Good intentions, invisible outcomes: the place of disability in development

Papua New Guinea has launched the Catalysing Disability Equity (CDE) Joint Program, a national initiative led by government, UN agencies, the PNG Assembly of Disabled Persons, and development partners including the Australian High Commission. Its focus on national coordination, disability data systems, and alignment with the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities signals a deliberate shift from policy commitment to operational delivery.

The purpose of the project is to accelerate PNG’s implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, reduce inequalities, and ensure national development “leaves no one behind”.

It marks a shift with regional implications. In PNG, the project arrives at a moment when those working closest to disability inclusion have been warning that – at the point of practice – disability can become lost within a Gender, Ethnicity, Disability, and Social Inclusion (GEDSI) framework.

Development practitioners working in PNG know the pattern well. Disability policy is present – it appears in strategic documents, organisational values, donor conditions. But as a project moves from design into implementation, something shifts. Gender equity components hold through a project, with dedicated staff, reporting requirements and budget lines. The social inclusion language persists. But disability begins to lose ground.

By the time monitoring and evaluation data comes in, the evidence of that loss is buried in the reporting. “Failed to complete.” “Participation dropped.” “Engagement was limited.” These are the results that get recorded. What they frequently describe, without naming it, or perhaps specifically recognising it, is structural exclusion. A program developed with strong intentions that simply was not designed for all the people it claimed to include.

In PNG, disability is not a marginal experience. It is shaped by limited health access, high rates of acquired impairment from injury, disease and conflict, compounded by physically demanding livelihoods, geographic isolation, and increasingly, climate-related disruption. Across a lifetime, the majority of people globally will experience disability in some form, temporary or permanent. In PNG, where health infrastructure is limited and environmental conditions are demanding, that reality is immediate and the consequences are deep.

A woman who can no longer walk the distance to a training site does not simply miss a session. She loses access to a livelihood pathway. A man whose hearing has deteriorated does not just struggle in a group setting. He is progressively excluded from decisions about his own community’s climate adaptation. A young person managing an episodic mental health condition does not just have an attendance problem. They are being systematically denied the opportunity to participate in the development of their own future.

Gender did not become operational through goodwill or one voice in the room. It became operational because systems were built to track it.

These are not program design challenges. They are experiences of exclusion from rights that are explicitly protected under the international convention and repeatedly affirmed in the frameworks of the very organisations failing to deliver them.

The D in GEDSI is not separate to equity or social inclusion. Treating disability as a distinct technical workstream, a data point or a consideration is to entirely misread the nature of the problem. Disability intersects with gender, ethnicity, poverty, and climate vulnerability. A disabled woman in a remote PNG community is not experiencing four separate issues. She is experiencing one life at the intersection of the GEDSI lens.

This is where the gender equity design and delivery integration becomes instructive. Over two decades, gender integration in international development has moved from aspiration to embedded architecture. Gender advisors are embedded in project teams. Sex-disaggregated data collection is standard and donor-mandated. Reporting on gender outcomes is not optional. The result is imperfect, but it is measurable – and it has moved the dial for the cohort it supports.

That architecture exists because reporting requirements made it necessary, and because necessity drove investment in tools, training, and staff capability. Gender did not become operational through goodwill or one voice in the room. It became operational because systems were built to track it, and organisations were held accountable for what those systems revealed. Disability is yet to make that journey.

The commitment and aspiration are real. But aspiration without architecture produces the same result every time: strong policy, invisible practice, and outcome data that records exclusion as attrition.

The remaining gap, which the CDE program now has an opportunity to address, is between stated intention and lived experience. Not what an organisation says it values, or intends to deliver, but what a disabled person in PNG actually encounters when they try to participate in the program built with them in mind.

Closing that gap requires more than strengthened policy or additional reporting fields. It requires the capacity to ask, consistently and in real time: is what we intend to deliver what is actually being experienced? Is the organisation chosen to deliver already genuinely inclusive – and can it demonstrate this? Where participation is dropping, is the program responding – or simply recording?

Until disability inclusion can be measured at the level of experience rather than enrolment, the D in GEDSI will keep disappearing. The CDE program is a significant step toward building those systems in PNG. The next question is whether the broader development sector is ready to follow.