From silos to solidarity: a Kenyan activist's case for disability justice in Africa
In a new book extract, Kenyan disability activist Mildred Omino argues that disability activism has isolated itself; and that a heating climate is now exposing, cruelly, what that isolation costs women with disabilities across Africa.
Published 27 October 2026 · 18:15 GMT
The summary
In a new book extract, Kenyan disability activist Mildred Omino argues that disability activism has isolated itself; and that a heating climate is now exposing, cruelly, what that isolation costs women with disabilities across Africa. Mildred Omino, a disability activist from Kenya, argues in a new book extract that disability activism must break out of its silos and build solidarity with other social justice struggles, as the climate crisis deepens the exclusion of persons with disabilities.
The three lenses
- WestThe Western lens: a rights framework, tested by lived experience Read from Geneva, London and Washington, Omino's essay lands inside a familiar framework, the World Health Organization's global disability data and the human-rights architecture built around the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and then presses on its weakest point: implementation.
- EastThe Eastern lens: the same exclusion, on another continent's terms Read from Asia, where the World Health Organization's South-East Asia work stresses the same barriers, negative attitudes, inaccessible transport and buildings, limited social support, the essay reads less as a Kenyan story than as a shared one.
- Global SouthThe Global South lens: solidarity as a survival strategy Read from Nairobi, Johannesburg and the continent Omino writes about, the essay is not an abstraction but a programme note.
Key facts
- Mildred Omino, a disability activist from Kenya, argues in a new book extract that disability activism must break out of its silos and build solidarity with other social justice struggles, as the climate crisis deepens the exclusion of persons with disabilities. Daily Maverick (Oct 27, 2026)
- The extract appears in Rethinking Activism in Africa: Voices and Visionaries for Social Justice and Human Rights, edited by Mark Heywood and published by Jacana Media, which gathers essays from writers in eight African countries; Daily Maverick is publishing extracts from four of the essays. Daily Maverick (Oct 27, 2026)
- The World Health Organization estimates that 1.3 billion people, about 16% of the global population, experience significant disability, and that 80% of persons with disabilities live in low- and middle-income countries. World Health Organization (Mar 7, 2023)
- Omino writes that Africa is home to more than 80 million people with different forms of disability across its 54 countries, and that women with disabilities face higher rates of gender-based violence and sexual abuse, lower literacy and higher unemployment than their male counterparts. Daily Maverick (Oct 27, 2026)
- In Kenya, a study of the flagship FLLoCA climate-finance programme found three out of four women, youth and persons with disabilities could not access the funds, despite being among those most vulnerable to climate impacts. Daily Nation (Aug 31, 2025)
What does a Kenyan activist's school protest reveal about disability justice?
Daily Maverick has published an extract from a new book, Rethinking Activism in Africa: Voices and Visionaries for Social Justice and Human Rights, edited by the activist and writer Mark Heywood and published by Jacana Media. The book gathers essays from eight African countries; Daily Maverick is publishing extracts from four. The latest, published on 27 October 2026, is by Mildred Omino, a disability activist from Kenya, and it carries a blunt thesis: disability activism must move from silos to solidarity, urgently.
Omino writes from her own life. Born near Lake Victoria in rural Kisumu County, she was sent to “special” schools because mainstream schools lacked accessible facilities. She became school captain at both her primary and secondary schools, and it was in her final high-school year that she found her activist voice, when a principal, reading out the names of students behind on fees during an exam, told them: “I don't care whether you are going to crawl or fly; all I need is school fees.” The students protested, marched to the district education offices, and were suspended as the school closed indefinitely. Omino's account of what followed, including, she writes, false allegations later used as cover for the maltreatment of learners with disabilities; is the origin story of her politics: dignity first, and never alone.
What do the global numbers actually show?
The scale Omino is writing about is vast. The World Health Organization estimates that 1.3 billion people, about 16% of the world's population, experience significant disability, and that 80% of persons with disabilities live in low- and middle-income countries. Omino puts the African figure at more than 80 million people with different forms of disability, across the continent's 54 countries.
Within that picture, women with disabilities face the sharpest edge: higher prevalence of disability, lower literacy rates and higher unemployment than men, and a higher proportion of gender-based violence, sexual abuse and neglect. She also describes people with psychosocial disabilities confined in healing centres in Ghana, Uganda and Kenya. Her economics-class vocabulary, scarcity, choice, opportunity cost, is, she writes, the daily experience of most disabled people.
What can one essay not yet tell us?
