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586 nominations from 93 countries. The Zero Project’s Call for Nominations 2026 on Accessibility, ICT, and Crisis Response drew responses from all regions of the world—grassroots NGOs, tech start-ups, government agencies, companies, and DPOs alike—mostly describing existing, operational solutions to overcome specific barriers. It is a record number of nominations, but also the past five years have shown more than 400 nominations each, so the Zero Project ecosystem is just as fruitful in all other themes: employment, education, independent living, and ICT.
Nominations come in as diverse as they can be. Some are high-tech, like AI tools for real-time navigation or sign-language interfaces for hospitals. Others are built from the grassroots and from necessity: an inclusive multisensory center co-created with persons with intellectual disabilities and their families; a tactile learning kit for children with visual impairments, using low-cost local materials. Each nominated project differs in content and form, but all are attempts to improve function, like mobility, access to health care, communication, or simply access to buildings.
The Shortlist of 163 innovations spans 68 countries and proves again that accessibility—and inclusion in general—are not fixed goals or achievements, nor is there a singular path. It is a large puzzle of problems constantly being worked on—mostly through incremental progress, rarely through disruptive breakthroughs. Accessibility is also a moving target, with new technologies or new skills constantly opening new opportunities to solve small pieces of the larger problem.
Capabilities, justice, and community governance: Drawing from Sen, Rawls, and Ostrom
The multitude of existing innovations unearthed by the Zero Project each year also offers a unique insight into how social progress occurs in everyday life. This type of progress is rooted in—and can be measured by—what Amartya Sen describes as the expansion of people’s capabilities: the real freedom to live a life they have reason to value, with as much self-determination as possible. John Rawls adds that justice—and most governments in the world claim they work towards just societies—requires systems to prioritize the most disadvantaged first.
Many of the nominations do precisely that: hundreds of targeted efforts—some tiny, some systemic—that expand freedoms where they are constrained, creating access for those who have so far been excluded. But constraints and inaccessibility come in thousands of forms and need even more innovative solutions. The Zero Project nominations only tackle a fraction of existing barriers—just think of all persons with severe disabilities or rare diseases, or those who are deafblind, and how inaccessible the world still is for them.
Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom’s insights into community governance also apply. Many of the most effective solutions are shaped and maintained not by institutions alone. They are the work of communities solving problems where they live, with institutions merely supporting their work.
UN agencies and governments are increasingly recognizing this—not as a concession, but as a necessary correction, especially in times when international organizations are under pressure and high-income countries are cutting development funding. Nurturing innovation-ecosystems is far cheaper than most large-scale programs typically financed through development cooperation.
I will now showcase five areas of innovation that demonstrate the wealth of expertise that lies within the Zero Project innovation ecosystem (though I could easily highlight dozens more).
"My key learning and message from all of this: Innovation at the scale and diversity needed cannot be centrally managed by any government or organization. The ecosystems of innovators must be nurtured, so they can develop, adapt, and grow. Nurturing means promoting shared learning, collaboration, and early-stage development."
Against All Odds – Innovations from low-income or remote regions
In many of the compelling innovations on the Zero Project Shortlist, the ingenuity comes not from abundant resources but from precisely the opposite. Innovative solutions from low-income or remote regions reveal how lived experience—and the lack of outside support—are the main drivers. These are the people who have the authority to design—because no one else does.
These innovators work despite unreliable infrastructure, scarce public support, and often social invisibility—and are, as a result, often easier to replicate in similar regions than innovations developed in wealthier contexts.
It is these constraints that sharpen the focus of innovators: to make something that works, it must be simple, robust, reliable, and relevant. Usually, it is created by and with the users themselves, since no one else cares enough—or at least understands enough—to make an innovation truly useful.
One shortlisted project in Tanzania trains young people with disabilities to conduct accessibility audits in their own schools using locally developed checklists and community walkthroughs—no software, no consultants, just applied knowledge. Also in Tanzania, a disability-led organization designs and delivers appropriate, custom-fit assistive devices made locally for users in East Africa, provides a full-service package aligned with WHO standards. And in Ethiopia, a simple and smart adaption to sewing machines has been developed and made into a social business that enables wheelchair users to work with them and earn their own income.
Built by Lived Experience
Solutions led by persons with disabilities carry a kind of authority that cannot be replicated by training or outside analysis—nor by central government regulations or large-scale business investments. They are grounded in experience—not only of existing barriers, but also of the workarounds that have already been tested and often failed, even when they looked promising from the outside. They know where compromises can be made, and where they cannot.
In these innovations, lived experience becomes design logic—and is much more than guidance or inspiration, which is often the case when persons with disabilities are “consulted” only. When persons with disabilities lead the whole process—from idea to implementation—they don’t just challenge exclusion; they replace it with something more functional, more direct, and often, more universally usable.
This year’s Shortlist includes a mobile-app-based assistive tech software from the United States that empowers low vision individuals to make the most of their functional vision, invented by a woman with sight impairments and constantly involving 150 beta testers with lived experience. In Sweden, a theater group was established by a group of Deaf persons and others with disabilities that write, perform and organize their own productions.
Disability-led solutions is not bound to locally developed solutions but also work with high-tech innovations invented somewhere else: In Peru, an engaged DPO has built a whole servicing model around a state-of-the-art hearing device, conducting school and community-based screenings, offering them socially-priced, and delivering remote calibration and maintenance.
