Flagship Course • Free Forever
Nothing About Us Without Us: Disability, Justice & Development
Rights, Barriers and Inclusive Development in South Asia
A comprehensive course on disability for development practitioners. Move from the social model and the CRPD to counting disability, dismantling barriers, intersectionality, and disability-inclusive programming — grounded in the disability justice movement and the realities of South Asia. Built with, not just about, disabled people.
Rights & Justice
Case Studies
South Asia Focus
Companion Lab
Disability Inclusion 101
Why Study Disability, Justice & Development?
An estimated 1 in 6 people — over a billion worldwide, and tens of millions in India alone — live with a disability, making disabled people the world's largest minority. Yet disability is still treated as a niche "welfare" issue rather than a mainstream question of rights, poverty and justice. This course puts it where it belongs: at the centre of development.
Disability and poverty reinforce each other. Barriers to school, work, health and services push disabled people into poverty; poverty raises the risk of disability and deepens its consequences. Break that cycle and you reach some of the most excluded people in any programme — which is exactly why the Sustainable Development Goals pledge to "leave no one behind." Start with the foundations in Disability Inclusion 101.
Rights, not charity
Move from the medical model to the social model and a rights frame — the CRPD and India's RPwD Act 2016 — where disability is about barriers to remove, not people to fix.
Count and include
Learn to see disabled people in your data with the Washington Group questions, and to design programmes — education, work, health, DRR — that reach and include them.
South Asian & intersectional
Grounded in the region's disability movements and law, and attentive to how disability meets gender, caste and poverty — because a Deaf Dalit woman's barriers are not the sum of separate parts.
"Nothing about us without us." — The rallying principle of the global disability rights movement
Assess Yourself — Disability Fundamentals
Six auto-graded questions spanning the course — models, rights and law, counting disability, the twin-track approach, universal design, and participation. Pick an answer and check it; each explains the reasoning. Nothing is stored and there's no sign-in.
Practice the Material & Continue Learning
Every flagship course is part of a wider open-source learning network. The cards below cross-link this course with hands-on labs, AI study companions, foundational 101 decks, book summaries, reference handouts, live dojos, and premium tools.
Free foundational primers that pair well with this flagship:
31 development-economics BookCompanion summaries with key concepts and field application notes:
85 print-optimised handouts across 10 tracks — methods, ethics, frameworks, lexicons, quick-reference cards.
56 weekly dojo sessions in the South Asian dev-practitioner cohort — case clinics, paper discussions, live Q&A.
9 premium tools (live + coming soon) plus 1:1 coaching, cohort access, and certificates. Sliding-scale pricing.