Our societies are marked by stark inequality and the exclusion of different people, including women and girls, people with disabilities, LGBTQI+ people, and ethnic and religious minorities.
At SDDirect, we work with communities, civil society, governments, businesses and others to foster a culture of active citizenship and greater accountability of all those who hold power.
We work to build inclusive societies where every citizen and community is valued and empowered to make their own choices about their development, act on these choices, and hold duty-bearers to account.
By applying a gender equality and social inclusion (GESI) lens, poor and socially excluded people can be better supported to access and claim knowledge, resources, rights and services. This allows them to participate in public life and build fairer, more inclusive communities and become active agents of change.
Our work is technically focused and grounded in practice which is objective and unbiased. Key products and services include:
Gender equality and social inclusion (GESI) analysis, strategy development, training and implementation support
GESI-aware political economy analysis (PEA), including SDDirect’s Gender, Inclusion, Power & Politics (GIPP) analysis
Design and advisory support to active citizenship, community voice and participation, and social accountability initiatives
Fast response ‘helpdesk’ facilities to provide the latest available evidence and analysis on key issues and questions
Disability inclusion mainstreaming, research, review, and analysis
Facilitation and advisory support to more inclusive and equitable development partnership-building
Development of ethical, ‘do no harm’ and safeguarding frameworks
Stakeholder mapping, engagement, and facilitation of multi-stakeholder dialogue
Monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) for governance-related programmes
Inclusive services, including promoting access to education and health services, including sexual and reproductive health and rights.
We provide technical leadership on GESI in governance programmes, including developing GESI strategies and promoting GESI mainstreaming throughout programmes. We take an innovative ‘looking inwards and outwards’ approach, working on GESI inclusion within our partnerships and consortiums as well as our programme work.
We deliver GIS programming in a diverse range of country contexts, including development and emergency settings. We take an intersectional approach to understanding and challenging the structural barriers that people face to social inclusion, including discrimination based on gender, age, disability, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, and other factors.
If you would like to hear more about our work on Governance and Inclusive Societies (GIS), please reach out to Emma Haegeman, Head of Governance and Inclusive Societies Portfolio, EmmaHaegeman@sddirect.org.uk
This presentation by Dr Lorraine Wapling explains how to collect better disability data using the Washington Group questions. It covers why good data matters, especially for children, and how poor methods can lead to undercounting.
This report reviews available data on access to higher education for students with disabilities in Sub-Saharan Africa, South and South-East Asia, and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. It looks at how many students with disabilities are enrolled in higher education, how many are women, and what gaps exist in the data. The report finds that data is limited, often outdated, and not disaggregated by gender or type of disability.
This report reviews global evidence on the deinstitutionalisation of children with disabilities. It explores which organisations are active in this area, the barriers to family-based care, and where reforms have been successfully implemented. The report highlights examples of inclusive care reforms, advocacy by organisations of persons with disabilities, and support from international agencies. It identifies what works, what challenges remain, and where further evidence is needed.
This package includes two resources: a report and an accompanying toolkit.
The report discusses the Building Equitable Partnerships initiative between Plan International UK and Social Development Direct, sharing research findings from across the collaboration. The toolkit offers a set of practical tools developed through this collaboration, designed to support equitable partnerships. The tools can be adapted to different partnership contexts. Questions and indicators can be edited or removed depending on your needs.
SDDirect played a leading role in the implementation of Voices for Change (V4C), the UK Department for International Development (DFID)’s £28m flagship programme (2012 - 2017) on strengthening the enabling environment for women and girls’ empowerment in Nigeria. SDDirect was responsible for technical leadership across the programme and for bringing together a team of Nigerian and international experts with technical expertise in the fields of gender equality, social norms, media and communications, and research and evidence.
This review sought to explore the United Nations High Comissioner for Refugees' (UNHCR) engagement with displaced youth, refugees and internally displaced persons (IPDs), by analysing the UN agency’s commitments to youth through its policies, guidelines, strategies, institutional infrastructure, approaches to identifying and responding to the needs of displaced youth, current funding, programmes and monitoring and evaluation processes.
A learning synthesis of the La Pépinière programme (French version).
The mini-pilots focused on adolescent girls and young women (AGYW) economic empowerment in the areas of mobile money/savings; social capital and inspirational role models; and social media interaction. The results of all three mini-pilots exceeded expectations in terms of improving financial independence, whilst two demonstrated improvements in AGYW decision-making on the use of their savings.
