Disability Inclusion Key to Social Progress in 2025
The UN emphasizes disability inclusion as essential for social development, equity, and human rights worldwide.
International days and weeks serve to raise public awareness, mobilize political will, allocate resources, and celebrate human achievements. While such observances predate the United Nations, the UN has embraced them as powerful advocacy tools, including marking other key UN observances.
Fostering disability-inclusive societies for advancing social progress
Globally, persons with disabilities and their households face multiple barriers to social development:
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They are more likely to live in poverty and face discrimination in employment, earning lower wages and being overrepresented in the informal sector.
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Social protection systems often fail to account for disability-related costs, frequently excluding those in informal employment, while care and support systems sometimes deny dignity, autonomy, and agency.
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Achieving core social development goals—poverty eradication, full and productive employment, and social integration—requires an inclusive environment where persons with disabilities are both agents and beneficiaries of progress.
The 2025 theme reinforces commitments made at the Second World Summit for Social Development to build a more just, inclusive, equitable, and sustainable world. Inclusion of all segments of society is essential to advancing social development.
An estimated 1.3 billion people, or 1 in 6 worldwide, live with significant disabilities. They face higher risks of early mortality—up to 20 years earlier than those without disabilities—and increased vulnerability to conditions such as depression, asthma, diabetes, stroke, obesity, and poor oral health. Health inequities stem from stigma, discrimination, poverty, exclusion from education and employment, and barriers within health systems.
The UN Disability Inclusion Strategy, launched in June 2019, aims to lead by example, embedding disability inclusion across all UN pillars, from headquarters to field operations. The strategy emphasizes that the full realization of the human rights of persons with disabilities is integral to all human rights.
This year, the UN system highlights achievements in disability inclusion, outlines priorities for accelerating change, and presents the Secretary-General’s vision for transformative, system-wide progress.
This article is authored by Akanksha Sudham, intern at Deccan Chronicle