SIRA — Disability-Led Digital Assessment Tool for Humanitarian Crises in Mozambique

Mozambique's Cabo Delgado province has been convulsed by conflict since 2017, displacing more than 425,000 people. Humanitarian responders there, as in most crises, have had almost no reliable data on how many displaced people live with disabilities — so services and shelters are rarely designed for them.

SIRA (Survey for Inclusive Rapid Assessment) is an open-source, screen-reader-accessible digital survey built to close that gap. It combines the Washington Group disability screening questions with open-ended interviews and built-in referral pathways to services. Critically, it was co-created with FAMOD, Mozambique's national forum of disabled people's organisations, and the Netherlands' Design Innovation Group, under Light for the World's Elrha-funded 'Data That Matters' project. FAMOD's own Disability Inclusion Facilitators — not outside consultants — shaped the wording and interview flow, and then led the field testing themselves.

Field testing in 2023–2024 assessed more than 2,400 people in initial testing and over 1,500 households in Cabo Delgado. It found disability prevalence of up to 30% when psychosocial conditions are included — far above the 16% global estimate typically used in planning — with rates reaching 70% among people over 50. The findings were used to inform Mozambique's 2025 humanitarian response plan.

SIRA is still a single-region field test: no independent academic evaluation has been published yet, and the headline prevalence figures are self-reported by the tool's own implementers rather than externally audited. Whether it is adopted as a standard tool beyond Cabo Delgado remains to be seen.

Read the full analysis: https://www.light-for-the-world.org/news/a-new-tool-for-disability-data-in-crises/