“We will come back to them later.” Few promises in leadership are easier to make, and few are harder to hold anyone to. This case is about what happens when that promise is made to children with disabilities.
A minister was appointed to oversee the education portfolio in a region of their country. On assumption of office, the minister described the poor state of the portfolio they had inherited and the need to turn the sector around quickly, starting with what they considered most crucial. During a Q&A session with the minister, I asked two questions. First, which part of the work the minister had described focused on the education of children with disabilities? Second, in the face of competing priorities and limited resources, how did the minister decide what to prioritise or do first?
Known Facts
- Given the poor state of infrastructure noted, creating decent learning environments for children was considered the most pressing priority to be met.
- Decent learning environments were prioritised because research evidence links basic school infrastructure to better attendance and learning outcomes.
- The minister acknowledged that none of their current efforts had considered children with disabilities. The plan was to sort out “other children” first and then come back to children with disabilities later.
- The minister explained that prioritisation of needs was largely shaped by their own judgement and what those who elected them to office would want to see Voters wanted wins: big numbers, visible movement and things that could be pointed to. Starting with children with disabilities could absorb resources without producing that kind of result in time.
- Elections were approaching and showing visible results was a priority because results would persuade the electorate to return the minister to office.
- There was no timeline for returning to children with disabilities who had been left for later.
On its own, this could read as one politician’s calculation, but I think it describes something far more widespread and much harder to see, in how leaders in public and private institutions alike decide who comes first. If you have ever signed off a plan built on quick wins, this case is as much about your organisation as it is about government. That is the focus of this edition: how power, politics, language and rhetoric shape who gets included.
The Case for Sequencing
Before critiquing the minister’s response and sequencing, there is something to credit in the minister’s answer itself. Where policymakers so often deflect from concrete answers during Q&As, this minister’s candour in naming a hard trade-off deserves recognition. Readers who followed Case Study 01 will remember my argument that saying less does not make the underlying questions go away; it relocates them somewhere the organisation can no longer manage them. This minister did the opposite. The difficult questions about sequencing were answered in the room where they could be examined.
Having said that, it is worth acknowledging that sequencing happens in institutional and global agendas and indeed, in almost every choice we make as humans. Resources are finite, so every budget item has a ranking, whether or not anyone calls it that. Sequencing is a core leadership discipline and at its centre is the ability to make a little go a long way while ensuring that essential needs are met. There is no gainsaying that a policymaker who tries to do everything at once could easily end their term having delivered nothing at all.
Moreover, the importance of the political economy in which the minister was operating must be recognised. A leader who loses office loses the ability to deliver change at that level. As such, securing early, visible results can be framed as protecting the reform agenda itself, including any future work on disability. Based on that understanding, the logic runs: win the mandate first, then extend the work to those who are yet to be reached. That logic is coherent and we have seen in play out in different election cycles across many contexts.
The weakness of sequencing, however, is not in the meaning or logic but in what it assumes, misses and takes for granted, which I turn to next.
How sequencing perpetuates exclusion and inequality
Genuine sequencing that has the potential to produce future results has three features. Firstly, someone owns the return i.e. the next leg of what is being deferred. Secondly, there needs to be a date or at least a time frame by which it happens. Thirdly, resources are set aside to ensure it happens. When deferral is missing one or more of these features, the mechanism to bring it back becomes questionable and that is where sequencing begins to perpetuate exclusion or already existing inequalities.
Consider what happens when the next cycle arrives. A new election brings the same arithmetic and the same demand for visible wins. The deferred group is no closer to being low-hanging fruit than it was the first time. If anything, it is further away, because unaddressed needs tend to grow more complex and more expensive with time. So, the logic that deferred them once defers them again, and again after that.
Nobody ever decides “never”. “Later” simply keeps being renewed until it becomes the standard.
To be clear, visible wins are a reasonable measure of whether a government is delivering. Under electoral pressure, however, they became the target and once the countable win is the target, effort flows towards whatever moves the number fastest. Visible wins are not bad in themselves but as we have seen over the years, work for children with disabilities is structurally disadvantaged by this type of scorecard in three ways. Firstly, it is judged as more expensive on a cost-to-beneficiary basis. Secondly, it is often seen as taking longer to show results on a timeline that may not fit an election cycle. Thirdly, children with disabilities are poorly captured in many data systems which makes any gains for them hard to count as well. The result? Continued exclusion.
