The inclusion of people with disabilities in the European Union’s official development assistance projects remains insufficient, according to a report published on Thursday 23 January by the European Disability Forum.
This document examines the number of ODA projects considered to include people with disabilities by the main EU institutions and the European Commission’s reports.
Although steady progress has been observed since 2018, 62% of the European Commission’s ODA projects still did not include the inclusion objective in 2022. According to EDF, this runs counter to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
In addition, four of the 1,343 projects analysed, i.e. only 0.3%, had the inclusion of people with disabilities as their primary objective. Similarly, despite the adoption of the disability policy marker by the European Investment Bank for the first time in 2022, no project has been reported as inclusive.
The document published by EDF calls on the EU to increase the number of inclusive projects, to strengthen the marker criteria to bring ODA into line with the CRPD, and to actively involve organisations representing people with disabilities.
Read the report: https://aeur.eu/f/f7k (Original version in French by Nithya Paquiry)