
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
I am delighted to welcome you to the third AfriNEAD symposium 2011. It feels like yesterday that we were inaugurating AfriNEAD 2007. Now we have two 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 focussed 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.