^{3 December 2020
By Ina Rahlina, RISE Indonesia Communications Officer}

Indonesia has a Law on Persons with Disabilities, but the voices of people with different needs in sanitation and clean water infrastructure are still limited. Infrastructure often remains physically inaccessible.

To overcome this, a local organization of persons with disabilities - the South Sulawesi PerDIK Foundation - provided the RISE Indonesia field workers with an in-depth understanding of disabilities before they began conducted household surveys by phone.

Disability Online Training has enlightened the fieldworkers' approach to conducting research with people with disabilities. "Our perspective on disability is different,” said Pak Hamdan. Hamdan's day-to-day work as a field officer is to conduct human and environmental sampling and also household surveys. This means he works closely with people with different needs in several settlements in the RISE research locations. During the training, Pak Hamdan got a new perspective on how to capture data about disability using the Washington Group Questions. "The training has helped us to identify people in the research locations with different abilities who might find it harder to take part in the program or receive the benefits of the program" he said. He also learned that “Society often gives labels to people with disabilities. Labelling that is often degrading, degrading, and marginalizing.”

Capturing the experiences of people with different needs in a transdisciplinary research project is one of the issues of the online training program for Water for Women led by Hasanuddin University, Monash University and Emory University, as part of the Water for Women program.