Disability Rights Fund

10/01/2026

Heading to the SVRI Forum in Bangkok next week? Join us and Women Enabled International at Booth B19!

DRF Associate Director of Peer and Collective Learning, Dwi Ariyani, will also be chairing a session on 'Disability, violence, and the right to be heard'

🗓️ Tuesday 6 October 2026
⏱️ 17:00-18:30 - Parallel Session 3.5
📍 Lotus 1-4

Four presentations will share research and lived experience on violence against women and young people with disabilities, from human rights violations against women with intellectual disabilities and psychosocial disabilities, to peer-led research, to findings from Malawi and Uganda.

Come to listen, learn and join the conversation.

09/25/2026

This week, Deaf women leaders from across Africa came together in Nairobi for the Pan-African Deaf Women's Network Convening - 'Strengthening Leadership, Building Alliances and Shaping Collective Action' supported by the German Government through GIZ and hosted in collaboration with FEDWEN-Kenya.

Over four days we:
🤝 Connected with partners and donors, and shared the challenges and priorities Deaf women face across the continent.

⚖️ Explored the CRPD, the Maputo Protocol and the African Disability Protocol, then turned those commitments into concrete advocacy asks.

📝 Learned from the wider women's rights movement, with FIDA-Kenya, Femnet Secretariat and Kenya Network of Women and Girls with Disabilities, about building alliances and making sure Deaf women's voices are included.

🚀 Shaped the future of the Network, including priorities, governance, the role of the Steering Committee and the Deaf Feminism Africa initiative.

Participants left with four shared strategic priorities – access to justice; advocacy and policy influence; leadership and movement building; and organisational strengthening and capacity building – as well as a stronger sense of knowledge, confidence, motivation and solidarity.

The convening also laid the foundations for the Network’s next steps, including strengthening its governance, developing its strategic plan, maintaining regular communication and continuing to build collective advocacy across the continent.

Together, we are building a Pan-African platform where Deaf women can connect, lead, advocate and advance their rights. 🤟🏾

09/23/2026

Today is International Day of Sign Languages 🎉

Over 70 million Deaf people worldwide belong to signing Deaf communities, yet only 84 countries have officially recognized a national sign language.

We're celebrating the Rwanda National Union of the Deaf (RNUD), a Deaf-led organization DRF fist funded in 2013, and its decade-plus push to get Rwandan Sign Language recognized:

✔️The 2018 'Sign Your name' campaign, in which 36 public figures learned to sign their names
✔️30 sign language videos made with the Ministry of Health during COVID-19
✔️The first Rwandan Sign Language Dictionary, launched in 2022

Advocacy for official recognition is still gaining momentum in 2026 but every step toward that goal brings us closer to a Rwanda where the Deaf community is fully included.

Read the full story here: https://www.disabilityrightsfund.org/2026/09/23/advocating-sign-language-rwandan-deaf-movement/

09/21/2026

📣 Nothing about us without us, and that includes how we talk about deinstitutionalization.

TCI, a global organization of persons with psychosocial disabilities, and DRF grantee, has released its 2026 Call to Action. The Call demands an end to legal incapacity based on disability and to forced hospitalization, medication, and sterilization, and asks that awareness campaigns be led by persons with psychosocial disabilities.

Read the full Call to Action: https://bit.ly/4h2XhUl

Across the world, persons with psychosocial disabilities continue to face institutionalization, coercion, legal incapacity, violence, and exclusion from community life. For youth, women, and gender diverse persons with psychosocial disabilities, these barriers are often intensified by intersecting forms of discrimination and control.

TCI Global is proud to launch its:
Call to Action on Deinstitutionalization and Community Inclusion of Youth, Women, and Gender Diverse Persons with Psychosocial Disabilities.

Developed through consultations with more than 45 peers from TCI member OPDs and their networks across 15 countries, in six languages, this Call to Action sets out demands for States, donors, development partners, UN agencies, cross-movement actors, and our own movement.

It calls for comprehensive and time-bound deinstitutionalization, an end to legal incapacity and coercive systems, and recognition and leadership of youth, women, and gender diverse persons with psychosocial disabilities.

As we have been reiterating, deinstitutionalization is not simply about closing institutions. It requires transforming the systems, laws, policies, practices, and attitudes that reproduce control and exclusion, while building communities where everyone can exercise choice, autonomy, and belonging. This Call to Action furthers TCI's strong advocacy towards rights-based deinstitutionalization and community inclusion.

📄 Read the full Call to Action:https://tci-global.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Call-of-Action-2026.pdf

09/15/2026

📢 New from the UN CRPD Committee: 'Guidelines on Intersectional Discrimination Against Women and Girls with Disabilities' were adopted at the end of August.

Women and girls with disabilities don't experience discrimination on the basis of disability alone — gender, age, race, poverty, migration status, sexual orientation and more all intersect to create unique and compounded barriers.

📚Check out International Disability Alliance new analysis of and toolkit for the guidelines. It's a useful tool helping OPDs implement the guidelines, holding governments accountable, and pushing for the meaningful participation of women and girls with disabilities in their organizations.

