Blog
Community development work that doesn't deliberately consider accessibility and inclusion risks leaving behind exactly the residents who often need support the most. As One Vision CBO's programmes have grown, disability inclusion has become an increasingly explicit consideration in how we design and deliver our work across Mwiki — and it's a topic we believe deserves honest, ongoing discussion rather than a single tick-box mention.
Physical Accessibility at Our Events and Water Points
Simple design choices matter enormously here — ensuring medical camp venues and community water points are reachable without navigating steps or narrow, obstacle-filled paths, and that event set-ups leave enough space for residents using mobility aids to move through comfortably. These considerations are increasingly part of our standard site planning, though we're honest that not every existing water point was designed with this in mind from the start, and retrofitting is an ongoing process.
Making Health Outreach Genuinely Accessible
Our Community Health Outreach & Free Medical Camps aim to be a genuinely accessible entry point to healthcare for residents with disabilities who may otherwise face additional transport and access barriers reaching a distant clinic. This includes training our volunteers to offer appropriate assistance during queuing and registration without being presumptuous about what help someone actually wants or needs.
Skills Training That Doesn't Assume One Type of Ability
Within the Youth Digital Skills & Vocational Training Programme, we're working to ensure that both the physical training environment and the curriculum itself can be adapted for trainees with different abilities — for instance, ensuring digital skills training considers screen-reader compatibility and alternative input methods where a trainee needs them, rather than assuming a single standard setup works for everyone.
Where We Still Have Work to Do
We don't want to overstate our progress here. Disability inclusion is a continuous process of listening, adapting, and correcting course, not a box that gets checked once. We actively welcome direct feedback from residents with disabilities and from disability-focused organisations on where our programmes are falling short, and we'd rather hear that feedback directly than assume we've already got it right.
Learning Directly From Disabled-Led Organisations
Rather than assuming we understand accessibility needs well enough to design programmes without direct input, we've begun reaching out to disability-focused organisations and disabled residents themselves to review our event planning and programme design before major activities, treating their feedback as expert input rather than an afterthought consultation.
This is still a developing relationship rather than a fully mature practice, and we're the first to acknowledge that meaningful disability inclusion is a standard we're working toward incrementally, cohort by cohort and event by event, rather than one we can claim to have fully achieved.
Training Our Own Team and Volunteers
Genuine disability inclusion depends heavily on how confidently and respectfully our own staff and volunteers interact with residents with disabilities on the ground, not just on physical accessibility of a venue. We've begun incorporating basic disability awareness and appropriate assistance training into our volunteer orientation process, covering practical guidance like asking before offering help rather than assuming what assistance someone wants or needs.
This training is still relatively basic and evolving, and we welcome direct input from disability-focused organisations on how to strengthen it further as our programmes continue to grow.
Progress We're Genuinely Proud Of, Held Honestly
We're proud of the concrete steps described here, while remaining clear-eyed that meaningful inclusion is an ongoing commitment rather than a finished achievement. We'd rather be judged on this honest, incremental progress than on a polished claim of full inclusion that wouldn't withstand genuine scrutiny from the residents it's meant to serve.
We share this account of our current practices not as a finished accomplishment to be praised, but as an honest status update on work still very much in progress, offered in the hope that naming both our genuine progress and our real gaps openly will keep us moving in the right direction faster than quiet, unexamined assumptions ever could.
We'd rather residents and disability advocates alike hold us accountable to continuous improvement on this front than accept a static description of where we currently stand as a finished achievement, because genuine inclusion, by its nature, is never something an organisation can declare complete and stop actively working on.
If you're a Mwiki resident with a disability, or represent a disability-focused organisation, and have feedback on how our programmes could be more accessible, we genuinely want to hear from you at info@onevisioncbo.site or +254 798 200890. We're committed to treating this as continuous, honest work rather than a box to check once, and we'll keep sharing updates on this front as our practices continue to develop across every programme we run. Thank you for taking the time to read this honest account, and we welcome your continued feedback as we keep working to do better.