Trade has the WTO. Health has the WHO. Aviation has ICAO. Work inclusion for disabled people has no equivalent — no single body sets binding global standards, collects comparable data, or holds any government to account. That gap is a large part of why InkludX exists.
Why There Is No Global Referee for Work Inclusion
A gap most people don't notice until they look for it
Almost every major area of cross-border life has a body that sets the rules, keeps the scorecard, and can be pointed to when a country falls short. Trade has the World Trade Organization. Public health has the World Health Organization. Civil aviation has ICAO. Financial stability has the Bank for International Settlements and the Financial Stability Board. Even something as narrow as postal delivery has the Universal Postal Union, running continuously since 1874.
Work inclusion for disabled people has no equivalent. There is no single international body that sets binding employment standards, audits national performance against them, or publishes a comparable global scorecard the way the WHO does for health systems or the OECD does for education (PISA). What exists instead is a patchwork of overlapping mandates, each with real value and each structurally unable to do the job on its own.
The patchwork, piece by piece
The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD, 2006) is the closest thing to a global framework. It has been ratified by 191 states and explicitly recognises the right to work (Article 27). But the CRPD Committee that monitors compliance can only review self-reported state reports on a multi-year cycle, issue "concluding observations," and hear individual complaints under an optional protocol many states haven't signed. It has no enforcement power, no ability to compel data disclosure, and no budget or mandate to run comparable employment statistics across countries.
The International Labour Organization (ILO) sets relevant conventions — notably C159 on Vocational Rehabilitation and Employment (Disabled Persons), 1983 — and collects labour statistics generally. But C159 has been ratified by only around 90 of 187 ILO member states, ILO supervision relies on the same self-reporting model as the CRPD, and disability employment is one narrow slice of an organisation whose core mandate spans all labour rights, not a dedicated inclusion authority.
The OECD produces genuinely useful comparative analysis — its "Sickness, Disability and Work" series and periodic country reviews are cited throughout InkludX's own research. But the OECD has 38 members, excludes most of the world, has no enforcement mechanism, and publishes on its own schedule rather than as a continuously maintained public dataset.
The European Union goes furthest of any supranational body: the European Disability Strategy 2021–2030 sets an explicit target (closing the disability employment gap by at least 10 percentage points by 2030) and the European Accessibility Act carries real legal force. But its writ runs only to EU/EEA member states, its own 2024 mid-term review found that legislative progress has not yet translated into measured employment outcomes, and it has no jurisdiction once you step outside Europe.
National governments run their own definitions of disability, their own benefit systems, their own employment quotas (or none), and their own statistical agencies — each measuring something different, on a different cycle, in a different unit. Norway's NAV data is not built to be compared with Germany's Integrationsamt data, which is not built to be compared with the UK's DWP data. Comparing "disability employment rate" across the five countries InkludX currently covers already requires reconciling five different definitions of who counts as disabled and what counts as employed.
Why fragmentation is the default, not an oversight
This isn't a case of an obvious institution nobody has built yet. Employment inclusion sits at the intersection of labour law, health and disability policy, and social security — three domains that are almost everywhere handled by separate ministries domestically, and by separate UN and multilateral agencies internationally (ILO, WHO, UNDP, the CRPD Committee). No single existing body owns the full intersection, and creating a new binding international authority would require the kind of treaty-level consensus that took the WTO nearly fifty years of GATT negotiation to arrive at — for an issue with far less commercial pressure behind it than trade ever had.
The practical result: a Dutch policymaker cannot look up a single trusted source ranking WIA outcomes against Denmark's flexjob system or Sweden's post-2008 reforms on a common scale. A jobseeker with a disability moving between EU countries cannot check one place to see how their rights and support actually differ. A journalist trying to hold a government accountable on disability employment has to hand-assemble data from national statistics offices, Eurostat, the OECD, and NGO reports — sources that rarely agree, and none of which is built for that comparison.
What InkludX is built to do about it
InkludX did not set out to replace the CRPD Committee, the ILO, or the European Commission — no single company can, and the underlying governance gap is a genuine multilateral problem that only real international coordination can ultimately close. What InkludX does is smaller and more immediately useful: it is a working attempt to build, country by country, the comparative layer that no institution currently maintains end to end.
Concretely, that means:
Standardising country data onto one comparable basis. InkludX's country reports (Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Norway and others) deliberately reconcile national benefit categories, employment definitions, and fiscal accounting onto a common structure, so a reader can compare WIA, flexjob, and sjukersättning outcomes side by side rather than trusting five incompatible headline statistics.
Aggregating the evidence base, including on interventions with genuinely strong data — Individual Placement and Support chief among them — so policymakers and employers don't have to separately track 25+ RCTs across 15 countries themselves.
Connecting the demand side and the supply side directly — inclusive employers and disabled jobseekers — in the same product, rather than leaving that matching to whichever national job board or NGO happens to operate in a given country.
Publishing openly, on the premise that a transparent, continuously updated comparison is worth more to accountability than another periodic report that goes stale the year it's published.
None of this substitutes for the binding authority a genuine international body could exert if one existed. But until trade-off politics between labour ministries, health ministries, and social security systems produces the will for that kind of institution — and history suggests that could take decades — the gap has to be filled by whoever is willing to do the unglamorous work of comparison, one country and one dataset at a time. That is the problem InkludX was built to work on.
Sources: UN CRPD (2006) and Committee monitoring procedure; ILO Convention No. 159 (1983) ratification status; OECD "Sickness, Disability and Work" series; European Disability Strategy 2021–2030 and European Commission 2024 mid-term review; Universal Postal Union, WTO, WHO, ICAO institutional mandates for comparison.