The unaccounted costs of sequencing
Aside from the risk of being forgotten, deferring children with disabilities is not cost-free. For children, time carries a particular weight. A six-year-old whose disability goes unidentified and unsupported at the start of a government’s term can become a ten- or eleven-year-old with compounded learning gaps by the end of the term, or even become a child who has left school altogether. Developmental windows close on their own schedule, indifferent to the electoral one. While a deferred programme for adults can sometimes recover lost ground, oftentimes, for children with disabilities, delayed or deferred intervention can shape everything that follows.
So, while the visible wins could still arrive and the votes are still counted for the policymaker the cost of sequencing has gone elsewhere. It has gone into classrooms that cannot accommodate the child, and into homes, where it is absorbed by whoever provides the care. In many households, that is the mother, who gives up work, income and often her own wellbeing to fill the gap the system left open.
The cost, by then higher, has also been passed on to whichever future government or policymaker is willing to say, “This stops now.” That willingness, or its absence, is the crux of this case.
The will or lack thereof to break the chain of unending deferral
At some point in your work or conversations, you have probably heard the phrase “there is no political will.” It is usually taken to mean that policymakers are not willing to put their political muscle behind a particular cause.
However, I have come to realise that political will does not happen in isolation and it often reflects underlying power dynamics.
In my previous research on inclusive education policy, I argued that policy makers contribute to the continued reproduction of education exclusion of children with disabilities. One way they do this is through the use of the language of reforms which allows them to create legitimacy for certain ideas. Every reform comes with its own set of actions and its announcement names what is broken, what will be fixed first and invites the public to support that account. In the minister’s case, once crumbling classrooms were named as the problem, fixing them first looked less like a choice and more like common sense.
Given this, policy makers and the governments they serve cannot be seen as neutral in the changes we observe in society, because reforms reflect their own interests in prioritising some changes over others.
The absence of specific reforms targeted at ensuring that children with disabilities have equal access to and participation in, quality education, suggests a non-prioritisation of disability inclusion amidst other competing agendas. That absence is itself a silence, and it adds meaning to the exclusion already present. It tells us what the government considers the best use of its limited resources, how urgent it considers the needs of children with disabilities and, when demands compete, whose needs come after everyone else’s.
This brings us back to the person willing to say, “This stops now.”
Breaking the chain of deferral requires a policymaker willing to spend political power on a particular group against the odds. That raises a harder question: where does power actually sit in driving disability inclusion and what would move those who hold it to act? For the minister, the honest answer was the ballot box. Until policymakers see inclusion as part of what they would be judged on and until those affected muster enough voice to make it so, “later” will most likely remain the standard.
The case for progressive realisation. Is it still valid?
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development commits every UN member state to leave no one behind, and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) sets out the rights that give that commitment legal force for persons with disabilities. At the heart of the pledge is a promise to reach the furthest behind first. What is visible in many development contexts, and in this case, is how that pledge gets inverted: the nearest are reached first, because the nearest produce numbers fastest.
Asking policymakers to honour the pledge’s intended meaning does not ignore the reality that resources must be allocated strategically in any social or economic system. Legal frameworks and international commitments acknowledge that reality, which is why they allow states to realise economic, social and cultural rights progressively, as resources allow. However, in my work as a disability and inclusion advocate and as an external expert to the African Union’s child rights treaty body (ACERWC), I have seen that progressive realisation is the provision governments reach for when they explain why disability can wait. This is despite General Comment No. 4 of the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which clarifies that in education, progressive realisation means moving as expeditiously and effectively as possible towards inclusive education. So, the question is less whether progressive realisation is valid than whether it is being used as intended. Progressive realisation means that “later” carries obligations an election timetable does not erase. It describes a direction of travel, with deliberate steps along it.
Where this shows up beyond government
It would be comfortable to read this as a case study only for policymakers or the education sector. However, I believe leaders in private and public organisations alike will recognise the same pattern in their own plans, usually under a different name.