An extract is not the book, and a memoir chapter is not a census. Omino's essay is a first-person account: its school protest, its family memories and its 2022 homecoming are hers, and they cannot by themselves establish how widespread each practice she describes is across 54 countries. The book's other essays may complicate or redirect her argument.
Nor does the extract settle the practical question at its heart: what solidarity costs, and who pays for it. Omino argues that disability activism has placed itself in silos and been placed in them, overlooking the intersections between disability and other social justice issues. But the essay lays out no programme, and readers should not mistake a call to arms for a plan. The honest gap is also the invitation: the work of turning solidarity from a word into a practice is still to be done, and it will be judged county by county, budget by budget.
Why does a heating climate make this argument urgent?
Because the climate crisis is already rewriting Omino's home ground. Returning to her rural home in 2022 for a longer stay to mourn her late father, she found the fish vendors no longer selling at homesteads, an acute shortage of fish, and a village living with food insecurity. “I have never seen a drought like this,” one woman told her. “We could not find water to drink. I remember, one day, I drank dirty water, because I was so thirsty. I almost died from stomach ache. Taking a shower became a luxury for me.” Omino and colleagues were then preparing a shadow report to the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and the pastoralist women with disabilities they spoke to, livelihoods lost as droughts and floods killed livestock, poverty deepened by low education and employment, starvation and poor health, form the essay's most damning passage: their voices, she writes, are persistently absent from climate justice policy, in an era when “climate justice” and “leave no one behind” are constant refrains.
Kenyan reporting beyond the book bears her out. A study of Kenya's Financing Locally-Led Climate Action programme, which channels more than 39.3 billion shillings to counties, found three out of four women, youth and persons with disabilities unable to access the funds. In drought-affected Kilifi and Kajiado counties, UNFPA Kenya reports women with disabilities travelling longer distances and queuing longer for water, losing income and seeing reproductive healthcare disrupted. The pattern is the essay's thesis in the field: money and warnings exist, but they are not designed to reach those who need them most. The same logic runs through our barometer of global risks.
How does Omino's argument change the way we read activism?
Omino's move is to reverse the usual direction of the argument. Disability is often presented as a specialist concern, to be addressed once the big struggles, poverty, climate, gender, are won. She argues the opposite: that the big struggles are already disability struggles, because their failures land first and hardest on people whose bodies and minds the system was never designed for. Her economics framing makes it concrete: scarcity for disabled people is the absence of a service altogether, no accessible clinic, no inclusive school, no receivable warning, and the opportunity cost is dependence itself.
That is why the silo metaphor matters. A movement that argues alone can be answered alone: a ramp here, a grant there, a mention in a strategy document. Omino wants disability inside the rooms where climate money is divided, where drought plans are written and where school discipline is decided; not as a beneficiary category but as a co-author. The test she implicitly sets is unforgiving, and it is the right one: if the next climate plan in Kisumu cannot be used by a woman with a mobility disability fetching water in a drought, it has not understood its problem. The factbook tracks the same structural gaps.
What happens if solidarity stays a slogan?
The first consequence of inaction is already visible: adaptation money that bypasses the people it names. Kenya's climate-finance gap is what happens when inclusion is a paragraph rather than a design rule. The second consequence is quieter: every inaccessible warning and undignified service teaches a generation of disabled activists that the movement does not expect them to stay.
The third consequence runs in the other direction, and it is Omino's wager: a disability movement that joins forces with climate, gender and labour organising gains leverage it never had alone, and lends those movements something they lack, a ruthless test of whether their plans work for the hardest cases first. If that alliance forms, the winners are not only disabled people; a warning system redesigned for a blind woman in a flood is a warning system that works better for everyone. If it does not, the next drought will produce the same stories, with the same names changed, and the same refrain, “leave no one behind”; sounding thinner each time.
What should readers watch next?
First, the series itself: Daily Maverick is publishing four extracts from Heywood's collection, and the remaining essays will show whether Omino's solidarity thesis is the book's spine or one voice among several. Second, whether Kenyan disability organisations take up the climate argument in county planning, where Kenya's climate money is spent. Third, the practical record: whether Kenya's climate-finance programme and its early-warning systems publish disability-disaggregated data, and whether the next drought response in Kilifi and Kajiado is co-designed with the women it serves.
Readers should also watch the United Nations track: the shadow-reporting process Omino describes is slow, technical work, and its value lies less in a single session than in whether its findings migrate into budgets and county plans. This article will be updated as the remaining extracts appear. The full archive of the Bureau's rolling coverage is on the archive page.
