‘Categorisation itself is a form of barrier’: disabled entrepreneurs warn against ‘single-lane’ thinking

Funders, conference organisers and the media must do more to ensure disability is visible and taken seriously, entrepreneurs said at last week’s Skoll World Forum.   

The global social entrepreneurship gathering, held annually in Oxford, England, was a good example of progress, said Professor Hannah Kuper, founder and co-director of the International Centre for Evidence in Disability, a research group at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. The organisers had “listened to our request and funded a cohort of leaders with disability to be here”, she said. This is the second year that a “Disability Inclusion Leadership Cohort” has been selected to attend the forum, which is considered a key gathering for systems-change advocates.

Around 1.3bn people – 16% of the global population – live with a disability, and many of them do not receive the healthcare they need, according to the Missing Billion Initiative, which aims to change health systems so that they work for disabled people. “We can talk about people with disabilities as a vulnerable group, but having them as a vulnerable group is a choice,” said Kuper, who was introducing a discussion on disabilities and systems failure last Wednesday.

Sometimes exclusion was unintentional, such as when decision-makers simply “haven’t thought about” disability, she added. In other cases, exclusion was explicit and intentional. “I spoke to a former minister of health, and she said to me: ‘I will focus on people with disabilities when I have basic health in place for all.’” 

Systems change doesn’t happen just because we want someone else to feel inspired and give us a pat on the back

Cross-cutting

Disability should be treated as its own category, said Azima Dhanjee, who founded the disability inclusion social enterprise ConnectHear in Pakistan – but it should also be viewed as “at the intersection of everything”.

• Read more: Global focus: Pakistan

Every fund or initiative should have a “disability angle to it”, she told Pioneers Post. “That’s my message to every funder out there: if you don’t have a disability-focused fund, just make it a KPI [key performance indicator] for the other funds that you have.”

Melissa Malzkuhn, a deaf creative strategist and social innovator, and one of the eight leaders selected to attend this year, echoed this. 

“When I’ve had conversations with funders, they’ll say: ‘Oh, well, I don’t fund deafness’ or ‘I don’t fund disability’. But a lot of my work is cross-cutting…the categorisation itself is a form of barrier.” 

If you don’t have a disability-focused fund, just make it a KPI for your other funds 

Malzkuhn also warned against relying on the “inspiration” narrative. “Systems change doesn’t happen just because we’re here, look at us, we want someone else to feel inspired and give us a pat on the back and say that they feel good about our achievements. For real systems change to happen, real people need to be willing to shift their cultures.”

Sometimes that cultural shift came from policy changes, like a recent Supreme Court decision in India that opened up medical posts for doctors with disabilities – an achievement attributed in part to the work of fellow cohort member Dr Satendra Singh. Sometimes it required individuals to confront their personal biases, said Malzkuhn, who admitted she had “had some ableist thoughts” herself when first seeing a deaf dentist, wondering if he would be “as good as the hearing dentists I went to as a child”.

Problem-solvers

Discrimination and lack of opportunity remain significant problems in many countries. But social entrepreneurs are helping to address this.  

In Indonesia, only a very small portion of disabled people can access higher education, according to Nicky Clara. Her organisation, Setara Berdaya Group, has helped more than 300,000 people since 2017 with training, soft skills development and entrepreneurship support.

• Read more: Breaking down the disability stigma, one creation at a time in Indonesia

In the Philippines, most people with disabilities are not in formal employment, said Carolina Catacutan, who is blind and faced discrimination when trying to get a job. She now helps visually impaired and other disabled candidates to get into tech jobs as chief of operations at ATRIEV, an NGO.

Asked what the media could do differently, Malzkuhn said journalists tended to put disability stories into a “single lane”, framing the issue “too narrowly”.

“There needs to be a broader perspective, like: what causes that harm? Capitalism,” she said, adding that the focus was always on the cost incurred by providing accommodations for people who need them

Catacutan, a former journalist, said that the media often “romanticised” stories of disabled people, portraying them as “superheroes”, instead of as flawed human beings. When she was asked to write a script for a popular TV series based on her own life story, the producers wanted her to change some things, she said. She refused: “I wrote my own story. I showed them that I’m not an angel – far from it.”

This year’s Disability Inclusion Leadership Cohort, brought together by the Missing Billion Initiative and the Skoll Foundation, were:

• Carolina Catacutan (Philippines) 
• David Duncan (Jamaica) 
• Gedlemikael Abebe (Ethiopia) 
• Nicky Clara (Indonesia) 
• Asma Baker (UAE) 
• Lois Auta (Nigeria) 
• Satendra Singh (India) 
• Melissa Malzkuhn (USA)

Top photo, left to right: Carolina Catacutan, Nicky Clara and Melissa Malzkuhn at a panel during the Skoll World Forum 2026 (credit: Special Olympics)