The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a good example of a framework that practices disability mainstreaming. The SDGs reference disability throughout, be it in the context of inclusive education, accessible urban infrastructure, or disaggregated data. Development that aspires to be sustainable and rights-based must consider people with disabilities in all their diversity across all SDGs. And this is just logical. Persons with disabilities are not a homogenous, boxed-in group.
Part of the appeal of the SDGs is that countries regularly report on their implementation. As part of the Voluntary National Review (VNR) process, governments take stock of their policies, analyse available data and submit reports to the UN. If the goals are inclusive of disability, these reports should be too.
However, a single case analysis of the 2023 VNR of Burkina Faso reveals that this is hardly the case. When the Government of Burkina Faso presented its VNR in July 2023, the main report measured 132 pages of dense prose not unfamiliar to anyone working on sustainable development. Persons with disabilities make their entrance in sub-chapter 5.1.5, which makes these points:
- Paragraph 1: We estimate that 1.1% of the population of Burkina Faso have a disability.
- Paragraph 2: Burkina Faso ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2009 and passed a disability law in 2010.
- Paragraph 3: Burkina Faso has a National Inclusion Strategy and celebrates the International Day of Persons with Disabilities.
- Paragraph 4: It is difficult to implement the relevant laws and policies.
That is all on sustainable development for persons with disabilities in the report. 413 descriptive words without a shred of analysis. There is no information on the National Inclusion Strategy’s content or progress and there needs to be more information on why it is difficult to implement the relevant laws and policies. There is no mention of children with disabilities in the dedicated section on SDG4, regardless of its call for quality and inclusive education. The whole chapter on SDG5 covers gender equality and gender-based violence without a single reference to women and girls with disabilities. Very useful additions from OPDs are buried deep in Annex 2 and remain entirely unreferenced in the report.
The point that the report’s lead authors – the Ministry of Economy, Finance and Prosperity (MoEFP) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) – inadvertently seem to make is: We don’t know much, so let’s just keep persons with disabilities in their little box. However, there is a range of interesting qualitative data available from Burkina Faso, which could have informed the VNR. This is quite the opposite of disability mainstreaming as intended in the SDGs.
If this report were never to be looked at again, this would just be an irritation. But for years, development actors will return to it as a key planning tool. UNICEF will use the education chapters to conceive interventions without knowledge of the gaps in disability inclusion in the classroom. UN Women will advise on gender-sensitive programming without any basis for intersectional analysis. Bilateral development agencies like GIZ or USAID will base their funding allocations in part on the report, without understanding the obstacles in implementing key policies.
As a quick post-mortem: What could have gone wrong in the case of Burkina Faso’s VNR? What could be done better the next time around?
- Guidance: There may have been a lack of guidance from the UN Secretariat on ensuring disability best mainstreaming in the VNR process. With around 40 VNRs presented every year, it would be crucial to bridge potential skills gaps in disability mainstreaming.
- Data: The authors may have felt that there was insufficient reliable and comparable data to allow for authoritative statements on disability inclusion in individual SDGs. In this case, it would still have been very useful to acknowledge these specific gaps in each chapter, not least as a call for action to produce better disability data in the coming years.
- Structure: When drawing up a skeleton structure for the report, MoEFP and UNDP seem to have created a sub-chapter on persons with disabilities. While this consideration is laudable, there should have been placeholders for persons with disabilities in all thematic chapters, their situation mainstreamed throughout the report.
- Mindset: The way that the disability sub-chapter sits along with others on internally displaced persons, children or the elderly suggests that this ultimately boils down to a question of mindset, where some population groups are boxed in. This seems to create a perception of sustainable development as a process for a standard ‘beneficiary’ – an able-bodied, middle-aged male. Such limited understanding must be supplanted by a thoroughly intersectional analysis of any country’s sustainable development state.
The questions that remain to be further explored are whether the case of Burkina Faso is just an egregiously bad outlier, whether other reports use qualitative data, or only rely on national datasets that use the Washington Groups short set and whether the UN’s recommendation to have a stand-alone chapter on “Leave No One Behind” might actually hinder meaningful disability mainstreaming and intersectional thinking in VNRs.
When the SDGs were adopted in 2015, organisations of persons with disabilities rightly celebrated how disability was mainstreamed throughout them. In 2024, the reason to celebrate has evaporated.