Our values

We know that these cross-cutting areas will fundamentally strengthen and accelerate our ability to improve the lives of children with disabilities, while ensuring that our approach is equitable and does no harm.

Meaningful engagement

Meaningful engagement is an approach that puts people with disabilities at the front and centre of all decision making and delivery. It asserts that adults, young people and children with disabilities know best what works for them, and by listening to their solutions we can ensure longer-lasting and more meaningful change.

Child-centred

A child-centred approach focuses on the needs and rights of children. In practice, this means understanding global problems through the viewpoint of children and designing interventions that primarily respond to their specific experiences and uphold their rights. For us, a child-centred approach requires us to educate, equip, and enable children to make decisions about their lives and to become their own agents change.

Racial equality

Racial equity is the intentional and continual process of eliminating racial disparities in our workplace and through all our work. We believe that we are ultimately accountable to the communities where we work, and to be truly accountable, we must ensure we are an antiracist organisation. This requires us to confront institutional racism and old colonial structures, both within our organisation and in relation to the work that we do. We also believe it means shifting power to the organisations we work with, putting our members in meaningful decisionmaking positions and listening to new and different ways of working.

Gender sensitivity

Gender sensitivity is the ability to acknowledge existing gender differences and understand the inequalities that exist. Disability and gender often intersect to compound the discrimination girls with disabilities experience, and adopting a gender sensitive lens allows us to design effective interventions that will address these specific barriers.

For more information about our four corners and how we will implement each through our programmes and our organisation, see our Able Child 2030 Strategy.

We are collaborative

We believe we can achieve more by working together.

We are courageous

We are bold and agile, with the courage to innovate.

We are accountable

We are accountable to the children we work with.

Response to the climate emergency

Climate change is taking the biggest toll on the world’s most marginalised. This is not an accident. The failure of governments and international agencies to effectively tackle structural inequalities has left many people from low-income countries at risk of the most significant effects of climate change.

We are committed to reducing our carbon footprint and taking an environmentally responsible and sustainable approach to our work. We commit to doing this in three main ways:

Fly less

Due to the nature of our work, our carbon footprint is relatively high compared to the size of the organisation. This is due to regular long-haul flights between our operational offices and Africa. We are committed to reducing this footprint and the number of flights we make over the next strategic period. We are taking our first steps toward this by employing staff in the places where we work, so we can limit the distances needed to travel and reduce our dependence on long-haul flights. We will only fly internationally when necessary and continue to embrace technology to ensure strong and consistent communication with our members.

Be conscious

We will be climate conscious in our programme delivery by:

• Delivering new projects that focus on climate justice for children with disabilities.
• Integrating climate resilience for children with disabilities in all our programmes.
• Including climate change risks and mitigations for children with disabilities in our planning.

Amplify

We will amplify the voices of children and young people with disabilities in global conversations by:

• Providing information and resources in accessible, child-friendly formats, that enable children with disabilities to participate in climate action.
• Standing up for the rights for children with disabilities to be part of the global conversation on the climate crisis.
• Coordinating and funding child and youth-led campaigns on inclusive climate justice.