Inclusion by Design: What Disability Pride Month Means for Our Work
One in six people worldwide live with some form of disability. In rural Africa, that rate is even higher, driven by limited healthcare access, poverty, and remote locations. (World Bank).
Disability is often broader than most people assume. Beyond visible or severe impairments, the World Health Organization (WHO) recognizes sensory challenges, physical limitations, cognitive and learning differences, psychosocial conditions, chronic illesses, and age-related changes.
If systems aren’t designed with disability in mind, they quietly exclude people who were never considered in the first place. At Opportunity International, inclusion isn’t a checkbox. It’s woven into everything we do, from the financial services we help deliver to smallholder farmers, to the schools we work with across sub-Saharan Africa.
Ghana: Reaching Clients Others Overlook
Maroon Capital, one of Opportunity International financial service partners in Ghana, identified that persons with disabilities (PWD) were largely shut out of traditional financial services, with many active in agriculture, trading, and small-scale manufacturing. So, they built something different.
Maroon offers loans to PWDs individually as well as through disability associations at lower interest rates than their standard products. The cost is absorbed as a part of the company’s social mission. Rather than requiring clients to come to a branch, staff go directly into the communities. Financing is also extended to caregivers, acknowledging that some PWDs depend on others for daily functions.
And Maroon doesn’t work alone. They partner with local disability-focused organizations and associations to not only identify clients that might fit these services, but also support outreach, ensuring that people who might otherwise have been missed by the institution are found and served.
Now, PWDs represent 10% of Maroon’s total portfolio. It’s intensive work that is costly to delivery and requires extensive relationship-building, but it demonstrates something important: with the right product design, delivery methods, and community partnerships, serving people with disabilities isn’t impossible. In fact, it’s already happening.
Tanzania: When Good Intentions Aren't Enough
We know access to education shapes everything that follows in a child’s life, from higher lifetime earnings to physical and mental wellbeing. For children with disabilities, access is far from guaranteed, even in schools that are working to do better.
In a recent case study on the state of Special Educational Needs and Disability (SEND) inclusion in five affordable non-state schools in Tanzania, the picture was mixed.
Leadership commitment was the strongest predictor of inclusive practices. Where school leaders prioritized inclusion, the classrooms followed, with teachers across all five schools applying differentiated practices to meet SEND learner needs.
But physical infrastructure proved to be a limiting factor. Regardless of teacher effort, the school building and environment limited how fully children with disabilities could participate.
It’s a finding that shapes how we think about our work. Improving the physical infrastructure of schools through school improvement loans is a core part of our programming for this very reason. We know that true access begins long before a child sits down at a desk.
What Disability Pride Month Means for Our Work
These two examples demonstrate that disability inclusion doesn’t happen by default. It requires deliberate design, honest assessment, and partners willing to do harder, more intentional work.
Disability Pride Month is a reminder that people with disabilities have always been part of the communities we serve. Our work is to ensure we meet their needs, too.
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