Any organization, regardless of disability expertise or experience, can take intentional measures to advance disability inclusion and leadership at the program level and at the organizational level.
That’s why, on December 3, 2025, in celebration of International Day of Persons with Disabilities, MIUSA invited members of our Excellence, Development and Disability Inclusion (EDDI) initiative and InterAction member organizations to a panel featuring the 2025 winners of InterAction’s Disability Inclusion Award
The InterAction Disability Inclusion Award recognizes organizations who have taken intentional measures to advance disability inclusion and leadership in the measures in the fields of international development and humanitarian assistance.
2025 Finalists included:
- Lever for Change
- World Vision US
- Mobilizing Allies for Women, Peace and Security (MAWPS)
- Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI)
About the Disability Inclusion Award
In 2009, MIUSA collaborated with InterAction to establish the Disability Inclusion Award, in honor of the passage of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities (UNCRPD). It recognizes organizations that demonstrate “a commitment to ensure the full inclusion of people with disabilities and approach disability as an essential cross-cutting issue, which uses a human rights lens throughout all aspects of their organization’s work.” Learn more about the Disability Inclusion Award here.
Organizations may be nominated or self-nominate. The award’s selection committee considers whether the organization’s disability-inclusive practices are innovative, whether they highlight disability leadership, whether they’re organization-wide, and whether they’re replicable.
The award recognizes progress, not perfection. MIUSA CEO Susan Sygall encourages all international development organizations to apply for the award if they are making an intentional effort towards disability inclusion or doing something innovative around disability leadership, even if there is still much more to do. “We are all part of this community of practice, and we can make this an opportunity for all of us to share strategies that display innovation and boldness.”
Showcasing Best Practices: 2025 Disability Inclusion Award Winners
During MIUSA’s December 3 webinar, representatives of the award winners described the pathways and steps that their respective organizations have taken in pursuit of disability inclusive excellence and disability leadership. While none of the winners are specifically disability-focused organizations, the actions recognized by these awards align with each organization’s overall mission and values.
Lever for Change: Disability Inclusion Award Winner
Lever for Change, the 2025 winner of the Disability Inclusion Award, does not provide direct international development and humanitarian services. However, as a leader in the field of philanthropy, Lever for Change influences hundreds of organizations who do provide such services, which can translate to a staggering impact on disability inclusion in the field.
As Susan commented: “We at MIUSA have had the honor of working with Lever for Change for several years. They are in the world of philanthropy, and the innovative approaches they are taking are going to change the face of philanthropy to highlight the inclusion and leadership of people with disabilities.”
According to Awards Director Emma Poole, Lever for Change connects funders to problem-solvers who are tackling some of the world’s biggest issues and accelerating social change, in areas ranging from early childhood education to economic empowerment and more. Since 2019, Lever for Change has designed and managed over 16 customized funding challenges, which awarded over $2.5 billion in grants.
From the start, Lever for Change’s Open Call Challenges have required applicants to describe, throughout the full application process, how their proposed solutions – regardless of the focus area – will include people with disabilities as beneficiaries as well as leaders. For example:
- Applicants are required to articulate how their project will ensure full participation and leadership of people with disabilities. In addition, applicants must include project-specific funds for reasonable accommodations and other disability-related costs in the application budget. Lever for Change provides guiding resources for best practices for disability inclusion and budgeting for inclusion.
- Lever for Change contracts with MIUSA, a disability-led organization, to review finalists’ proposals and provide tailored feedback, resources and recommendations to engage people with disabilities, which is shared with finalist teams. Finalists also have the opportunity to consult with MIUSA’s team one-on-one about how to incorporate disability-inclusive principles into their final prospectus documents.
- In their final prospectus submissions, applicants have the opportunity to expand upon plans for inclusion and leadership of people with disabilities. MIUSA reviews and provides another round of comprehensive feedback to Lever for Change on the finalists’ final prospectus documents.
- MIUSA provided a virtual workshop for members of the Bold Solutions Network, comprised of more than 500 Lever for Change finalists and awardees, on Utilizing a Human Rights Framework for Disability Inclusion.
As Susan noted in a previous Lever for Change blog post, MIUSA’s feedback, consultations and workshops with applicant and awardees organizations can have ripple effects. “[Our consultations] might start with ‘how do we make our health centers more accessible in the countries where we work?’ but then they blossom into conversations about how the organization can do more to champion disability justice principles and inclusion more broadly.”
