Jill Hanass-Hancock
Prof Hanass-Hancock, SAMRC South Africa
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During the last two decades, Prof Jill Hanass-Hancock's research has primarily focused on sexual and reproductive health and rights for vulnerable populations in Southern Africa, including women, youth, adolescents and people with disabilities. Prof Jill is best known for her contributions to the understanding of the sexual and reproductive health needs of people with disabilities using a variety of research approaches, including ethnography, epidemiology, disability statistics, situation and policy analysis techniques and the development, piloting and evaluating of several tailored interventions in the health and education sector. She also provided significant support in translating research into policy.
Prof Jill's previous work has notably contributed to a better understanding of the vulnerability of women with disabilities to HIV and violence, the increased risk of disability among people living with HIV and methods to measure the cost of disability. The latter was among the best of UNICEF's research 2016. In her research, her work on comprehensive sexuality education and young people with disabilities is noteworthy, as she developed an evidence-informed curriculum innovation to provide CSE in accessible formats. This intervention, called Breaking the Silence, has been identified by UNESCO as a good practice. Similarly, her, Forgotten Agenda project focused on the sexual and reproductive health and needs of women with disabilities under the COVID pandemic in South Africa., which won the Discovery Award for Policy Translation in the 2023 South African AIDS Conference. She is also the developer of the Disability Awareness Checklist and accompanying toolkit, which is an action-oriented tool to transform health facilities into inclusive and accessible services utilising local resources. Currently, Prof Jill leads the Disability Data Initiative Sub-Saharan Africa, which provides an innovative approach towards disability rights monitoring using national datasets.
Towards Inclusion and Accountability through Disability Data: Leveraging new Databases from the DDI
Evidence consistently shows that people with disabilities experience inequalities across all areas of life, resulting in poorer outcomes in health, education, employment, living conditions, and overall well-being. Both the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) call for inclusive development and emphasise the need for disability-disaggregated data to monitor progress and accountability. While disability data is increasingly included in recent surveys and censuses, its analysis and presentation in user-friendly formats that inform policy and practice remain limited. The Disability Data Initiative (DDI) addresses this gap by mapping national surveys and censuses worldwide since 2009, assessing the extent to which they include disability data, and producing internationally comparable estimates of disability prevalence and related inequalities. These estimates are freely accessible through the DDI databases www.disabilitydatainitiative.org and can support human-rights-based advocacy, policy design and evaluation, and inclusive development more broadly.
In this session, participants will learn the fundamentals of disability-inclusive data and how to access and use the DDI databases. Through guided, hands-on exercises, we will demonstrate the databases’ functions and provide a step-by-step approach to identifying disability data and generating country-specific analyses. Using their own devices, participants will create customised country reports aligned with their areas of interest, such as education, health, or employment. By the end of the session, they will understand the value of disability data and gain practical skills to quickly generate disability gap estimates and apply these insights to inform policy and programmatic decisions in real time. They will also have made new connections to the DDI team (researchers with and without disabilities) and disability sector, enabling collaboration and information exchange long after the event.
Jill Hanass-Hancock
Prof Hanass-Hancock, SAMRC South Africa
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