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Tuesday December 2nd marks International Day of Persons with Disabilities! We would like to share with you on this occasion, UNFPA’s SRHR guidelines which is titled: “WOMEN AND YOUNG PERSONS WITH DISABILITIES – Guidelines for Providing Rights-Based and Gender-Responsive Services to Address Gender-Based Violence and Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights”.

Women and Young Persons with Disabilities: Guidelines for Providing Rights-Based and Gender-Responsive Services to Address Gender-Based Violence (GBV) and Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR) aims to provide practical and concrete guidelines for making GBV and SRHR services more inclusive of and accessible to women and young persons with disabilities and for targeting interventions to meet their disability-specific needs. There are over 1 billion persons with disabilities living in the world today. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) and World Bank’s World Report on Disability, the female disability prevalence rate worldwide is 19.2 per cent. There
are between 180 million and 220 million young persons with disabilities worldwide, predominantly in developing countries.

The purpose of these Guidelines is to provide practical guidance to ensure that GBV and SRHR services give full effect to the rights of women and young persons with disabilities. While the primary audience of these Guidelines is GBV and SRHR service providers and support staff, these Guidelines are also intended as a valuable resource for all stakeholders—including those in government, international organizations, and non-governmental organizations—involved in designing, developing, implementing, or advocating for GBV or SRHR services for women and young persons with disabilities. The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) is the lead UN agency for delivering a world where every pregnancy is wanted, every childbirth is safe, and every young person’s potential is fulfilled. As part of this mandate, UNFPA’s work on disability has focused on ensuring that women, adolescents, and youth are empowered to make decisions regarding their sexual and reproductive health and life options. These Guidelines have been developed as part of UNFPA’s multi-year programme, WE DECIDE: Young Persons with Disabilities: Equal Rights and a Life Free of Violence. The programme promotes the human rights and social inclusion of women and adolescents and youth with disabilities, with an emphasis on access to services to prevent and address GBV and access to SRHR-related services, information, and education.

To read the full guidelines document, please click here