An Empowering Message from International Disability Alliance (IDA) President, Dr Nawaf Kabbara, on 3 December 2025, the International Day of Persons with Disabilities

AUDIO VERSION

 As we close 2025, I speak not only as President of IDA but as one person within a global community whose dignity, rights, and futures continue to be treated as an afterthought. This message is addressed to our movement, to governments and donors, to INGOs and multilateral agencies, and to every actor who shapes the world that persons with disabilities must navigate every day. It is offered with pride in the true leadership shown by persons with disabilities across the world and with profound concern for the material realities shaping their lives.

Next year marks 20 years since the adoption of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The CRPD remains a landmark of justice and possibility. But for millions of persons with disabilities, the promise of that treaty has never reached their homes, their schools, their workplaces, their communities. We have fought hard this year for strong political commitments – and the World Social Summit outcome document recognised the urgent need to dismantle inequality and barriers faced by persons with disabilities and rebuild our social contract. Yet its vision stands in stark contrast to the daily experience of most persons with disabilities, whose material conditions remain dire, exclusionary, and deeply unjust.

Too many still live segregated lives in institutions, far from their communities and families. Too many continue to be denied legal capacity, autonomy, and the freedom to determine their own lives. Millions are trapped in poverty that is not accidental but manufactured through exclusion. And everywhere, from climate disasters to economic crises to forced displacement, the impacts fall hardest on persons with disabilities, who are the first to be ignored and the last to be reached.

In conflict settings, the situation is especially grave. This year again reminded us that persons with disabilities face the greatest risks in war and the fewest protections. We cannot speak truthfully about global justice without naming the horrors witnessed in Gaza, where persons with disabilities faced catastrophic barriers to evacuation, to basic assistance, and to survival itself. Their suffering cannot be forgotten, and their rights cannot continue to be erased in humanitarian and political decisions.

These injustices are not historical footnotes. They define the present. They shape who gets to live safely, who gets to learn, who gets to work, who gets to dream.

And yet, amid all this, persons with disabilities continue to work collectively for a better future. The cohesion, courage, and solidarity within our global movement are extraordinary. Organizations of Persons with Disabilities (OPDs) across every region have mobilised, organised, and led with clarity and hope, even as resources shrink and civic space closes. Their work has driven reforms in discriminatory laws, advanced deinstitutionalisation, fought for inclusive education, insisted on accessible humanitarian action, and exposed the structural violence of exclusion.

We must recognise the incredible work done by organisations of persons with disabilities in these difficult times, in partnership with allies that work to support our autonomy and independence taking steps to end our ongoing subjugation. OPD leadership shows the world what is possible when persons with disabilities are not added to agendas but shape them from the beginning, and make meaningful reforms sparked by their insistence that rights belong in daily life, not just in resolutions.

The Global Disability Summit in Berlin demonstrated this vividly. When persons with disabilities lead, the entire system shifts, analysis sharpens, solutions become real, and commitments gain weight. The lead-up to the World Social Summit reinforced this again: where OPDs have power, the global agenda becomes more just, more grounded, and more accountable.

And yet, these processes also revealed a troubling truth. Too many governments and development actors speak the vocabulary of inclusion while delivering almost nothing beyond symbolic gestures. Funding cuts continue. Civic space narrows. Inequality deepens. And the global trend toward mainstreaming within existing (or reduced) resources has become a dangerous retreat. Less than one per cent of development assistance directly supports disability inclusion, and a tiny fraction of that goes to OPDs.

The remaining ninety-nine per cent could be inclusive but rarely is. When ‘mainstreaming’ becomes a rhetorical shield to justify inaction, it harms the very people it claims to serve. Inclusion without investment is abandonment. Partnership without resources and power is performative window-dressing.

The world must change course.

INGOs must transform how they work, centering OPDs not as stakeholders, but as equal partners and essential public actors. Donors must move from short-term projects to long-term system reforms. And all actors must recognise that disability inclusion cannot be achieved through symbolic commitments; it requires structural investment, accessible systems, and leadership rooted in lived experience.

One truth has become impossible to ignore: real, lasting change is driven by the leadership of persons with disabilities.

It is OPDs who dismantle segregation.

It is OPDs who challenge discriminatory laws.

It is OPDs who demand accessible humanitarian response.

It is OPDs who make rights real.

As we move into 2026, we carry urgency, but we also carry hope. Not a quiet hope, but a determined one. A hope grounded in solidarity, in struggle, and in the extraordinary leadership that persons with disabilities show every day. The world is no longer in a ‘business as usual’ moment. Every global system is being tested politically, socially, and economically. But this moment also offers an opening: a chance to rebuild with justice, accessibility, and equality at the centre.

To achieve that future, OPD leadership must be prioritised, not rhetorically, but financially, structurally, and politically. When OPDs lead, policies become grounded in reality, institutions become accountable, and the lives of persons with disabilities begin to shift in meaningful, measurable ways. So we do retain hope for the future; hope is the last thing we will let go of, but we need more evidence to sustain it.

To every OPD, every activist, every ally, every donor who has chosen courage over convenience: thank you. Your determination has kept this movement strong even when the world has turned away. Your solidarity with each other, across borders, languages, identities, and lived experiences, remains one of the most powerful forces for justice alive today. Through honesty, solidarity, and the unshakeable leadership of persons with disabilities, we are not merely responding to the world’s challenges. We are reshaping the world.

Thank you for your voice, your leadership, and your refusal to accept anything less than dignity and equality for all.