25-01-19041
INGO ID 25-01-19041
Bureau Reg No.
804
ADD International
Our work is rooted in supporting disability rights activists in Africa and Asia to realise the changes they want to see. We are getting back to our roots by sharing more power and resource directly to them. We are transforming to become a participatory grant-maker in order to move more funding directly to disability justice activists. Crucially, we will also give disability justice activists greater decision-making power on who should receive funding and how funding should be spent. Find out more about this change. Alongside our grant-making, we are launching a Global Leadership Academy. We will encourage collective action and movement-building by promoting collaboration and learning amongst individual disability rights organisations and leaders in each region.
Our Mission is to strengthen disability rights activists and organisations through resourcing and leadership skills.
Our Vision is for a world in which ableism no longer exists and disabled people can fully participate in society.
Our core values are inclusion, anti-ableism, daring, equity, integrity and care.
ADD International was founded as ‘Action on Disability and Development’ in 1985 by Chris Underhill, following a trip to Zimbabwe. Chris was blown away by the disabled people he met who were successfully changing attitudes and policies.
At that time other charities working with disabled people in Africa based their work on the medical model which frames disability as a medical problem requiring ‘treatment’. Chris saw a clear need for a new approach, and wanted to create a development agency for disabled people.
And so ADD’s locally led way of working evolved, taking on a social or human rights perspective that states it is not the individual who is disabled, but the way society treats them that creates disability.
In many countries, ADD International was the first organisation introducing the idea of “self-help groups of people with disabilities” (SHGs). These were initiated to service the need of people with disabilities to gain self-motivation, capacity building and the ability to advocate for their rights.
Still today, people with disabilities use self-help group as forum for to share concerns and experiences and to develop together.
Throughout the years, ADD International helped self-help groups to form their own organisations at district and provincial level to ensure sustainability. Since then, we turned our focus on developing the capacity of these organisation and to become disabled people’s organisations (DPOs), empowering them to support the development and running self-help groups at village level.
And as our work has grown we have become more aware of the complexity within the disability debate and the myriad needs and issues faced by disabled people, including the necessity to tackle marginalisation within the disability movement itself, which can exclude people who are poorer, uneducated, women, younger people, and people with certain impairments.
ADD International is currently getting back to our roots by becoming a participatory grant-maker. This change will mean more resources, money and decision-making power given to disability rights activists.
We want disabled people to have greater access to funding and more power in deciding how this money is used to build powerful movements for positive change. We want to see more resources flow directly to them.
ADD International was founded on values of listening to and supporting people with lived experience of disability to make change through their own organisations. Disabled people know best the solutions that will work for disabled people, and we want to get back to our roots in how we support them to implement these.
The world has become even more unequal and unfair. This hurts everyone, but disabled people are amongst those who lose out the most. Therefore, our role in supporting disabled people also needs to change and evolve to better address the new challenges of our time.
It is more important than ever before to look at the causes of discrimination and injustice, not just the effects. This means recognising the different ways in which disabled people are discriminated against.
