Key elements – must do
‘Must do’ actions must be undertaken in all phases of humanitarian action when implementing protection programming for personswith disabilities.
Participation
- Ensure that persons with disabilities and organizations of persons with disabilities (OPDs) actively participate in identifying protection risks and barriers to accessing protection.
- Ensure that persons with disabilities are fairly represented in formal and informal protection mechanisms including community-based protection mechanisms (camp leadership mechanisms as well as women's groups and youth groups), taking into account all forms of disability as well as age, gender and diversity. Make concerted efforts to promote underrepresented groups, such as persons with intellectual and psychosocial disabilities, indigenous persons, women and girls.
Addressing barriers
- Identify and monitor barriers that impede persons with disabilities from accessing protection and take steps to make protection systems and services accessible to them. Provide outreach and make other reasonable accommodations to reach persons with disabilities who are unable to leave their homes.
- Communicate all protection-related information in multiple accessible formats, taking into account persons with hearing, visual, intellectual and psychosocial disabilities.
- Review sectoral policies, guidelines and tools to ensure that they clearly affirm the right of persons with disabilities to access and inclusion.
Empowerment and capacity development
- Ensure that, when persons with disabilities need to take personal decisions, including persons with intellectual and psychosocial disabilities, procedures always require their informed consent.
- Through training and building awareness, make protection actors more conscious of the rights of persons with disabilities, and the specific protection risks they face. Equip them with practical tools and approaches that strengthen their protection and resilience.
- Map local and national OPDs, assess their capacity to work in protection mainstreaming, and provide training and support where required. Involve them in the work of protection coordination mechanisms.
- Involve persons with disabilities and their representative organizations in all community mobilization and outreach activities. Build their capacity to identify and refer persons at risk of violence or abuse and take appropriate steps to protect rights and address violations.
Data collection and monitoring
- Collect and analyse protection data on persons with disabilities, disaggregated by sex, age and disability. Do so systematically across the humanitarian programme cycle in all protection information management systems, including the Gender-Based Violence Information Management System, Child Protection Information Management System and national reporting databases.
- Collect data and information on barriers to claiming rights and barriers that impede access to protection services.
- Ensure that data ethics and protection principles (including confidentiality, provision of information, informed consent, security) are respected whenever data on persons with disabilities are collected and used.
- Share information on the cross-sectoral needs of persons with disabilities in interagency coordination mechanisms (WASH, health, education) and ensure cross-sectoral coordination.
- Monitor violations of the rights of persons with disabilities.