“The communiqué released at the end of the U.N. high-level panel (HLP) meeting on the post-2015 development agenda failed to mention disability, repeating in Bali the same omission notable in last month’s official communiqué from the Monrovia meeting,” Dominic Haslam, director of policy and strategic program support at Sightsavers, and Virginia Kamowa, global advocacy coordinator for the organization, write in The Guardian’s “Poverty Matters” blog. “The absence of disability in the Bali communiqué came as a surprise to many of us who attended the civil society meetings,” they write, noting, “Disabled people’s organizations had made a clear recommendation to the panel: in the monitoring and evaluation of targets and indicators, data should be disaggregated by disability. Building on learning from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and the inequality in progress under them, no post-2015 target should be considered to be met unless it equitably reached disabled people, they argued.”

“Without guaranteeing that the poorest and most marginalized people — including those with disabilities — can benefit from the new framework, it will not only fail in its attempt to eradicate extreme poverty but will also perpetuate inequality,” Haslam and Kamowa write. “And if things don’t change, we risk the new development framework repeating a central failing of the MDGs — specifically, failing to tackle inequality by leaving out the world’s one billion disabled people,” they continue. “In our opinion, a successful post-2015 process will only be achieved if people with disabilities are no longer ignored,” they state, adding that “the post-2015 framework should include priorities of people with disabilities that will be implementable and measured through disaggregated data.” They conclude, “Unless this happens, it will be impossible for the post-2015 framework — regardless of its other merits — to properly tackle inequality and eradicate extreme poverty for everyone” (3/28).