As Global Disability Summit 2025 ends, can world leaders deliver on promises and target inequality?

On 2-3 April 2025, world leaders, international activists and policymakers gathered in Berlin for the Global Disability Summit (GDS).

Speakers included German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, King Abdullah II bin Al Hussein of Jordan, UN deputy secretary-general Amina J Mohammed, and World Health Organization director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

The third summit of its kind, these events are important opportunities to highlight disability rights on the world stage. It’s a rare chance to focus attention purely on 16 per cent of the world’s population who have a disability and shoulder disproportionate levels of inequality.

But after seven years and three summits, are we making the progress that is so vitally needed? The commitments that have been made in Berlin must now lead to action and real change.

Progress through the Global Disability Summit

The first Global Disability Summit in 2018 was a watershed moment. Co-hosted by the governments of the UK, Kenya and permanent co-host International Disability Alliance (IDA), it welcomed 1,200 participants. It was the first time that governments and civil society came together on this scale with a shared acknowledgment: disability rights are fundamental to global development.

Some commitments made at the summit drove real progress, such as the 10 commitments from the World Bank, which significantly accelerated their progress on inclusion. Nigeria committed to passing its Disability Act, and did so the following year. But, overall, commitments were weak – it was a starting point, but it was clear that more needed to be done.

The second summit in 2022 came in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Hosted virtually by the governments of Norway and Ghana, alongside IDA, it became the world’s largest gathering for disability rights, with more than 7,000 people convening online. It included more than 100 global leaders and 50 state representatives, such as the UN secretary-general and the WHO director-general.

But international aid is only one part of the solution. Domestic financing is even more critical to deliver the progress we need. Data from the new Global Disability Inclusion Report, which Sightsavers has been involved in developing, shows that many low- and middle-income countries are spending less than 0.1 per cent of GDP on disability inclusion.

Since 2018, we’ve seen significant progress in countries where Sightsavers works, with governments strengthening their policy framework on disability rights. Cameroon ratified the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2019, Pakistan introduced questions on disability into its census for the first time in 2023, and the African Disability Protocol came into force in 2024.

This momentum needs to be matched with long-term, sustainable investment. Budgets are not just technical documents: they are also political and the most significant indication of a government’s priorities. Governments need to budget for disability, and international donors need to ensure they are supporting and complementing domestic financing.

Holding governments and decision-makers to account

We look forward to reading the full range of commitments made at the summit as they are published. But the commitments must be more than words on paper. Governments, donors and development agencies must establish clear, transparent mechanisms to monitor and report on progress.

Author

Hannah Loryman is head of policy at Sightsavers.