Brigitte Rohwerder is a Research Officer in the Participation, Inclusion and Social Change research cluster. Her current work mainly focuses on themes of social justice and inclusion, particularly disability inclusion in low-income contexts, using participatory methods. Her research interests include disability stigma, forced displacement, and marginalised groups’ experiences of conflict, crises and humanitarian response.

Her work at IDS has included the BASIC (Better Social Assistance in Crises) programme, where she is working on a participatory research project looking at marginalised peoples’ experiences around accessing social assistance in crises settings in northern Uganda and the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. The Disability Inclusive Development programme, where her focus has been on supporting a participatory research project looking at experiences of children with disabilities of pre-primary education in Kenya, as well as providing situational overviews of disability in several different countries. In the Inclusion Works programme, she worked on people with disabilities experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic, people with disabilities experiences of inclusive employment, and co-facilitating participatory methods workshops in Kenya and Uganda. She did additional work on the effects of the pandemic through PARDAN (focused on adolescents with disabilities in Nepal) and the Covid Collective (focused mainly on forcibly displaced persons). She has worked for K4D (Knowledge and Evidence for Development) and the GSDRC helpdesks on disability inclusion, humanitarian response, conflict, governance, and social development issues, providing support to FCDO (previously DFID), DFAT and EC advisors. She has also worked with the Humanitarian Learning Centre and on the Balancing unpaid care work and paid work project.

Previously, she worked as a researcher for the Post-War Reconstruction and Development Unit (PRDU) on evaluations for DFID, UNICEF and the Government of Afghanistan related to education, refugee return, disaster preparation and response. She has a Masters in Post-War Recovery Studies from the University of York and a Masters (Hons) in International Relations from the University of St. Andrews, as well as a post graduate certificate in Disability Studies: Inclusive Theory and Research (MSc) from the University of Bristol.