📎 Find the toolkit at:

Explore IDA’s article-by-article guide to CRPD implementation, with practical questions and references to help advocates turn disability rights into action.

09/03/2026

Fantastic news that the United Nations General Assembly resolution on access to assistive technologies was adopted today.

Assistive technologies includes things such as hearing aids, screen-reading software, and other digital systems. They can play an important part in helping people with disabilities participate more fully in society.

The International Disability Alliance welcomes the adoption of the first-ever United Nations General Assembly resolution on access to assistive technology. This is a historic political milestone, and we thank Pakistan for its leadership in facilitating this groundbreaking initiative.

Access to appropriate, affordable and quality assistive technology is essential for the autonomy, equality and participation of persons with disabilities and others who use it.

While technology can support people in exercising their rights, society must remove the barriers that deny them. IDA will continue working to ensure that assistive technology policies are shaped by persons with disabilities and connected to the wider transformation of laws, systems, services, and communities, as required by the .

ATscale, the Global Partnership for Assistive Technology UNICEF World Health Organization (WHO)

09/02/2026

For the past two weeks we've been in close communication with our grantees in Indonesia and Nepal, following the 7.7 magnitude earthquake on 15th August and the devasting flash flood on 26th August.

In Indonesia, DRF grantee Himpunan Wanita Disabilitas Indonesia (HWDI) told us that they had identified around 154 people with disabilities affected by the earthquake. This figure will likely keep rising, with HWDI returning to affected sites and families to further understand their most urgent needs, and how assistance can be received safely.

Similarly, in Nepal, DRF grantee the Federation of Women with Disability-Nepal Page (FWDN) has not been able to communicate with many groups of persons with disabilities due to the loss of mobile and internet access, as well as overall electricity. From the information that they have received, they already know of several women with disabilities affected by the emergency.

Our thoughts are with the people impacted by both disasters, and we will proceed to support our grantees in those areas as best as we can. As we continue to monitor the situation, DRF calls on humanitarian actors to consider and reach people with disabilities in their emergency response. We also know these won't be the last climate disasters we will see in the next few years, and that's why we have climate justice as one of our seven cross-cutting priorities embedded in our strategic plan.

08/26/2026

“Deaf women who are leaders are very few due to negative attitudes against them, believing that Deaf women can’t be in leadership."

Through our BRIDGE project, funded by Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH on behalf of Bundesministerium für wirtschaftliche Zusammenarbeit und Entwicklung (BMZ), more than 800 women with disabilities from 16 countries across East, Southern, and West Africa participated in a regional polling exercise and assessment to share their experiences, priorities, and aspirations for leadership and inclusion.

The reports provide a roadmap for future action and support efforts to ensure that the voices and priorities of all women with disabilities remain at the centre of policy and programme development across Africa.

Find out more here: https://www.disabilityrightsfund.org/2026/07/14/new-reports-highlight-leadership-of-women-with-disabilities-across-africa/

06/29/2026

We went into Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO)'s holding both hope and grief. That didn't go away over the course of the week—it deepened, and opened space to reckon with other tensions along the way. Which ultimately pushed us to ask: what do we actually do differently now?

DRF's Connie Laurin-Bowie and Jen Bokoff wrote a reflection for Alliance magazine that grapples with what we heard and gets specific about what it means for how we fund, collaborate, and show up across movements.

One thing we kept coming back to: disability was largely absent from conversations where it absolutely belongs—democracy, AI, child mental health, climate, cross-movement solidarity, and more. Disability isn't a topic for one session. It belongs in all of them.

Whether you were at or are following the reflections online, we'd love to hear your thoughts. Share a comment below or on the article itself.

At last week’s , we felt the joy of reconnecting with long-time philanthropy friends and engaging in hopeful conversations alongside the grief and pain of volatile democracy and underinvestment in movements. As an organisation working …

06/25/2026

Last week, DRF's Washington Sati and Chrissy Zimba joined Lena Bheeroo of ADD International, Stephen Ikonya of The Action Foundation, Esther Kyozira of NUDIPU-Uganda, and Anthony Mang'eni of Women for Women International at the East Africa Philanthropy Network conference for "Inclusive by Design: Participatory Governance and the Constituencies the Ecosystem Has Designed Around."

Their session named something the sector often dances around: philanthropic systems frequently exclude the very communities they claim to serve—through funding criteria, compliance requirements, and governance structures that were never designed with those communities in mind.

Participants explored what it looks like when persons with disabilities, residents of informal settlements, and communities at the intersection of multiple exclusions move from the margins to the center of grantmaking architecture not only as beneficiaries, but as decision-makers.

A key provocation emerged across the session: consultation is not participation. Meaningful inclusion requires co-design, flexible and accessible funding systems, and lived experience embedded in governance, and not added on at the end.
DRF's participatory grantmaking model where persons with disabilities shape funding decisions at every level anchored that conversation.

We will pose the same question here as we did to session participants: what work needs to happen in the broader funding ecosystem to embed meaningful participation and inclusion? Share your thoughts in the comments.

ID: Washington, Stephen, Chrissy, Lena, Esther, and Anthony wearing conference badges and smiling in front of their presentation screen.