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.