ABSTRACT
There is growing international recognition of disability as a priority development issue. This is reflected in the adoption and widespread ratification of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), which emphasises ‘the importance of mainstreaming disability issues as an integral part of relevant strategies of sustainable development planning’ (United Nations, 2006, preamble (e)). The Sustainable Development Agenda, which promises to ‘leave nobody behind’, contains explicit references to disability in targets relating to five of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), 1 providing further evidence of the rising profile of disability as an issue of critical importance to development planners. It is widely recognised, however, that there remains a significant lack of empirical evidence on which to build the policies and programmes that are necessary to effectively address the concerns and priorities of disabled people, particularly those living in the Global South.
