Innovating Pathways for Employment Inclusion

The Innovating Pathways for Employment Inclusion (IPEI) project was a consortium project led by Leonard Cheshire (involving the International Labour Organization) that was designed to promote private-sector employment of persons with disabilities in Kenya and Bangladesh. Both Bangladesh and Kenya are going through rapidly changing contexts on disability and employment. One notable development in Bangladesh is the formation – with Prime Ministerial support in its launching – of the Bangladesh Business and Disability Network. This network brings together businesses and civil society partners to scale-up and build on the existing, but largely scattered, initiatives around disability inclusion in employment in Bangladesh. Kenya has been a global leader on rights of persons with disabilities, including through co-hosting the recent Global Disability Summit with the UK in July 2018. The extent of these high-level commitments offered a key opportunity to substantially shape new approaches to disability, including ones that find new employment opportunities for persons with disabilities.

Our team supported Leonard Cheshire and the International Labour Organization in the project’s co-creation phase, providing substantive research regarding employment and social protection data and private sector-led initiatives to support employment of persons with disabilities to shape programme design and rapidly form new implementing mechanisms.