Shifting Perspectives: When Good Intentions Aren't Accessible

"It's an added operational cost if you want a truly accessible workplace. So — what would you do if we joined your office?" Metta asked.

The question cut through our afternoon training session. We came from teams working on communications, data, and social protection, and we looked at each other and realised that none of us had an immediate answer. As UN development professionals, we thought we understood human rights well. We cite the UN Disability Inclusion Strategy (UNDIS) in our frameworks. We complete the mandatory training and receive a certificate. We talk easily about “leaving no one behind.”

Yet Metta had simply asked what it would take for her to work beside us, and she stopped us cold.

Metta Thippawong, Co-founder of DMAS and Director at COPE, together with Vinthong and Thongchanh, are advocates from DMAS, a local civil society organization. They did not come to lecture us. They came with hard questions, and they kept asking them. We thought we knew enough. We realised there was much more to learn.

That week, the UN Country Team in Lao PDR stopped to listen. Following a senior management briefing, we spent a full day in a workshop designed and led by people who live the realities that UNDIS sets out on paper. What began as a training exercise became personal, for the three of us and for everyone in the room.

Beyond the Checklist

The UN has already taken steps towards disability inclusion. Across agencies, persons with disabilities are being recruited and supported in the workplace, and persons with disabilities and their representative organizations have been consulted in important UN processes, including the development of the Cooperation Framework and Common Analysis.

This work is also increasingly bringing the UN Country Team together around a collective approach to inclusion. The recently launched UNV-led Disability Inclusion Campaign is creating space for agencies and colleagues across the UNCT to build a shared understanding of disability inclusion, raise awareness and consider how we can make our workplaces and programmes more inclusive.

But the training made us ask a different question: not only what have we done, but what does meaningful inclusion look like in our everyday work?

UNDIS calls for disability inclusion to be mainstreamed across our workplaces and programmes, from creating a culture of respect and inclusive employment, to ensuring disability data is collected and reflected in analysis, and that persons with disabilities are meaningfully engaged and consulted in programmes. As the day went on, we saw clearly that each of our jobs has an important role to play.

In communications, we measure reach and visibility but do we always ask who our materials might leave out? Accessibility can too easily become something we add at the end of a campaign rather than consider from the start. A design intended for “everyone” may not be accessible to everyone.

In our workplaces, the discussion struck closer to home. Individual agencies may already collect information about their staff and take steps to support colleagues with disabilities. But the training prompted us to consider whether we have a sufficiently shared understanding across the UN Country Team of the barriers our own colleagues may experience, and whether we are consistently creating the conditions for everyone to participate fully.

The same applies to employment. The training reminded us that reasonable accommodation should be considered from the outset, rather than treated as an exceptional favour or an afterthought. An accessible workspace, flexible arrangements or other practical adjustments can be what enables a person with a disability to participate and contribute on an equal basis. Inclusion means anticipating these needs rather than waiting for someone to ask.

Looking at Our Own Spaces

Then the facilitators asked us to put down our pens and split into three groups, each given a single ordinary task starting at the same place: the steps outside our Lane Xang meeting room.

The exercise was not intended to suggest that nothing has been done to improve accessibility at UN House. An accessibility audit commissioned by UNDP has already identified practical ways to make the premises more disability friendly. Steps have been taken, including an accessible ramp and accessible parking near reception, while the UN House Committee continues to consider further improvements within the resources available and the practical limitations of a building that was not originally designed as an accessible workplace.

But the exercise helped us see the space differently.

Group A, in a wheelchair, needed the toilet. The accessible one was across the building. The steps were impossible, so they took the longer route through the canteen, only to meet a metal door that opened halfway, too narrow to pass through easily.

Group B, on crutches with no prior training, faced those same three steps. They looked simple. They were not.

Group C, blindfolded, set out for the coffee shop a few metres away, down unguarded steps and across grass, with no guiding tiles to follow.

None of these were unusual places, just the toilet, the canteen and the coffee shop we use every day without thinking.

The lesson was not that every barrier can be removed overnight. It was that accessibility requires us to keep looking at our spaces by putting ourselves in their shoes and living their life and to make the practical changes that are possible. Where structural changes are limited, there may still be ways to improve how people navigate, communicate, participate and access our workplaces.

The question is not simply whether a person with a disability can enter a building. It is whether they can participate fully once they are there.

Inclusion from Day One

The discussion went deeper when facilitators highlighted the intersecting risks faced by women and girls with disabilities, including higher exposure to gender-based violence, exploitation and harassment.

The conversation revealed something important about how we work. When gender-based violence was raised, there was a question about whether it belonged in a disability training when the gender focal points were not in the room. It was an uncomfortable moment, but also a useful one.

We can easily put disability and gender into separate boxes and wait for the right specialist to handle each. But violence and exclusion do not wait for the right focal point. They do not follow our organizational charts.

The message for our programming, data and communications work was clear: we cannot design protection in a vacuum. Persons with disabilities and organizations representing them need to be involved from the beginning, helping shape concept notes, project documents and communications, rather than being asked to review them only after decisions have already been made. 

Consultation is important. Meaningful participation goes further.

From Strategy to Action

By the time we returned to our desks, Metta’s question no longer felt like a provocation. It felt like a to-do list.

The training did not tell us that the UN has done nothing. It reminded us that the work is ongoing, and that good intentions, policies and individual initiatives need to translate into everyday practice. Adaptation is necessary, and it should not be considered additional work, but rather a mutual responsibility.

Meeting the ambitions of UNDIS will require continued attention to budgets, communication standards, data, recruitment, reasonable accommodation and accessible workplaces. Some changes will take resources and time. Others begin with something much simpler: asking the right questions early enough.

What would make this programme accessible?

Who has been consulted?

Who might still be excluded?

What reasonable accommodation would someone need to participate fully?

And, perhaps most importantly, are persons with disabilities in the room when we are making the decisions that affect them?

The clearest lesson of the day was about shared responsibility. Disability inclusion is not the job of one working group, one focal point or one agency alone. The UN is already taking steps through recruitment, consultation, accessibility improvements, awareness raising and collective initiatives such as the UNV led Disability Inclusion Campaign. Bringing the UN Country Team together around this work is an important step towards building a more consistent and inclusive approach across the UN.

The challenge now is to build on those efforts and make inclusion an increasingly consistent part of how we work.

Because meaningful inclusion is not a box to tick once. It is a practice of continually asking who may still be left out and what action we can take to create lasting impact.