Lumos attends 2025 Global Disability Summit with Youth Advocate
09.04.2025
Continuing with our record of prioritising the participation of people with lived experience in our work, Dumitrița Cropivnițchi, a child rights and disability rights advocate who has worked with Lumos for over 10 years, joined us for a 2-day summit in Berlin to advocate for change.
Here, we sought to engage with governments to prioritise children with disabilities within the reform of child care and protection systems, and make tangible commitments in the area. It was also an important opportunity for us to exercise our own commitment to the rights of children with disabilities, and we’ve made a series of concrete pledges reflecting the high priority we place on this.
The Global Disability Summit (GDS) was a critical opportunity, as children with disabilities are disproportionately represented within institutionalisation and family separation. Because of this, reform efforts must begin with children with disabilities, ensuring they are not an afterthought. The rights of children with disabilities are one of our three key priorities in Lumos’ 2024-2027 Strategy.
Segregated systems of care are never acceptable, as noted in Article 23 of the UN CRPD which firmly enshrines the right of all children with disabilities to grow up in a family environment.
Our first day began with our attendance at the Civil Society Forum session on ‘Children and youth with disabilities’, where some key issues for children with disabilities were set for the week:
Just because you’re a child, doesn’t mean you give up your CRPD [Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities] rights, and just because you have a disability doesn’t mean you give up your CRC [Convention on the Rights of the Child] rights
– Sue Swenson, President of Inclusion International.
We also heard about the importance of placing significant consideration on the needs children with disabilities when reforming systems of child care and protection:
We need to ensure that children are well nourished and live with their natural or foster families, but not in institutions. Never in institutions. Children with disabilities must also be included in all deinstitutionalisation plans.
-Juan Cobenas, IDA Youth Fellow and Trustee of SPOON
On day two, we met with Kenyan Principal Secretary for Social Protection and Senior Citizen Affairs, Joseph Motari (pictured above), who was speaking at a Fireside Chat ‘Boosting the Nairobi Declaration: Alliancing for African Inclusive Development’. Having active programmes in Kenya, opportunities to meet delegates from Kenya is key in ensuring we continue our shared vision for children in the region:
Disability inclusion is not just a moral imperative, but a fundamental right. The time is now. Together, let’s build an Africa where no-one is left behind.
– Ps. Joseph M. Motari, CBS, MBS
Lumos congratulates Kenya for its GDS Commitments and looks forward to supporting their full implementation.
But the greatest highlight of the week came toward its conclusion, where Dumitrita spoke to a packed room as a panellist at a critical Side Event, ‘Ending the institutionalisation of children and adults with disabilities’. Dumitrita focused on both her lived experience of institutionalisation which informs her advocacy, and on a series of concrete recommendations to ensure sustainable deinstutionalisation for all persons with disabilities. Delivering a powerful rallying call, which motivated all those present in the room, Dumitrita underlined the critical importance of people with disabilities being at the centre of decisions which affect them: :
We come here not to seek pity or find blame, but to exchange best practices and come up with solutions. Unfortunately we cannot press a ‘reverse’ button to turn back the clock, but each one of us can directly contribute to changing the system and in doing so, change thousands of lives.
-Dumitrita
Lumos congratulates Dumitrita for her outstanding advocacy, and thanks the event organisers, FCDO and Inclusion International, for providing this important forum for discussion.
At the closing of the Global Disability Summit, we were inspired by the shared commitment to change. We were delighted that three of the countries where Lumos has programmes have endorsed the Amman-Berlin Declaration, pledging ‘15% for the 15%’: Colombia, Kenya and the Republic of Moldova. This pledge reflects the recognition that approximately 15% of the global population (1.3 billion people) live with some form of disability, and that 15% of all development projects and initiatives should prioritise inclusion, providing equal opportunities and rights for people with disabilities.
The GDS is by no means the end of this conversation. We exchanged good disability and inclusion practices with country delegates and were inspired by the variety of initiatives and programmes we witnessed, especially the ones led by people with disabilities. We also look forward to supporting the governments of the countries where we work to fully implement the commitments made at the Summit, as well as the implementing our own commitments to ensure that children with disabilities are a priority, not an afterthought, in the reform of child care and protection systems.
