USICD Consultant Allison deFranco made another trip to Myanmar to provide technical assistance and training to local leaders and trainers. This has included co-presenting training sessions on how Myanmar's disability community can be engaged with writing an alternative, or "shadow," report on Myanmar's implementation of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD).



When countries ratify the international disability rights treaty, they commit to writing a report on how they are implementing the CRPD and submitting it to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. In addition to the official report from the government, civil society organizations, including disabled people's organizations (DPO), can write their own reports on how the CRPD is being implemented in their country. Writing these "shadow" reports enables DPOs and other civil society organizations to highlight challenges and gaps in CRPD implementation that the official report from the government might not cover. 

This summer, USICD brought four young emerging professionals with disabilities in Washington, DC, as part of its annual Youth in International Development and Foreign Affairs internship program. The interns left DC for the summer at the end of July.

USICD's internship program is targeted at students and recent graduates with disabilities who aspire to careers in the international development or foreign affairs field. Each year since 2013, USICD's internship program has placed a small cohort of interns, selected from a field of nearly 100 applicants, at various international organizations with offices in the Washington, DC area.  USICD program interns start their summer with a week of training and orientation,

	Intern Shafeka Hashash and Task Supervisor Joan Timoney at Womens Refugee Commission

followed by eight weeks of full time internship at their host organization. During the summer, they stay in shared dormitory housing at a local university in Washington, DC.  During the past four years, USICD has placed 24 interns at 17 different host organizations, including organizations such as World Learning, Human Rights Watch, Management Sciences for Health, the National Democratic Institute, the State Department, Women's Enabled International, and others.

USICD will soon announce details about the application process for the summer 2017 program. Sign up for the Youth in Development mailing list to receive an email notice as soon as USICD opens for applications, either via USICD's website or by sending an email to internships@usicd.org to ask to be added.

Learn more about USICD's internship program at http://usicd.org/template/page.cfm?id=257

Read blog posts written by USICD interns at https://usicd.wordpress.com/category/usicds-internship-program/ 

During the summer, disability rights advocate Beth Wanjiku Mdirangu joined a group of 25 Youg African Leadership Institute (YALI) Fellows to attend the Staley Leadership Institute at Kansas State University for six weeks. As a woman with cerebral palsy, her goal is to build her nascent organization, Cerebral Palsy Kenya, into a non-funded agency. Its members are uneducated parents of children with cerebral palsy who lack access to the Internet.

During the last week of her leadership training program, Beth Wanjiku Mdirangu and the other YALI participants came to Washington, DC. During that time, Beth met with USICD Deputy Director Isabel Hodge. They talked about the situation of people with disabilities in the U.S., including the U.S. law Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), reasonable accommodations, disability support services in colleges and universities. They also talked about the types of support that people receive in Kenya.