The three lenses
West Lens:
The Western lens: a rights framework, tested by lived experience Read from Geneva, London and Washington, Omino's essay lands inside a familiar framework, the World Health Organization's global disability data and the human-rights architecture built around the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and then presses on its weakest point: implementation. The Western lens counts what can be counted, and the counts are stark: 1.3 billion people, earlier deaths, poorer health, more limited everyday functioning. What Omino adds is the part the framework keeps missing: a right unusable at the water point or on the evacuation route is not yet a right at all.
East Lens:
The Eastern lens: the same exclusion, on another continent's terms Read from Asia, where the World Health Organization's South-East Asia work stresses the same barriers, negative attitudes, inaccessible transport and buildings, limited social support, the essay reads less as a Kenyan story than as a shared one. No East Asian outlet has yet taken up this extract; the Eastern lens here is the parallel, not a citation. Across Asia as in Africa, most persons with disabilities live in low- and middle-income countries, populations are ageing, and noncommunicable diseases are rising; and the question Omino poses travels intact: whether climate adaptation designed without disabled people, from warnings that assume sight and hearing to shelters that assume walking, can honestly call itself adaptation at all.
South Lens:
The Global South lens: solidarity as a survival strategy Read from Nairobi, Johannesburg and the continent Omino writes about, the essay is not an abstraction but a programme note. The South African publisher, Kenyan author and Kenyan women's network preparing a UN shadow report are all Southern institutions doing Southern work. The Southern lens hears Omino's central claim most clearly: that disability movements weakened themselves by accepting a single-issue lane while the forces harming their members, climate shocks, broken services, stigma, poverty, never stayed in one lane.
The consensus
- What we agree on
- What we agree on: disability activism in Africa has historically worked in its own lane, and the climate crisis is now hitting persons with disabilities, above all women with disabilities, through drought, floods, food insecurity and services they cannot reach, while their voices remain largely absent from the climate decisions that affect them.
- What we don't agree on
- What we disagree on: whether the answer is mainly better inclusion inside existing climate and development programmes, or a more radical rebuilding of solidarity across movements, disability, gender, climate and economic justice together, so that no group is left to argue its case alone.
- What we know
- What we know: 1.3 billion people worldwide experience significant disability; Africa counts more than 80 million people with disabilities; Kenyan evidence shows women, youth and persons with disabilities struggling to reach climate finance, and drought-affected women with disabilities in Kilifi and Kajiado facing longer water journeys, lost income and disrupted reproductive healthcare.
- What we don't know yet
- What we do not know: how far the solidarity Omino calls for will reshape African disability organising in practice; whether climate finance and early-warning systems will be redesigned with disabled people as co-designers rather than as an afterthought; or what the book's other essays, yet to be extracted, will add to the argument.
- What we expect
- What we expect: the extract to travel well beyond literary pages, into disability organisations, climate-justice networks and county climate planning in Kenya, and for the test of its argument to be practical: whether the next drought plan, the next warning and the next budget line are usable by the women Omino writes about.
Questions, answered
Why does Mildred Omino say disability activism must leave its silos?
Omino argues that disability activism has isolated itself, and been isolated, from other justice struggles, so its campaigns are answered piecemeal: a ramp here, a grant there. Meanwhile the forces harming disabled people, from climate shocks to broken services and stigma, never stay in one lane. Solidarity with climate, gender and labour movements, she argues, is how a movement kept small stops being ignorable.
What book is the extract from, and who edited it?
The extract comes from Rethinking Activism in Africa: Voices and Visionaries for Social Justice and Human Rights, edited by activist and writer Mark Heywood and published by Jacana Media. The book gathers essays from writers in eight African countries. Daily Maverick is publishing extracts from four of the essays, beginning with Heywood's introduction, and Omino's chapter is the latest in the series.
How many people worldwide live with significant disability?
The World Health Organization estimates 1.3 billion people, about 16% of the global population, experience significant disability, with 80% living in low- and middle-income countries. Omino puts Africa's figure at more than 80 million people with different forms of disability across 54 countries. Women with disabilities face higher unemployment, lower literacy and greater exposure to gender-based violence.
How does climate change affect women with disabilities in Kenya?
Droughts and floods kill livestock, destroy livelihoods and force longer journeys for water, while warnings and shelters often assume sight, hearing and walking. In Kilifi and Kajiado, UNFPA Kenya reports lost income and disrupted reproductive healthcare. A study of Kenya's FLLoCA climate-finance programme found three in four women, youth and persons with disabilities unable to access its funds.
Sources
- Daily Maverick (Oct 27, 2026)
- World Health Organization (Mar 7, 2023)
- Daily Nation (Aug 31, 2025)