Yegenew Sanitary Services Cooperative — Disability-Led Women's Enterprise in Addis Ababa

The Federation of Ethiopian National Association of Persons with Disabilities (FENAPD) proposed a sanitary-services enterprise for the World Bank's Development Marketplace Competition, winning one of 186 prizes chosen from over 2,700 submissions. The resulting Yegenew (Yenegew Sew) Sanitary Services Cooperative, founded in the early 2000s, built shower and laundry facilities at some 30 sites across Addis Ababa, staffed entirely by people with disabilities. The cooperative sits within a longer-running ILO-Irish Aid partnership with FENAPD that also channelled seed funding into the Gasha Microfinance Institution and helped a separate strand, the Tigray Disabled Veterans' Association, connect over 1,600 people with disabilities to mainstream microfinance credit they had previously been excluded from.
An ILO/OECD DAC case study documented that the cooperative's roughly 180-250 initial employees saw wages rise from about USD 8 to USD 50 a month over four years. A later account from the UN Ethiopia country team, marking the ILO-FEAPD partnership's 25th anniversary, reports that more than 1,000 family members now derive livelihoods from the enterprise, and that ILO-facilitated microfinance seeding enabled hundreds of women with disabilities to start their own microbusinesses.
The evidence base is real but not rigorous: the two main sources disagree on the founding year (2003 vs. 2004) and initial headcount (180 vs. 250), suggesting the underlying story is solid but the statistics are imprecise across retellings. Both are programmatic accounts by the implementing agencies (ILO, OECD, UN country office) rather than independent academic evaluations — there is no control group and no disaggregated survey of outcomes specifically for women with disabilities within the cooperative's broader membership. Most of the strongest quantitative data (wage growth, headcounts) is over a decade old.

Read the full analysis: https://ethiopia.un.org/en/203729-ilo-feapds-twenty-five-year-successful-partnership-disability-rights-and-inclusion-ethiopia