The African Network for Evidence-to-Action on Disability (AfriNEAD) exists to ensure that research contributes to a better quality of life for people with disabilities in Africa.

AfriNEAD facilitates networking among researchers, persons with disability, government representatives, business and civil society within the African region as well as with international communities. To effectively realise the rights of persons with disabilities, these stakeholders need to collaborate in the area of disability research.

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Well, the 2011 AfriNEAD Symposium has come and gone and we are left feeling strengthened by the energy you all brought to Victoria Falls last year.

We now have 3 symposia under our belt! The first focused on research evidence and how much this had managed to realise the rights of disabled people in Africa thus far. This was an introspective and reflective step that challenged us all – a huge undertaking indeed, and a lot of time was spent challenging each other. We also wanted to unite different stakeholders because we believe that each stakeholder carries knowledge which is essential to enhance disability research evidence. We questioned ourselves with regard to: How should disability research evidence be explored? And what exactly should be explored? And of course, we developed a deeper understanding that disabled people themselves should be the ones guiding us as to what the critical questions to ask are, so as to focus us all on the really important issues.

That’s why the second symposium focused on the ABCs of research evidence-to-action: putting the UNCRPD principles into action for rights-based change. The UNCRPD ABC rights-based principles gave us a tool for dealing with the challenges we were facing in the first symposium. The five ABC principles of the UNCRPD toolkit serve as a useful checklist against which to measure ourselves on our use of a rights-based approach on disability research.

Disabled people themselves have said: “Nothing about us without us”. This remains one of the key challenges for all of us: if you are going to do disability research you have to include disabled people. But how should you do it? What processes could you put in place in terms of inclusion? Disabled people are not a homogenous group, but they are instead a myriad of constituencies who come with different knowledge and skills. You can’t just bundle them in one box and use them in research for one purpose. That is dangerous. You need to understand the different knowledge and skills they have and the different assets they come with... like all of us – this is where the UNCRPD toolkit helped a lot.

Many of the email addresses we have registered for AfriNEAD members have been returned to us as ‘undeliverable’. If you wish to stay in touch, please confirm that your address is correct by checking your details on your personal profile. Log into your member profile on the right hand side of the page and click on "my profile" under the member menu. You will now have the option to change your profile details.