In 2022, Community-Based Inclusive Development (CBID) continued to be an area of high priority for CBM Global as community-focused projects intersected across many sectors such as education, health, livelihoods, economic empowerment, food security, social protection as well as other crosscutting themes such as gender and climate change adaptations.
Our CBID approaches did not just look to bring about change and transformation at an individual level, but we continued to challenge systemic exclusion and discrimination faced by people with disabilities at various levels. We maximised our impact by delivering a combination of inclusive community-based programmes, advocacy, advisory and awareness at community, national, regional and global levels.
The modelling of our life-changing community development programmes across Africa, Asia and Latin America continued to establish foundations for inclusion in project planning, ensuring the foundations, or preconditions for inclusion in community-focused programming. These foundations are drawn from various CRPD and disability-rights literature. These pre-conditions for inclusion are things that need to be done, at the community level, to ensure disability inclusion and include conditions such as equality and non-discrimination, accessibility, access to services, accountability, participation of people with disabilities and their representative organisations, disability data, inclusive budgets and regulations on added costs of disability.
Realising these conditions requires coordinated and integrated programming. Our strategic partners and Organisations of People with Disabilities (OPDs) have challenged us to prioritise these foundations for inclusion and it continued to remain a highly valued area in programming in seeking real change. At its best, we have seen this bring systemic change at community and wider levels as well as the opportunity to effectively push closer to our vision, mission and distinctives, and gain effective outcomes as we define our niche and plot a way forward in our community-based inclusive programming. The framing of CBID projects has continued to support CBM Global’s commitment to localisation by connecting people with disabilities with each other, their families, the wider community and with decision makers – all undertaken in close partnership with OPDs and implementing partners.