Technology that Returns Control
With spectacular new ICT-based developments like AI, the importance of technology-driven solutions is growing every year. Technology enables communication, navigation, translation, decision-making, and autonomy at a scale that manual solutions cannot reach.
But technology is also a threat: when poorly designed, it can deepen exclusion, reinforce bias, and widen gaps between those who can and cannot access it. The strongest ICT-based solutions in our Shortlist rely on empathy and control. They give users agency—through customization, transparency, and respect for local context.
Excellent technologies are developed by using AI to audio-describe the environment to persons who are blind or with visual impairments, recognize faces, read texts or interpret pictures in front of them. An innovative solution from Spain enables persons with severe physical impairments to learn and play music instruments with the movement of their eyes. And in Malaysia, a Deaf-led initiative has built a comprehensive digital platform and app for real-time and quality sign language interpretation, a health-related sign language dictionary and a series of education videos.
Rethinking Access to Health
Access to health systems is a topic that continues to grow in importance, particularly because its deficiencies have become more visible in recent years. In most parts of the world, health services—almost ironically—are not designed for inclusion. Physical inaccessibility, communication barriers, misdiagnosis, lack of expertise, and mutual mistrust are daily obstacles for persons with disabilities, especially those with intellectual, psychosocial, or neurodivergent profiles, or those who cannot speak for themselves.
Several innovations shortlisted this year treat access to health services not as an afterthought, but as a necessary design condition. In Spain, an NGO supports persons with intellectual disabilities and/or autism to access healthcare through tools like an identity card, tailored protocols, and QR codes in hospitals. In the U.S., a blind-owned healthcare company offers accessible labeling, packaging, educational programs, and support tools for health products. And in Argentina, a small civil society initiative focuses on providing therapeutic-pedagogical and emergency support to people with disabilities in rural, remote, and vulnerable communities. The project delivers mobile assistance, offers orthoses and prostheses, conducts community training, and maintains a database of needs.
Models that Multiply
Most innovations are valuable because they work. Among them, some have additional value because they work in Country A—and can be copied in Country B—so that the wheel need not be invented again (and again, in countries C, D, etc.). What distinguishes scalable models from all others is not just their effectiveness, but their adaptability. Scalability is not only about geographic spread—it’s also about reaching additional user groups (such as communication services in emergency situations) and leveraging different scaling pathways: a business offering a service, a government introducing a subsidy model—both can radically influence affordability, availability, quality, and sustainability.
Models that multiply can use diverse strategies such as standardized toolkits, open licensing, public-private partnerships, or institutional adoption. Most of the time, they are already designed with replication in mind. Replication—copying, scaling, growing—is a second-step innovation that must be as powerful as the innovation itself, and it requires different skills, networks, and resources.
Some of the innovations on the Shortlist have already shown growth across borders or sectors—not by exporting a finished product, but by offering a method that others can build on.
A Start Up-company from Peru has built a WhatsApp-based course platform with accessibility features for people with intellectual and hearing disabilities, using a partnership-model with the business sector to grow it internationally with users also from Mexico and Chile and aiming at all Latin American and also some African countries. Also in Latin America, contingency plans for emergencies have been developed and implemented by NGOs and are already used in 20 countries.
And an innovative AI-enabled text-to-speech solution has been developed in the U.S. and has users of its App already in more then 60 countries: It enables people living with ALS and other disabilities related to speech impairment to remain connected to their own voice.
Conclusions
Let me finish with two famous essays used by economists to explain how markets work—and how they also help explain the new approach that is needed to support innovators and their networks.
The essay "I, Pencil" by Leonard E. Read is a short and powerful illustration of how complex products are created not by central planning, but through decentralized, invisible cooperation between hundreds of organizations along the value chains. Told from the point of view of a simple pencil, the essay reveals that no single person knows how to make a seemingly simple object like a pencil. Its components—wood, graphite, rubber, metal, lacquer—come from all over the world. Each material is extracted, processed, and assembled by countless people who often have no idea they are contributing to pencil-making. The pencil exists not because of central control, but because of decentralized cooperation, guided by prices, incentives, and specialization.
What can the Zero Project ecosystem take away from this? The parallel: no single person knows how to make the world accessible. The difference: decentralized market economies have failed to make the world accessible—for obvious reasons. It is infinitely more difficult than making a pencil, since it must serve a diversity of consumers, many of them socially disadvantaged and difficult to reach.
For me, the conclusion is not to accept the failure of decentralized market economies and replace them with centralized planning. How could it be better to make an accessible world if the same systems fail to make a better pencil? For me, the solution of the future is to fill the gaps that prevent decentralized markets from working efficiently and from serving persons with disabilities at all. But how? Here we come full circle to my statements at the beginning of this blog: by supporting cooperation, shared learning, and early-stage development.
The famous free-market economist Milton Friedman coined the phrase “Who feeds Paris?”, arguing that every day, millions of people in a large city receive food—thousands of tons grown, processed, packed, delivered, and sold—without a single central planning authority. Another case for enabling cooperation and setting the right incentives, rather than leaving it to any central authority.
Human + AI collaboration breakdown:
- Writing, editing, fact-checking, and all editorial decisions done by Michael Fembek (the human).
- Data analysis used during the creation of this blog post was powered by Zero Project Responsible AI.
- Proofreading was supported by ChatGPT.
- Audio versions of this post were generated using Eleven Labs, with an AI voice model of Michael.
- The visual uses an original photo from the Zero Project Conference, with image editing by Alessandro Gobello.