Washington, DC
ADMINISTRATOR SAMANTHA POWER: Thank you Counselor [Clinton White], and that word really means a great deal if you understand Clinton's relationship to me and to the whole leadership team here at USAID.
[I’m] really grateful to all of you for being here in person and online. I gather we have hundreds and hundreds of people who have zoomed in. I am so pleased that I can be here and be a part of this. And I'm just really grateful to have been invited to join you, given what a historic event this is not only for USAID, not only for our programming, but for development, the whole idea of development, the whole possibility of development. And thus, for the enterprise to change the world, that's what we're here to do and to be a part of today.
I want to give a really special welcome, of course, to the members of our disability policy working group, and particularly to Kathy Guernsey for her fearless and stubborn leadership over the years. Clearly the fact that we are here today after so many years is a reflection of Kathy's determination and will. I know the long hours and late nights that have gone into updating this policy, the gathering of input from across the disability community, talking to colleagues at USAID, iterating and iterating again. I know that when I engaged on this policy, I was incredibly impressed with the sophistication, the anticipation of questions that somebody engaging with the policy would have, and really just such a compelling case for moving forward in the way that we are now embarking on together.
I want to welcome all USAID staff who are joining from around the world. As you will hear, we are counting on you to turn the words in this policy into action in the world, into meaningful change.
As many of you already know, in the 1980s and 1990s, disability rights activists rallied around a memorable slogan that has actually spread now into multiple domains, and that slogan was "Nothing About Us Without Us". This was the message that activists scrawled on signs and shouted in the air as they rallied for legal protections like the Americans with Disabilities Act, and later, of course, the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
Here, at USAID, our first disability policy also grew out of this movement. It was launched in 1997 and at that time, USAID was in the vanguard as one of the first development agencies in the world to lay out a formal disability policy. But three weeks ago, that first policy celebrated its 27th birthday, making it older, I'm sure, than some people in this room. And as times have changed, so too, of course, has thinking about disability and development.
For decades, the usual framings of disability typically assumed that persons with disabilities were the problem, that somehow they needed to be fixed, or somehow they needed just to be offered charity in the form of temporary access to goods and services that failed to recognize the root causes of the problem. This could, at times, lead to relationships of dependency and often a lack of agency for persons with disabilities. But over the years, at least in some quarters, we have seen greater recognition of an essential fact that the main obstacle to inclusion is actually society and its attitudes toward persons with disabilities.
As the great diplomat and disability rights activist and my cherished colleague in the Obama administration, Judy Heumann said, “Disability only becomes a tragedy when society fails to provide the things we need to lead our lives – job opportunities or barrier-free buildings, for example. It is not a tragedy to me,” Judy said, “that I'm living in a wheelchair.”
So, fundamentally, the work we must take on is to remove the barriers in society so that everyone, including persons with disabilities, can participate fully in their communities. To do this successfully, we cannot confine our efforts to a bucket called disability issues.
There are more than 1.3 billion persons with disabilities in the world, in every community and every geography. Any issue that affects humans – whether that's climate change, hunger, disease, conflict – necessarily affects persons with disabilities. In fact, these challenges often affect persons with disabilities disproportionately. Persons with disabilities are two times as likely as non disabled people to be unemployed. Children with disabilities are twice as likely to die from malnutrition. And when extreme weather events hit, as is happening increasingly, death rates for persons with disabilities have been recorded at two times the death rates for non disabled persons.
So, disability rights advocates have updated their old rallying cry. Instead of “nothing about us without us,” their goal now is simply “nothing without us.” Following their lead, that is the title of our new policy, “Nothing Without Us.”
What does “Nothing Without Us” mean in our work at USAID? It means that across every issue we work on and every program we run, we have to look for and address the barriers that persons with disabilities face. If we are developing early warning systems for climate disasters, those systems should include sign language and captioning to help them reach everyone who needs to be warned. If we are helping expand voting access in a particular country, we should make sure that polling stations are physically accessible and that blind and low vision voters can access tactile ballots. If we are providing job training to improve economic security, we should be prepared to support trainees with cognitive disabilities.
To do this, we know we will need to continue to rely on a dedicated disability team and their targeted efforts. And again, we cannot overstate our gratitude to that team.
But this policy makes clear that this is also a responsibility for all of us, regardless of where we sit at USAID or what is formally in our job title or job description. Embedding disability inclusion across all of our work is not just the right thing to do for persons with disabilities. It is the right thing to do to achieve our development goals. And in fact, it is the only way we will achieve our development goals.
Our investments are more effective when they include persons with disabilities. For example, for every $1 spent promoting access to non communicable disease prevention and care for persons with disabilities, the estimated return on investment is $10. A dollar spent providing access to assistive technology returns $9 in increased productivity. And providing access to assistive technology for a child in a low- or middle-income country has the potential to increase the child's lifetime income by up to $100,000.
At USAID, so much of our work comes down to unleashing human potential. This updated policy is all about that. We will do it by following the lead of persons with disabilities and the organizations that they run. We will do it by continuing to strive for representative staffing here, at USAID, and we know we have work to do in that regard. And we will do it by working together because this policy asks us to include persons with disabilities across all of our work, and thus it will take all of us to make that happen.
So, I want to ask all of you, when you review applications from implementing partners, ask how their proposals are going to reach persons with disabilities. When you request data from those partners, ask that they break out the data on participants with disabilities. When you hire new members of your team, seek out experience supporting persons with disabilities. When you perform inclusive development analyses for your programming, include persons with disabilities. And when you leave this room or you click that leave meeting button, please carry these three words, “Nothing Without Us.”
Thank you so much, and it is my privilege to hand off the baton to Josh Joseph now who will moderate what will be an exquisite panel. Thank you so much.