Sweden’s development cooperation and humanitarian action includes some good practices with the potential to catalyse greater inclusion of persons with disabilities; through tools on applying a human-rights based approach and through expenditure tracking. However, these specific good practices are not unified by a comprehensive strategy or set of incentives to ensure the systematic inclusion of persons with disabilities. Furthermore, while some consultation opportunities are available, more could also be done to ensure full and meaningful participation of representative DPOs, especially those from the Global South, throughout all Swedish development cooperation and humanitarian action.

Current Strengths

• Sweden participates in a specialist Geneva-based network for disability inclusion in humanitarian ODA.
• Sida is on the Steering Committee of the GLAD Network.
• The Swedish Public Procurement Act includes a provision on accessibility as well as an option to favour suppliers who are supporting access to the job market for persons with disabilities.

Areas to Improve

• Sweden does not have a national strategy or action plan on disability.
• Measures to promote the participation of persons with disabilities in the design, implementation and evaluation of mainstream programming are not yet widespread.
• No Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) employee currently works on disability inclusion full-time.

Advocacy Questions

• What steps could the Ministry of Foreign Affairs take to ensure future strategies on human rights clearly identify disability inclusion as a priority matched with time-bound commitments?
• Has Sida assessed the risk that, in contexts where disability data is still scarce, current emphasis on using existing data could create perverse incentive not to include persons with disabilities?
• Does the Ministry of Foreign Affairs have plans to issue a broader guideline on the importance of budgeting for inclusion across all sectors and programmes?

More Information – Sweden factsheet  [12 KB doc]