Category: Uncategorized

  • Lebanon’s disability card, and everyone it never reaches

    Lebanon’s disability card, and everyone it never reaches

    A Lebanese pilot enrolled adults with disabilities who were already receiving monthly cash and known by name to the staff running the programme. About 10% obtained a Personal Disability Card through the pilot itself and a further 20% already held one, and for everybody else the learning brief says outcomes could not be established (Mercy Corps with the Rights and Access Center, 2026). That is most of the group unaccounted for by the programme that was holding them.

    The allowance is not the missing part

    Lebanon’s National Disability Allowance already exists and the card is what unlocks it, so nothing in this story needs inventing or funding. Someone has to find the person, and that is the part that fails, and it fails in a pattern UNHCR has already documented — its guidance on working with persons with disabilities in forced displacement says registration and needs assessment systematically miss displaced people with disabilities, and singles out those isolated at home and those living in dispersed or urban settings rather than camps. A system that waits to be approached is waiting on the people least able to approach it.

    What £10 a month does

    We think a working phone is the first thing someone in that position needs, ahead of the assessment and well ahead of the allowance, because it is how they learn the scheme exists at all and how a caseworker can reach them at home instead of waiting for them to appear at a counter. Ten pounds of credit a month is what that costs, and it is the whole intervention. More on why that gap exists is in our piece on disability and displacement.

    Our pilot sends that credit every month to adults with disabilities who have been forcibly displaced, and places are limited while we find out what it changes. You can apply to the pilot.

    Sources

  • Ugandan Camps: 35% With Disabilities Got No Food Aid At All

    Ugandan Camps: 35% With Disabilities Got No Food Aid At All

    More than a third of people with disabilities in Ugandan refugee camps — 35% — were excluded from food aid entirely, which is what Humanity & Inclusion found in its Uganda Refugee Disability Study (Humanity & Inclusion, July 2025), and the figure is not a reduced ration or a delayed one but no food aid at all.

    The same study puts the equivalent figure for households with children with disabilities at 42%, again excluded from all food aid, and once two numbers of that size turn up in the same piece of research you’re no longer looking at administrative slippage in one settlement, you’re looking at disability functioning, in practice, as a filter that sorts people out of the support they were supposed to receive.

    Lebanon: 10% got a disability card through the pilot

    There’s a version of this problem that shows up further along the chain, in Lebanon, where Mercy Corps and the Rights and Access Center ran a pilot moving people with disabilities off humanitarian cash and into the national social protection system. About 10% of participants obtained a Personal Disability Card through the pilot itself, and a further 20% already held one (Mercy Corps, March 2026), which is real progress for the people who got one and also a fairly blunt statement about how many were still standing outside the system that decides who exists on paper. Registration isn’t a formality so much as the gate itself, and anyone who hasn’t been through it is watching aid arrive in their district for somebody else.

    688 family members found in two days at Gorom

    The counterexample is small and specific: when the ICRC switched on a Starlink-based social media service at Gorom Refugee Settlement in South Sudan, 156 people reconnected with relatives within two days of the rollout, and 688 family members were located over those same two days (International Committee of the Red Cross, Gorom Refugee Settlement, South Sudan). The service did one thing, which was to let people get a signal out, and what came back was the information nobody else was in a position to hand them, which is where their relatives had ended up.

    A phone behaves differently from a distribution point, in that it doesn’t require you to be in a particular place at a particular hour, or to negotiate terrain and queues that were never designed with you in mind, and it carries on working at three in the morning, which is when somebody might need an ambulance rather than a distribution, or might just need to hear that their family is still where they left them. What it does require is credit, and nobody logs a phone running out of credit as a gap in provision.

    That’s the reasoning behind what we do at Calling for Help, which is to send mobile phone credit to adults with disabilities who have been forcibly displaced, on the basis that the phone is the one piece of infrastructure a person can keep hold of when the rest of the response doesn’t reach them. We’ve written more about the cost of being offline in the digital divide, the process itself is set out in how it works, and if this describes your situation you can apply here.

    Sources