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.