Why Should We Care About Disability-Inclusive Health?
Led by the Lancet Commission on Disability and Health, the Missing Billion Initiative (MBI) will be hosting a session that centers disability leadership in how systems are understood and redesigned.
About the session
Global health has made significant progress over the past decades. Yet 1.3 billion people living with disabilities continue to be systematically excluded from health systems, programmes, and funding priorities - contributing to stark and persistent inequities, including a 14-year gap in life expectancy.
Disability inclusion in health remains insufficiently integrated into how health systems are designed, financed, and delivered. Its continued neglect reflects not a lack of evidence or solutions, but a lack of prioritisation.
This session poses a direct question to global health leaders: Why should you care about disability-inclusive health? It then interrogates that question through three distinct lenses - urgency, morality, and feasibility - each offering a different pathway to action.
Bringing together leaders across research, implementation, and financing, the session will move beyond awareness toward accountability, exploring what it would take to close the disability inclusion gap in global health in practice.
Who this is for
This session is designed for funders, policymakers, implementers, and global health leaders who influence how health systems are prioritised, designed, and resourced—and who are in a position to drive meaningful change.
What you will get out of it
A clear understanding of the scale of disability-related inequities in health, grounded in current evidence
Exposure to three distinct arguments for why disability-inclusive health should be prioritised
Insight into which types of arguments resonate most with global health decision-makers
Reflections from funders and leaders on what would motivate action in practice
Opportunities to engage with others working on disability inclusion in global health
Hosted by
The Lancet Commission on Disability and Health and the Missing Billion Initiative
Session focus
This session is an invitation to move beyond treating disability inclusion as optional - and toward recognising it as central to achieving equitable, effective health systems. At a moment when global health is under pressure to deliver more with limited resources, the question is no longer whether inclusion matters, but whether the sector is willing to act on what it already knows.