Notes from the Field: What Happens to Caregiving Relationships When a Person with a Disability Gains Greater Autonomy?

By Njumanuh Constance, Project Coordinator, Wakka Inclusive Njangi Project

How can we design programmes that strengthen the autonomy of persons with disabilities without overlooking the caregiving relationships that have supported them, sometimes for years?

This question stayed with me after a training session under the Wakka Inclusive Njangi Project in Méfou-et-Akono, Centre Region of Cameroon, in mid-June.

As part of the training, we distributed smartphones to participants and introduced practical sessions on digital marketing and artificial intelligence. One participant, a man with a mobility disability, attended the training with his wife, who had accompanied him as his assistant throughout the programme, as many spouses and caregivers do.

During the practical exercises, participants were encouraged to explore the phones independently. I noticed his wife becoming increasingly impatient. At first, it seemed like ordinary frustration with the pace of the exercise. But as the session unfolded, I realised something more significant was happening.

For perhaps the first time, he was not receiving information through someone else. He was navigating the technology himself. He was asking his own questions, making his own mistakes, and discovering new possibilities in his own way.
The phone itself was not the important part.

What mattered was that a new kind of autonomy had entered a relationship that, for years, had been shaped by caregiving.

It made me wonder whether we sometimes overlook the fact that disability-inclusive programmes do not only change the lives of participants. They also reshape the lives of those who have walked alongside them, often quietly, often for many years.

Caregivers carry responsibilities that programmes rarely measure. They adapt their own lives around the needs of another person. They become interpreters, assistants, advocates, companions, and sometimes the primary bridge between a person with a disability and the outside world. When programmes begin restoring opportunities directly to the person with a disability, those long-established roles can also begin to change.

These changes are not necessarily negative. But they are real.

If we fail to recognise them, we may overlook an important factor influencing how participants, families, and communities experience inclusion.

That experience has left me with questions we should perhaps ask more often.

• How do our programmes affect caregivers as well as participants?
• How do we prepare families for changing roles as people with disabilities gain greater autonomy?
• What support might caregivers themselves need during that transition?
• Are we capturing these changes in our monitoring, learning, and evaluation systems?

At Wakka, we do not yet have all the answers.

But moments like this remind us that meaningful inclusion is about more than strengthening the agency of persons with disabilities. It is also about understanding the relationships that make that agency possible.

As we continue implementing the Wakka Inclusive Njangi Project, these are the kind of questions we want to keep asking, not because they appear in our indicators, but because they may determine whether the changes we support are sustainable for individuals, families, and communities alike.