About the Study
Too often, the disability and care agendas move on parallel tracks. This disability-inclusive care strategy lays out a roadmap for a care agenda that serves everyone in a care relationship, caregivers and recipients alike.
This document is the outcome of a strategy session held December 3, 2024, at the 15th AWID Forum, hosted by the Disability Rights Fund, the Center for Inclusive Policy, Oxfam International, and the International Domestic Workers Federation, with support from the Global Alliance for Care. .
Care policy has mostly been written around one question: how do we support the people who give care, most of them women? This disability inclusive care strategy, developed by the Center for Inclusive Policy (CIP) together with the Disability Rights Fund, Oxfam International, and the International Domestic Workers Federation, argues that’s only half the question.
Why Does Care Policy Need a Disability Lens?
Women and girls carry out more than three-quarters of unpaid care work worldwide, and make up two-thirds of the paid care workforce, often without the labor protections other workers get. Domestic workers alone number 75.6 million globally, and 90% of them lack access to social security. Feminist and women’s rights movements have organized around this reality for years, guided by the “5Rs” framework: recognize, reduce, redistribute, and reward care work, while ensuring care workers are represented in law and policy. But children, older people, and people with disabilities also give and receive care, and their needs have largely stayed outside that conversation. Across 12 low- and middle-income countries, over 45% of people with disabilities receive some human support, but in ten of those countries, more than 46% say the support they get still isn’t enough.
What Happens When Disability Gets Left Out of Care Policy?
Often, harm. The strategy points to institutionalization as a clear example: still justified in many places as a way to reduce unpaid family care work, even though it routinely exposes people with disabilities to neglect and abuse. Left unaddressed, tensions between the disability rights and women’s rights movements tend to grow, largely because there’s no shared agreement on what care relationships should actually look like, or what obligations run in each direction.
What Does a Rights-Based Care Agenda Require?
A Shared Foundation
At its core, the strategy asks both movements to treat care as a fundamental right and a public good, not a private burden or a privilege. That includes recognising that people move between giving and receiving care over their lives, and rejecting the narrative that people with disabilities are “dependant”.
Clear Facilitators
Progress depends on caregivers and care recipients actually talking to each other, setting expectations, and organising convening spaces where both sides can be heard, backed by sustained funding for that collaboration.
Four Strategic Initiatives
The document names four concrete levers: cross-movement collaboration between OPDs, care worker unions, and feminist organisations; participatory, accessible policy design processes; disability-inclusive data collection, like adding disability questions to time-use surveys and care questions to disability surveys; and awareness-raising that shifts language away from “dependency” and “burden.”
What Counts as a Win?
The strategy names specific “must-win battles”: replacing institutionalization with community-based personal assistance and respite care, designing cash-for-care programs that don’t default to women as providers, and replacing outdated guardianship laws with supported decision-making, so adults with disabilities can direct their own care.
What Does This Means for Bogota's Care System?
The study’s central recommendation is straightforward but significant: care systems need to recognise adults with disabilities as both recipients and providers of care, not just one or the other. That means designing services around independence and autonomy, not dependency, and building specific support for caregivers who themselves have disabilities, a group the current system doesn’t address at all.
