarian aid programming is not sufficiently disability inclusive. Efforts are needed to reduce disability-specific risks by improving coordination, identification and data collection among humanitarian actors to enhance programming.
In the Humanitarian Country Team’s (HCT) Centrality of Protection Strategy 2022-23, the HCT commits to strengthen efforts to identify barriers, risks and enabling factors for persons with disabilities. Further, it commits to take concrete steps to improve the inclusion of persons with different types of disabilities. This could be achieved, for example, by supporting clusters and humanitarian actors in strengthening data collection. In particular, it is important to enhance capacity and locally adapted tools for inclusive data and programming in protection and WASH in line with IASC Guidelines.
Project Location
The project will be implemented in Mogadishu in South Central Somalia and in Hargeisa, Gabiley, Arabsiyo in Somaliland where significant protection risks remain due to physical, communication and attitudinal barriers and lack of adequate consideration in humanitarian assistance.
