Each year, the 3rd of December is universally celebrated as the International Day of Persons with Disabilities, more known as International Disability Day. These are citizens still living on the margins of society. While this situation is more pronounced in a country like Nepal, the state of the rights of citizens with physical, developmental and psychosocial conditions is abysmal in the vast majority of the nations. Governments around the world need to scale up their ambitions if we want to achieve truly inclusive societies.

This year in Nepal, the 'Dr. Birendra Raj Pokhrel Accessible ICT Excellence Award' was launched, an award established by academician and advocate Dr. Pokhrel to recognise and felicitate blind and visually impaired leaders working to empower fellows through accessible/adaptive technologies, tools and innovations. As an expert in inclusive ICT, Dr. Pokhrel has been a leading activist.

After years of leading not-for-profit organisations focused on disability rights, now he has launched the award. Among the winners of the first edition of the Award is my friend and colleague Sushil Adhikari, with whom I have joined forces to promote leadership empowering opportunities for youths. Sushil, together with his brother Basudev, has been tirelessly providing support to hundreds of young persons with disabilities through their Bright Star Society, a not-for-profit organisation.

Along the years, Sushil developed a strong interest in inclusive technologies and interest that he has expanded over the years, a trajectory that also saw him awarded with an Asia Foundation Fellowship. I

want to use this column to share with the readers what Sushil thinks about social inclusion and what it will take to make Nepal a truly inclusive and equal society for all.

'I think it requires multifaceted approaches and models to raise critical awareness to include not only persons with disabilities, or PWDs, but other minority segments,' he shared with me in an interview.

'Education, public awareness, sensitisation training, authentic and positive media representation, policy advocacy, accessible/adaptive technology and universal design, these all are very interlocking and interconnected models that could be embraced and adopted,' he adds.

'Also encouraging self-advocacy and leadership development, community engagement and their meaningful participation and representation in state mechanisms would matter the most.'

Sushil believes that the country is 'moving in the right direction, but the pace is very slow'. Then, sarcastically, he tells me that in Nepal there is a lot of what he calls 'policy garbage', laws and regulations which are good in theory but not implemented effectively as if they were dumped somewhere in Singha Durbar to gather dust.

'Our government should be more serious towards the rights and issues of persons with disabilities, accessibility should be considered in each developmental activity, and the charity- based approach should be transformed into right-based approach.'

Then we touched the sensitive issue of quotas. 'For me, quotas are good only for certain cases and contexts, they can be effective but they need to be well formulated.' According to him, there is a need to create a lot of awareness on why quotas might be the only effective response to create a level playing field. 'Here, the quota system is being mis-used and mis-interpreted, as politicising heavily the

spirit of this system has not imparted a positive message in Nepal,' he explains.

I totally agree with him as quotas must be seen as a temporary measure to restore the dignity and rights of groups who have been historically dismissed as second- or third-class citizens.

Finally, our conversation zoomed in on what private companies should do for citizens living with disabilities. 'The role of the private sector is very important as they have the ability to generate employment opportunities, they could not only invest but themselves could be a role model to hire PWDs. They could lobby for better legislations, allocate more funds on CSR towards programmes and empowerment of persons with disabilities as the integral part of society.'

In the ICT sector, young citizens with disabilities could play a big role. This is the area that, throughout the years, Sushil has been training many young citizens with visual impairment to master computer skills. So far, there has not been any entrepreneur with the moral and ethical depth that has decided to focus on embracing the cause of persons with disabilities. I am wondering if this can change, if the new generation of business people, those who recently returned from studying overseas, can do something about this situation.

What will happen from now till the next six years, when the Agenda 2030 is supposed to be fully implemented? I wanted to know Sushil's opinion on this worrying conundrum.

'Since we are now at around the end of 2023, by 2030, I don't really think that we will have such drastic change, but I imagine that Nepal would become a more accessible and inclusive realm for persons with disabilities...I do hope that by 2030 at least, a more equitable type of development would integrate our voice and aspiration and we would have a slightly better, barrier-free and just society,' he shares.

Sushil concludes the interview with the following: 'Putting the 'consistency' at heart, I will keep upgrading myself, and I will work much actively to transform my passion into action, my ideas into impact and my imagination into innovation.

'Indeed, I co-founded Bright Star Society with the spirit of going together and growing together, and we are guided by the philosophy that small is beautiful. Connecting the dots, all those small segments eventually create a whole, so I believe it carries a very pivotal additional value to raise the voice of the voiceless and empower people through such small organisations like Bright Star.'

Galimberti is the co-founder of ENGAGE and The Good Leadership