Agile’s interest in utilising the GLIA toolkit stems from our desire to become pioneers in holistic program design for people with disabilities. By understanding the complexity and diversity of gender-based issues including disability, race, level of income, level of education, and cultural barriers we hope to create inclusive programs that tackle intersectional issues.

Agile utilised the toolkit to determine how to create a more inclusive program for women with disabilities in regards to location, time and marketing in coordination with a grant program that was implemented at the same time. The grant program involves hosting three workshops and a final forum focusing on teaching ICT and decision making skills to women with physical disabilities in Phnom Penh. The workshops were a full day session (8AM – 5PM), with 10-15 participants per workshop that occurred in August, September and October. Through written surveys, informal interviews and testing imagery on Facebook, our team gained footing in learning of best practices for choosing event venues, preferred dates and times for events as well as ideal imagery in marketing for women with disabilities in Phnom Penh. 

After creating an action plan, our team developed a series of questions to be included in pre and post surveys, conducted before and after each roundtable. These questions focused on: venue location and accessibility, workshop length, number of breaks, workshop date and imagery that motivates women with disability to participate/become involved. 

After utilising these questions for the first roundtable, we discovered that many of our participants didn’t understand the questions related to the visuals and imagery that inspired them. We then decided it would be better to ask these questions in an informal interview group setting so that the meaning of the questions were clearer or could be verbally explained further. We conducted the informal group interview in the second roundtable, as well as left the questions about the accessibility of the time and location in the pre and post surveys (imagery/visual questions were subsequently removed). The second roundtable was also held at a different venue in Phnom Penh vs. the first roundtable in order to survey the participant’s perspective of the venue’s accessibility. 

Based on the results from the informal group interview (participants from the second roundtable expressed that they felt more motivated to join an event when seeing imagery of a woman with a visible disability), in collaboration with a local disabled people’s organisation (DPO’s), our team posted 2 Facebook posts advertising our third and final workshop for the grant program. Our goal was to test: (1) number of interactions from people with visible disabilities and (2) cross-check how many women who interacted with the post would attend the third roundtable. The first Facebook post featured a woman with no visible physical disability, while the 2nd Facebook post featured a woman with a visible physical disability. These posts were published 11 and 4 days prior to the roundtable date. For the third roundtable, the post and pre-surveys, as well as the informal group interview questions were also conducted. 

Our team utilised the “Program” section of the toolkit, specifically the Recruitment of Entrepreneurs (marketing and advertising) and the Program Design section (program location and logistics).

Our team utilised pre and post-surveys incorporating questions relating to the accessibility of location, time and marketing with tick boxes and open-ended questions. However, the participants either gave vague answers or did not end up answering the questions regarding what images/visuals inspires or motivates them. To remedy this, our team removed these open-ended questions from the surveys and asked them during the workshop in an informal group interview style. 

Through our survey and informal group interview questions, we were able to determine the following:

Many participants travelled 1 – 1.5 hours to attend workshops in Phnom Penh (due to traffic and distance). We provided an $8 stipend to compensate for the cost of travel, however, this should be increased to $10 to reflect the realistic distance they travelled. Sunday is the preferred day of the week to hold a workshop due to the fact that many of our participants work in factories on Saturday. For online social platforms, Facebook is the most utilised platform among our participants. For attracting and recruiting workshop participants (women with disabilities), Facebook is an ideal platform to use.

Our participants felt more inspired seeing a person with a disability (in their entirety) visualised in advertisements and marketing. Although the poster with a visible physical disability in our Facebook post experiment received more interactions, follow up testing or informal interviews should be conducted to determine whether this is more desirable imagery that people with physical disabilities prefer in motivating them to attend events for people with disabilities. 

Through using the GLIA toolkit over the past six months, we have only begun to scratch the surface of the complex intersectionality of gender and disability in Phnom Penh. Moving forward, our team plans to continue to work with women with disabilities and DPO’s to enforce/test our learnings from the project we ran, in order to create more inclusive programming for women with disabilities. We also plan to conduct a short design sprint in coordination with other women with disabilities to create accessible archetypes that will attract participants to any future workshops that Agile holds.

When utilising this toolkit for your organisation, share and explain the toolkit with others in your organisation when implementing your project. For example, although a few of our team members were responsible for implementing the GLIA toolkit, when shared with other co-workers during our third roundtable event (even when discussing the toolkit briefly), these co-workers became more mindful about inclusive practices and provided feedback into improving the accessibility of the workshop at the end of the day. I’d also advise to reach out to others who are knowledgeable about gender equity, in which you can bounce ideas off of and receive feedback if you’re attempting to apply a gender lens to your organisation.