Active Arts, Culture & Design Education & Skills

Disability Inclusive Youth (DIY) research: an innovative and co-creative programme to improve inclusion of children and youth with disabilities in health research in East Africa

Funder Wellcome Charity-funded
Recipient organisation London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
Funding £1.5M
Period Sept 2024 — Aug 2029

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

In East Africa, 12 young people with disabilities will be trained as researchers to interview health leaders and government officials about why children with disabilities are routinely excluded from health studies. This matters because 75% of East Africa’s population is under 30, and an estimated 15% have a disability. Yet young people with disabilities are rarely included in designing or carrying out health research. Without their involvement, global development goals for health equity cannot be met. The programme aims to identify the specific barriers—from inaccessible facilities to biased recruitment methods—that keep these young people out of studies. If successful, the project will produce a set of practical recommendations for making health research genuinely inclusive. This could change how hospitals, clinics, and research institutions in Uganda, Kenya, and Rwanda design studies, collect data, and engage communities. The youth researchers will also share their findings through disabled persons’ organisations, building a regional network that pushes for decolonised, equitable research practices. The long-term impact is a research community that routinely includes the voices of those it is meant to serve, rather than studying them from a distance.

View original technical description
Young people with disabilities are rarely included in research, yet 75% of the East African population is under 30 years old and an estimated 15% have a disability. Without including young persons with disabilities in designing and implementing health research, we will not achieve global development goals. This programme will forge a novel participatory approach to include children and youth with disabilities in health research in East Africa. I will foster and expand my network and build the research capacity of 12 youth with disabilities in Uganda, Kenya and Rwanda and partner universities to explore the barriers and facilitators to disability inclusive health research. The youth researchers will interview leading health researchers, key health stakeholders, government and research organisations, health service providers and children and youth with disabilities. Together with the youth I will establish recommendations to make health research more inclusive of children and youth with disabilities. I will establish myself as a regional research lead on innovative disability inclusive health research. I will encourage and facilitate youth led knowledge sharing and awareness raising in partnership with disabled persons organizations and contribute to disability inclusive health care and the creation of a decolonized, equitable, diverse, and inclusive research community.

View the original record at the funder ↗

Researchers

Femke Bannink Mbazzi (EPMC Awardee)

Related Research

Grants with similar aims, by meaning.

DIsabled Youth Investigates (DIY): a co-creative research collaboration
Developing capacity for youth disability advocacy through networking in East Africa
Making educational research count for children with disabilities in Malawi, Kenya and Uganda
SGSSS ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship (More than a Footnote: Strengthening Inclusion through Disability Arts, Policy and Scholarship)
Navigating the challenges of violence, gender and disability: A mixed method, longitudinal study with young people in Uganda (NAVIGENDI)

Original classification

Career Development Award

Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.