During fieldwork for a disability-inclusive livelihood program aimed at reducing extreme poverty, we looked for the local Organization of Persons with Disabilities (OPD) in our study sites. There wasn’t one. Not even a weak or an inactive one.
For a livelihood program designed to hand over its gains to local institutions after the project ends, this is a serious problem. We often assume an OPD is already there, waiting to receive training. In many upazilas, it simply isn’t. You cannot expect to sustain any such program if no OPD exists in the area to begin with. This reveals the first and most basic gap in Bangladesh’s approach to strengthening disability organizations.
An even more troubling finding came from another study we conducted on an education-focused program for children with disabilities that partnered with OPDs in other parts of the country. In these locations, OPDs did exist, and they performed well throughout the project. They built strong relationships with local government offices and developed organizational skills such as financial reporting, coordination, and community engagement through support from the consortium implementing the program. On paper, this is exactly what successful capacity building should look like.
But the project has now ended. The same OPD is struggling. It is scrambling to secure funding and is uncertain whether it can continue operating. The skills did not disappear. The relationships with government agencies are presumably still there. What disappeared was the funding and the organizational structure that had been supporting the OPD from outside.
When we put these two cases together, a pattern emerges that should concern anyone designing disability-inclusive programs in Bangladesh. The problem is not only that OPDs are unevenly distributed, with some areas having none at all. Even where OPDs exist and perform well, their survival often depends on funding from NGOs or donor consortia. Once the project ends, many organizations are pushed back to square one, regardless of how capable their staff has become.
This is not a training problem. You cannot train an organization into having a stable source of funding or guarantee that government agencies will continue engaging with it after a project ends. Bangladesh has disability committees at the national and upazila levels. However, a 2021 United Nations Partnership on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNPRPD) review found that OPD representatives are often not informed about committee meetings in advance. Even when they attend, their views are heard but rarely influence decisions. There is no reserved seat or statutory role that protects their participation regardless of changes in government priorities or the withdrawal of NGO support. This is a structural gap, not a skills gap.
Uganda offers a useful, though imperfect, comparison. Like Bangladesh, Uganda’s disability movement initially grew with support from NGOs and donors. The country’s main umbrella organization, the National Union of Disabled Persons of Uganda (NUDIPU), was established in 1987 with support from ADD International. It brought together disability organizations that had previously worked in isolation. The key difference lies in what happened afterward. Uganda’s 1995 Constitution formally guaranteed disability representation by reserving five seats for persons with disabilities in Parliament and requiring representation at every level of local government down to the village council. Today, NUDIPU represents 112 district unions and nine national member organizations through a federated structure that does not rely on a single donor-funded project to remain functional.
In other words, Uganda used early donor support to build institutions that could outlive donor funding. Bangladesh, by contrast, has largely used donor support to build organizations in isolation that often survive only as long as the project does.
It would be misleading, however, to present Uganda as a complete success story. Researchers have shown that despite reserved political seats and a highly visible disability movement, the daily lives of many Ugandans with disabilities have changed little. They argue that a small group of well-connected politicians, lawyers, and NGO professionals has benefited the most from these institutional arrangements, while many people with disabilities in rural areas remain deeply marginalized. Guaranteeing representation may ensure that OPDs have a voice, but it does not guarantee that the voices of ordinary persons with disabilities are represented or that their lives improve.
The lesson for Bangladesh is therefore more modest and more practical than simply copying Uganda’s Constitution. Sustainability cannot be achieved through training alone if an organization does not play an independent role during the project or is not financially sustainable after the project ends. If an OPD is financially struggling to survive today, that doesn’t mean that the earlier capacity-building effort failed. The skills clearly remained. What was missing was a stable institutional role or a reliable funding mechanism that existed beyond the life of a single project.
Bangladesh already has the Rights and Protection of Persons with Disabilities Act of 2013, which established legally enforceable rights and a formal complaints mechanism for persons with disabilities. What is still missing is the next step: a mechanism, whether through a statutory coordination role, dedicated government funding, or meaningful decision-making authority within the disability committees that already exist, that allows OPDs to remain standing after the consortium’s logo is removed from the banner. Until then, Bangladesh will continue training OPDs for a role that disappears the moment the funding does.
