This document summarizes efforts to promote disability inclusion in food security projects in Niger run by CRS Niger. It outlines steps taken to promote full participation of people with disabilities, including signing MOUs with disability organizations, embedding disability questions in studies, and ensuring monitoring and evaluation systems track disability-disaggregated data. It also identifies challenges such as lack of budget allocation and staff knowledge, and recommends dedicating staff time and budget to disability inclusion, working with disability organizations, and using planning years to collect local data and train staff.

1. Leia Isanhart- Senior Technical Advisor, Health
May 6, 2019
Disability Inclusion in Food Security:
An example from CRS Niger

2. Girma
CRS Niger
Food SecurityAward

3. 3
– Sign MOUs and Refine Year work plans with National
Federation of People with Disabilities, CBM
• help staff promote full participation of people with
disabilities
• promote inclusion among the project’s nearly 1M
beneficiaries.
– Embed disability questions in Refine Year studies
– Ensure M&E system has disability disaggregated
indicators
– Train staff on disability identification tool and
disability inclusion basics
– Use study findings to adapt activity approaches and
budget for Implementation Years 2-5
Steps toward Disability Inclusion

4. Challenges
• Proposal addressed disability inclusion, but there was no budget allocation for it
• Staff had little knowledge of how to consider disability in proposal or how to include it in their
design process
• No staff dedicated 100% to disability inclusion in the country office and little experience
across CRS
• Before Girma, country office had no established partnerships with DPOs, disability-specialized
organizations
• Country office’s administration is not on board yet with addressing disability inclusion as
office-wide initiative.
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5. Recommendations
• Dedicate staff to address disability inclusion during proposal and implementation
• Budget for inclusion, 3-5%
• Work with M&E teams during proposal and when they’re designing M&E system to ensure data and
use will be disability inclusive
• Include people with disabilities and organizations in design, implementation, and evaluation
• If you have a planning year, use it to:
– collect additional information on disability from community. Contextualize literature reviews with
community consultations
– Train staff in how to adapt approaches to promote participation of people with disabilities
– Find disability-specialized organizations and DPOs to work with
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