Your voice. Your rights. Your community.

Voice of Disability NPC was founded in 2010 by Fadila Lagadien — a disabled Black woman, quadriplegic wheelchair user, and disability rights advocate of forty years.

In 1986, Fadila was left in a hospital corridor through the night after a car accident while her white partner received immediate care. Her spinal cord was severed. A specialist unit existed but was not available to her under apartheid. She was given seven years to live.

She is sixty-seven. She has spent four decades fighting structural discrimination — contributing to South Africa’s disability legislation, building organisations for disabled women, and teaching herself every new technology that could expand what was possible for a quadriplegic woman with one working hand.

She holds an MBA from the University of Liverpool, which admitted her through Recognition of Prior Learning — recognising decades of self-taught expertise that South African institutions refused to credit.

She is now an AI-Enabled Accessibility and Disability Inclusion Specialist. She founded BeAccessible, an AI-enabled accessibility consultancy, and created BiasLens, an algorithmic bias testing platform. She is the author of the memoir The Door That Would Not Open.

Voice of Disability is her longest-standing institution — the home for disabled women’s voices in South Africa.