The capability we work toward: independence, mobility, learning, and full participation in society.
Approved activities: care and support for blind people and people with disabilities.
Program development directions: rehabilitation, assistive devices, assistive technology, and support for inclusion in education, work and community life.
Why Disability Inclusion Is Part of Our Work
For many people with disabilities, the greatest obstacles are not found in the disability itself but in the world around them: a building that cannot be entered, a lesson that cannot be followed, information that cannot be read, or an assumption that a person cannot take part. These physical and social barriers limit participation in education, work and community life, often more than any individual condition does.
Ebsar Masr exists to help people move past what holds them back. Disability inclusion is therefore not a separate cause for us but a direct expression of our mission: to remove or reduce the barriers that limit people’s opportunities, and to build the capabilities that let them move forward. It is one of the Foundation’s five areas of work, and the care and support of blind people and people with disabilities is among the Foundation’s approved activities.
Our name gives this area particular meaning. Ebsar is an Arabic word for sight and perception. We chose it for a meaning broader than eyesight: a person becoming able to see, understand, move, choose and progress where something once stood in their way. For blind people and people with other disabilities, that progress depends on removing the barriers that others place in front of them.
Previous Experience: Computer Training Open to Blind People
The Foundation has previously conducted training courses in computer use for people who are blind, as well as for sighted people. The training focused on computer use and digital skills.
For disability inclusion, the significance of this experience lies in who it reached. Computers are often treated as tools designed around sight, and blind people can be left out of digital learning altogether. By offering computer training to blind people and not only to sighted people, the Foundation treated digital skills as something blind people have the same claim to as anyone else.
This previous work is a practical foundation for the directions set out above, including support for inclusion in education, work and community life. It reflects the kind of inclusion we aim for: not support that stops at meeting an immediate need, but support that leaves a person with a skill they can use and build on.
Access to Learning, Information and Communication
Participation in modern life increasingly depends on being able to learn, find information and communicate. When any of these is out of reach, a person can be excluded from school, from work and from public life, even when nothing else stands in their way.
Learning is one of the capabilities this area works toward. A person with a disability who can continue to learn has more choices about the path their life takes.
Information about education, health, work and services is now widely held in digital form. Access to it should not depend on whether a person can see or move without difficulty.
Communication connects people to family, community, teachers and employers. Being able to communicate independently is part of taking a full and equal part in society.
Digital skills link all three. For people with disabilities, the ability to use a computer can turn tasks that once required help from others into tasks a person can carry out on their own. This is why digital skills sit at the meeting point between this area and our work on Education & Digital Skills.
Capabilities and Opportunities, Not Labels
We do not define the people we work with by their disability. A blind person is first a person with interests, abilities and ambitions of their own, who faces particular barriers in reaching them. Our task is to understand those barriers and help reduce them, not to decide in advance what a person can or cannot do.
This follows from the value of dignity that guides all of the Foundation’s work: we treat every person as the decision-maker in their own life, not as a recipient of aid, and we offer support in a way that preserves their self-respect. In disability inclusion, this means asking what a person wants to be able to do, and working toward that capability, rather than offering help that leaves them dependent.
From Barriers to Capabilities
The Foundation’s philosophy, From Barriers to Capabilities, sees development as a person’s progress from a barrier that holds them back to a capability or opportunity that helps them move forward. Disability inclusion is perhaps the clearest illustration of that idea. The barrier is real, whether it is physical, social, or a gap in access to learning and information. But the goal is not simply to help a person live with the barrier. It is to build the independence, mobility, learning and participation that let them move past it.
We measure progress in this area by what a person has become able to do. Someone who could not use a computer becoming able to use one is a small, concrete example of the change we work for: a barrier reduced, and a capability gained.
Our Commitment to Different Abilities
Inclusion is one of the Foundation’s core values. We work so that people with disabilities and those with fewer opportunities have a full place in education, work and community life. When designing any activity, we take care to make it accessible to all, without discrimination.
In practice, this commitment applies across all of our work, not only within this area. Whether an activity concerns education, health, economic opportunity or family support, we ask who might be unable to take part and what barrier stands in their way. People with disabilities should not have to wait for a dedicated program in order to be included; their participation should be considered from the start.
We also recognize that communities know their own needs best. We aim to work with people with disabilities, not only for them, and to build cooperation with organizations, volunteers and partners who share this goal.