Predicting the 2025 theme for International Day of Persons with Disabilities

Around the beginning of December each year, people around the world celebrate the International Day of Persons with Disabilities (IDPD). Around early November, the United Nations announces that year’s IDPD theme.

Last year, the theme was “Amplifying the leadership of persons with disabilities for an inclusive and sustainable future”. For just one day, that’s nearly a hundred characters of higgledy-piggledy word salad. What could it be this year? 

Before the reveal, I wanted to entertain a few potential options. The unnecessarily corporate and verbose IDPD themes have become a bit of a D*List office joke. They’re overly cursive, vague, and even with all those words, are still hard to understand.

The worst of them contain at least one abbreviation and are double-barrelled, making them sound like rejected titles to PhD theses. Take this one from 2009 as an example: “Making the MDGs Inclusive: Empowerment of persons with disabilities and their communities around the world”. So in following the conventions of the UN’s theme writer, here were my predictions for 2025. 

"Growth towards genuine equity and inclusion futures across sectors"

The convention here is to keep it vague with lots of abstract feel-good nouns combined with a trending topic. In this case, it’s equity and inclusion. Together, it sounds agreeable and anyone can interpret it how they’d like to because there are so many moving parts in this sentence. Growth could be slow and steady or rapid, ‘genuine’ is subjective, and the sectors could mean sectors within societies, or industries, or even within a single organisation. And just by making the word ‘future’ plural, the interpretive possibilities are even more vast: a perfect, yet meaningless sentence.

"Actioning accountability towards a UNCRPD-compliant global movement"

What’s stronger than a verb start? The word ‘actioning’ as the verb, followed by another pointy, alliterative word. But leave out the subject, the doer, so that they don’t have to be accountable for actioning accountability. As awesome as the UNCRPD is, we know that New Zealand is tragically failing its obligations.

"Self-determination: transforming leadership at local and international levels"

How good is a double-barreled name? You can get away with using a title that makes sense to only the writer by tailing it with a definition. The theme “nothing about us without us” is timeless and always relevant, but it was already claimed as the theme in 2004, so we need to keep finding other ways of saying the same thing.

"Ensuring equitable access to fundamental human rights for all stakeholders, irrespective of socio-economic status, thereby fostering a culture of inclusivity and ethical governance."

OK, so I cheated with this one and went to a corporate talk translator, and entered “give beneficiaries human rights”. But this theme is particularly relevant in Aotearoa as people on the benefit have become the recipients of punitive sanctioning by the Government. Maybe by making the wording a little less on the nose, we can get away with demanding human rights for people who live with less.

"Liberty of movement and nationality for all."

The IDPD theme writer is a big fan of the ‘something-something for all’ structure. I chose to reference Article 18 of the UNCRPD for this year because it guarantees disabled people the same freedoms as non-disabled people to a nationality and to choose where they live. In little old New Zealand, disabled migrants continue to be denied entry due to the discriminatory Acceptable Standard of Health criteria. 

How did these predictions fare? This year’s theme didn’t end up being double-barrelled or too long. However, it does continue the theme of abstract nouns (with at least one being pluralised), an unidentified doer, and a range of feel-good subjective words. And so, brought to you by the United Nations, the theme for the International Day of Persons with Disabilities 2025 is: 

“Fostering disability inclusive societies for advancing social progress.”

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