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.