Accessibility improvements scheduled for “the next release”. Flexible working for parents promised “once the restructure settles”. Equality, diversity and inclusion programmes that are the first to go when budgets tighten. Reasonable adjustments and ESG commitments approved “only once we have the numbers to justify them”. Each decision may seem sensible in isolation, and even on a strict reading of the business case. Yet each carries the same three absences: no owner for the return, no date and no resources set aside. In each case, the people deferred tend to be those with the least power in the meeting where the decision is made. The disabled customer is not in the product roadmap review. The mother returning from maternity leave is not in the restructure workshop.
The deferral feels neutral to the people making it because the people paying for it are not there to make it feel otherwise. And even when they are present, structural barriers often keep them silent.
Redesigning what counts
The minister’s constraint was real. Elections happen, and a leader who cannot show results may not get the chance to deliver anything else. But what counted as visible wins was partly the minister’s to shape, and the same is true for every leader with a scorecard.
Inclusion does not happen by accident but through deliberate efforts and it can produce visible results within a single cycle if someone defines the milestones. The number of children identified and assessed. The number of teachers trained in inclusive practice. The number of schools made accessible. The number of children with disabilities enrolled and still in school a year later. These are numbers. They are smaller than the headline figures of a mass programme, but they are presentable, and a leader confident enough to explain to the public why these numbers matter changes what the public learns to reward.
Leaders answer to scorecards, and over time they also teach their stakeholders what to score.
In organisations, that translates into four practical moves. Firstly, disaggregate every win, so that each result is reported alongside who it reached and who it did not. Secondly, set lead indicators for long-horizon work, so that it can show credible progress within a reporting cycle rather than only at the end. Thirdly, separate the funding decision for inclusion from the cost-per-head comparison, through a ring-fenced allocation or an appraisal method that weights reach to underserved groups. And lastly, report the gaps, naming openly the groups your organisation does not yet serve well, so that their absence becomes visible on the scorecard instead of hidden by it.
Considerations for leaders
- Leaders sequence and they should. However, in sequencing, every deferral should be a conscious decision that someone owns, rather than a drift that nobody has to answer for.
- It also helps to question whether a deferral choice is ever as binary as it is presented. In this case study, the minister framed it as either visible wins or children with disabilities. In practice, however, a leader can pursue the visible wins while protecting a floor for the deferred group. For instance, a modest ring-fenced budget for early identification, teacher preparation or accessible design, so that when the “later” arrives, the groundwork is already laid. A protected floor costs little in a single cycle. Yet, it changes everything about whether the return is ever realistic. The minister’s own priority shows how. Classrooms that were being rebuilt anyway could have been built accessible from the start, possibly at far lower cost than retrofitting them later. This is what inclusion by design means: thinking about those furthest behind at the design stage rather than adding them on later.
- Within corporate organisations, a deferral register is also worth considering. Each time a group, need or commitment is moved to “later”, record it with five things: who it affects, who owns the return, the date of return, the resources set aside for it, and the date it will next be reviewed. This register should then be monitored by the executive team or board each quarter until every item is either delivered or explicitly abandoned. The follow-through makes a difference.
- Beyond these, a questioning framework worth using when a group’s needs are being deferred is the 3 Ws:
o What does the deferral cost those making the decision to defer?
o What does the waiting cost those who are being deferred?
o Who in your leadership team is positioned to say, “Hold on, we said later last year, let’s revisit it now”?
Courageous and inclusive leadership accepts that not everything can come first at the same time and also refuses a “later” with no owner, no end date and no intention behind it.
About the Author Dr Basirat Razaq-Shuaib is an executive advisor to leaders and organisations on embedding courageous, inclusive and values-driven practices into strategy, policy, and operations within African leadership, education, and business contexts. She is the founder of The Winford Centre for Children and Women and The Blooming Mum, and an external expert to the African Union’s Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (ACERWC), working with its Working Group on Children with Disabilities. She holds a Cambridge PhD and has recognised expertise in strategic leadership, stakeholder management, policy analysis, gender equality and social inclusion advocacy, financial reporting and risk management. She also serves on the boards of change-making social impact organisations.