1980 — Winnipeg
The founding process began in 1980 at the World Congress of Rehabilitation International in Winnipeg, Canada. Disabled delegates who had been campaigning for a stronger voice within existing structures resolved instead to create a new, cross-disability organisation that would be controlled by persons with disabilities themselves. The new body was briefly known as the “World Coalition of Citizens with Disabilities” before adopting the name Disabled Peoples’ International.
1981 — Singapore
DPI was inaugurated at its first World Congress in Singapore, from 30 November to 4 December 1981, during the International Year of Disabled Persons. Around 400 disabled delegates from every region of the world took part and elected DPI’s first officers.
Building a global structure
Through the 1980s DPI established regional development offices — in Latin America, Europe, Africa and the Asia-Pacific — and hired regional development officers. It gained consultative status with the United Nations and built relationships with UNESCO, the International Labour Organization and, from 1985, the World Health Organization.
The road to the Convention
DPI’s World Assemblies became milestones in the campaign for a binding international treaty. In Sapporo (2002), more than 3,000 delegates from some 109 countries demanded “a specific international convention as an instrument of binding norms”. DPI helped bring international disability organisations together in the International Disability Caucus, which spoke with one voice during the negotiations. When the UN General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities on 13 December 2006, DPI’s 7th World Assembly in Seoul (2007) declared it the foundation for all laws and policies on the rights of persons with disabilities.
Since the Convention
DPI World Assemblies in Durban (2011) and Cairo (2016) have focused on ratification, implementation and monitoring of the CRPD and on the inclusion of disability across the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. In 2025 the organisation elected a new World President and set out a programme to re-establish its Secretariat and hold its next World Assembly.
World Assemblies & Congresses
- 1st World Congress — Singapore, 1981
- Council meeting — The Bahamas, 1985
- 2nd World Assembly — Bogotá, Colombia, 1989
- 3rd World Assembly — Vancouver, Canada, 1992
- 4th World Assembly — Sydney, Australia, 1994
- 5th World Assembly — Mexico, 1998
- 6th World Assembly — Sapporo, Japan, 2002
- 7th World Assembly — Seoul, Republic of Korea, 2007
- 8th World Assembly — Durban, South Africa, 2011
- 9th World Assembly — Cairo, Egypt, 2016