Emma emphasized the significance of partnering with a disability-led organization in Lever for Change’s learning journey:
“Since our founding, we’ve had the distinct pleasure and honor to partner with and learn from MIUSA, which has helped us really drive our grounding in our approach, which is meant to be inclusive and equitable both in the model we run and in the due diligence process we conduct.”
World Vision US: Honorable Mention
World Vision won a 2025 Disability Inclusion Award Honorable Mention for prioritizing reaching children with disabilities as part of its broader mission to reach the most vulnerable children.
Edward Winter, Senior Technical Advisor for Gender Equality and Social Inclusion, spoke on behalf of World Vision, which is the largest NGO in the world with a presence in over 60 countries around the world.
Edward explains that World Vision US’s efforts to engage children with disabilities were an outgrowth of commitments made at the Global Disability Summit 2018 (https://www.wvi.org/sites/default/files/2025-03/GDS%202025%20commitments%20and%20report.pdf), which included:
- Reach five times as many children with disabilities from 2022-2026. World Vision is currently reaching about 3.12 times as many children with disabilities as they were from the outset and is optimistic that they will reach their goal in 2026.
- Train all staff on disability inclusion. To date, World Vision has trained more than 4,000 of its staff, which represents about 12% of its total staff globally. They also train community volunteers – 18,000 in Rwanda alone!
As Edward phrased it, “the penny is starting to drop” that partnering with disability-led organizations is essential to successful disability-inclusive programming. In a recent global questionnaire, 37 World Vision offices around the world reported that they had partnered with 110 groups and organizations of persons with disabilities (OPDs), with Malawi’s office alone working with 21 such partners! While World Vision benefits from OPD leadership and expertise, these partnerships also facilitate connections between the disability organizations and other governing agencies to which World Vision has access.
World Vision uses a strategic case management approach to reach and provide services to children with disabilities in some of the most rural areas of the world, where families are reluctant to identify their disabled children, and physical therapists, speech therapists, occupational therapists and other resources are limited.
Examples of strategies include:
- World Vision used the Washington Group on Disability Statistics question sets to devise questions to ask families, community members and service providers to identify children who have a disabilities.
- Once a family with a disabled child is engaged, World Vision creates a community-based screening process that brings in multidisciplinary teams to assess and refer the child to specialist services, and provide tips that the family can use to support their child.
- World Vision uses a tool called Commcare to track families over time, supplying important data that show where children are progressing and where more support is needed.
To highlight the success of this approach, Edward shared a clip from Yamikani’s Story, a video highlighting the Able to Thrive project supporting children with disabilities in rural parts of Malawi.
In addition to bolstering disability inclusion within their own organization, World Vision contributes to the broader aid community by making its disability inclusion learnings available publicly to anyone who wants to use them. World Vision also welcomes opportunities to collaborate with other organizations to discuss technical issues and co-develop additional resources.
Mobilizing Allies for Women, Peace and Security: Honorable Mention
Don Steinberg and Kelly Case spoke on behalf of Mobilizing Allies for Women, Peace and Security (MAWPS), which brings together foreign policy leaders, development experts, and others who are committed to following the lead from women to resolve conflict and to rebuild stable and just societies. MAWPS’s Honorable Mention recognizes the dedication of resources and funding to support the leadership of women with disabilities in peacebuilding and post-conflict recovery.
Since MAWPS launched at the United Nations in New York and the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, more than 250 prominent organizations and individuals have joined MAWPS’ community of practice. MAWPS also provides resources for training, research, and advocacy to women and women-led groups, to lead in global peace, reconciliation, and post-conflict processes in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, Myanmar, and beyond.
Since its launch, MAWPS has been a consistent voice supporting the leadership of women with disabilities in peace negotiations and post-conflict reconstruction. One of MAWPS’ first partnership grants went to a group that pressures political parties in war-affected countries in Africa to include disability rights in their electoral platforms. In 2025, MAWPS dedicated its full partnership portfolio to groups led by women with disabilities who met Don during MIUSA’s 2025 Women’s Institute on Leadership and Disability (WILD) (read Don’s blog here). These awards will support:
- Research and training to address cyber scams and online bullying of disabled women in Southeast Asia
- The development of a handbook to guide protection and social services for disabled women displaced by conflict and natural disasters in Southern Africa
- Programs to combat sexual violence against disabled women in the minority Roma community of Eastern Europe.
Susan encouraged other organizations to follow MAWPS’ lead by supporting and partnering with disabled women leaders, noting that MIUSA has WILD alumni in countries around the world. Don echoed Susan’s comments, calling on the broader peacebuilding community to join the effort:
“I want to acknowledge that the peacebuilding community has come years late and dollars short to the disability agenda. Nearly two decades after the adoption of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, women and girls with disabilities still find themselves at the end of the line when it comes to services, training, and protections. We’re inspired by the work that MIUSA is doing as well as the work our co-recipients are doing. Under their guidance, we need to commit ourselves to fully embrace and promote women with disabilities and to celebrate their leadership, dignity, and irrepressible energy in preventing, resolving and rebuilding after armed conflict – Loud, Proud, and Passionate® indeed!”
Clinton Health Access Initiative: Honorable Mention
The Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI)’s focus on assistive technology (AT), which facilitates independence for many disabled people, as well as the immense scale at which it operates by working directly with governments, helped clinch CHAI’s Disability Inclusion Award Honorable Mention.
Frederic Seghers, CHAI Senior Director, described CHAI’s approach as supporting governments to take on a greater leadership role to meet the AT needs of people with disabilities at an immense scale. There is a critical scarcity of access assistive products and services in many parts of the world, and those that are available are most often provided by charitable organizations or humanitarian efforts, as opposed to by government programs.
As a global health organization currently active in about 40 countries worldwide, CHAI has provided support and assistance to government partners to deliver a wide array of health products, diagnostics, vaccines, and more since 2002. In 2018, CHAI expanded its portfolio to include AT, prompted by its long-time partnership with the British government, which had asked CHAI to help guide its work to increase access to AT.
Since then, CHAI has worked with over a dozen country governments – largely in Sub-Saharan Africa – to establish national policies and plans to increase access to AT, in accordance with the UNCRPD. These governments have now incorporated provision of assistive products (such as spectacles, hearing aids, prostheses, and wheelchairs) into service provision systems.
In parallel, CHAI became a founding member of ATscale, a new global partnership for increasing access to AT. ATscale aims to get AT to the people who need them the most. The program has now evolved to work with government partners in eight countries to support early identification, access to AT and community-based services for young children with disabilities under the age of 6. As a result, 2.6 million children have received screening for developmental delays and disabilities, with tens of thousands referred for supportive services, leveraging the experiences and best practices from organizations with experience in those areas.
As a result of these efforts to expand access to AT, Frederic says that the DNA of the organization has shifted tremendously. “While there is still so much more we need to be doing – both CHAI and other major actors in the global health space – to meet the healthcare needs of persons with disabilities, it is an area we feel very passionate about. We have strong champions internally, and we’re committed to build on what we’ve been doing over the past years to amplify our impact.”
Conclusion
Following the presentations, webinar attendees representing other international development and humanitarian assistance organizations expressed appreciation for learning about the range of strategies that the Disability Inclusion Award winners shared to expand disability inclusion and leadership.
Many commented that sharing of strategies is particularly valuable in the current climate of funding cuts and attacks on efforts to reach people with disabilities and other underserved populations. A number of attendees expressed the need for data about how such cuts are impacting the disability community specifically.
Susan agreed that the work that international development organizations and their DPO partners are doing in the face of these challenges is vital for not losing the momentum we have gained over the last decades. “After so many achievements in disability rights, we don’t want go backwards. What can we do now to prevent that from happening?”
MIUSA encourages members of the international development and humanitarian assistance community to reach out to us for consultation, and to join MIUSA’s membership-based initiative, Excellence in Development and Disability Inclusion (EDDI). EDDI members have access to MIUSA’s advising, resources, and networks to enhance disability inclusion and leadership with a disability rights lens. “EDDI is a resource of information, support and encouragement to get through these times in a way that also moves forward,” adds Susan.
And of course, we encourage organizations to apply for InterAction’s Disability Inclusion Award once the call for applications opens so the field can continue to learn from one another, recognize innovative practices, and celebrate achievements!
Congratulations once again to the winning organization and honorable mentions of the 2025 Disability Inclusion Award, and a huge thanks to all of the panelists for sharing their practices, learnings, and passion. Thank you also to those who attended, listened, asked questions, and shared resources and insights of their own. On this Day of International Persons with Disabilities, it was an honor to be among such a positive and passionate community!