— Impact Report
WE BELIEVE ACCESS SHOULD NEVER STAND BETWEEN A GOOD IDEA AND A REAL BUSINESS
The world would only be a better place when everyone is enabled to thrive and contribute equally. ELEVATE exists to rebuild access to entrepreneurship globally and in Southeast Asia.
Bringing disability-inclusive entrepreneurship to Southeast Asia — with Impact Hub Phnom Penh, Impact Hub Jakarta, Impact Hub Yangon and The Spark Project, supported by The Nippon Foundation.
— The opportunity and the gap
AN INNOVATION BOOM THAT LEAVES PEOPLE WITH DISABILITY OUT.
Phnom Penh entered ELEVATE furthest along of the four hubs — a DEI manifesto already existed, written by the staff member who’d become the program lead. But across a team of twenty-five, inclusion still rested on a couple of people at the edges of the work.
The gap
Entrepreneurship ecosystems across Southeast Asia are in the middle of a boom: accelerators, co-working spaces, mentors, and grant funding are more abundant than ever. Yet for people with disabilities who turn to entrepreneurship and self-employment because of a lack of opportunity in the conventional job market, the doors to those ecosystems are often closed — not by intent, but by overlooked design.
In our 2024 Toward Inclusive Access report with UN ESCAP about the lived reality of women entrepreneurs with disabilities across Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Nepal, we found physical infrastructure among the most persistent barriers for entrepreneurs with disabilities. Without a way through the door, every other kind of support becomes unusuable.
1 in 6
people globally has a disability
700
million people with disabilities live in Asia and the Pacific
2.5%
entrepreneurs supported by the Impact Hub Network per year live with a disability
ELEVATE’s ambition
ELEVATE was created to close this gap, so that entrepreneurs and innovators with disabilities can access the same resources as everyone else, and the growth doesn’t stop with them – it reaches the businesses they build, the people they employ, often other persons with disabilities, and the communities and economies they’re part of.
ELEVATE is a joint effort by Impact Hub Network and The Nippon Foundation, building on years of disability inclusion work across Asia, with the ambition to platform people with disabilities as agents of change for economic
growth and innovation.
Our path to ELEVATE
— Our philosophy
Why a hot air balloon?
Our logo’s V rises like a hot air balloon.
A hot air balloon doesn’t need a runway or momentum to fly. It’s already ready. It only needs to be untethered. We believe the same is true of communities of persons with disabilities: full of ideas, innovation, and leadership, held back only by a world that wasn’t built to let them lift off.
A hot air balloon was once cutting-edge technology, the turning point that led to propeller planes, commercial flight, and the interconnected world we live in today. We think about inclusion the same way: not as charity, but as unlocked potential. Every barrier we remove is a chance for the world’s next great idea to come from a place it couldn’t before.
And so this is our guiding principle – not to uplift but to untether. And in doing so, provide the best possible chance that the world’s next big innovations are brought forward by communities of people with disabilities.
About ELEVATE
ELEVATE is a trans-local program across Asia Pacific that elevates disability-led communities toward a more accessible entrepreneurship ecosystem, implemented from July 2025 to June 2026 by Impact Hub Phnom Penh, Impact Hub Jakarta, The Spark Project, and Impact Hub Yangon, with support from The Nippon Foundation. The program is grounded in local action and collaboration to expand opportunities for entrepreneurs with disabilities and rebuild access to entrepreneurship ecosystems around Southeast Asia and the world.
— Our achievement
WE RENOVATED OUR SPACES, MADE OUR RESOURCES ACCESSIBLE, AND OUR TEAMS ARE EAGER TO SUPPORT ENTREPRENEURS WITH DISABILITIES.
Before we made a single change, our teams in Cambodia, Indonesia, Yangon, and the Philippines sat down with 195 persons with disabilities to learn their actual needs. Their answers shaped dozens of physical and digital renovations that followed: tactile flooring, accessible toilets, lever door handles, screen-reader-friendly websites.
89%
of PWDs say these spaces now meet their needs
We’ve earned recognition from 10+ outside organisations, from disability-rights groups to a national bank, as accessible spaces. Fifteen staff members report increased confidence engaging with and serving persons with disabilities.
“Before, disability inclusion was an add-on, a good-to-have thing. Now it's by default that it has to be like that.”
Knowledge, confidence, and structural commitments spread across all our teams.
9
of our 11 direct staff report new confidence working with persons with disabilities
All eleven local project staff gained new knowledge, and ten have initiated in their own ways of working to ensure inclusion is meaningfully woven into every step of the organization’s work, even those who were not a part of the program. Project teams have gained confidence engaging the people with disabilities.
— Our achievement
WE BUILT A COMMUNITY THAT TREATS ENTREPRENEURS WITH DISABILITIES AS EXPERTS FIRST, AND 95% PWDS SAY THEIR CONFIDENCE CHANGED FOR GOOD.
95%
of participants reported a real change in personal confidence and belonging
ELEVATE gave people a place to be trusted as experts, not managed as cases. Throughout ELEVATE activities, people with disabilities were speakers, performers, suppliers, technical course builders, feature testers, business owners, collaborators, product developers, innovators, learners, and advocates. Witnessing fellow people with disabilities living independently, actively developing personally and professionally, and contributing to society and the economy as a whole has inspired other people with disabilities to dream and turn their ideas into reality.
"A PWD can be an expert first and a PWD second. My confidence in doing business returned. I am still growing."
ELEVATE also broke down walls between disability communities that had rarely mixed before, and between people with disabilities and people without. Wheelchair users sat alongside Deaf entrepreneurs, people with visual impairments partnered with those managing mental health conditions, and OPDs that once worked in isolation started sharing space, referrals, and ideas. Staff, mentors, and community members without disabilities showed up too, working alongside PWD entrepreneurs as equals rather than helpers. For many participants, ELEVATE events were the first time they had built a real relationship with someone whose disability was different from their own, or with someone outside the disability community altogether.
We welcomed 138 people back over the course of the year, some once, some many times over.
— Our achievement
WE’RE BUILDING COLLECTIVE MOMENTUM FOR DISABILITY INCLUSION ACROSS SOUTHEAST ASIA’S ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND INNOVATION ECOSYSTEM.
Four local teams joined hands to develop a playbook for inclusive entrepreneurship, turning our hard-won lessons into a shared library that the global entrepreneurial ecosystem could share and learn from.
10
cross-team learning sessions held over the year
Over monthly learning and exchange sessions, our four teams brought real-time local challenges to each other and traded ideas on the spot. Those sessions surfaced real differences in pace, tension around counting people by disability status, and places our own teams still have room to grow. We’re carrying all of that into how we redesign the space next.
— Our network across Southeast Asia
LEARN MORE ABOUT EACH LOCAL TEAM’S JOURNEY TOWARD INCLUSION
— Champions from the network
Sopheak Nhoek
OPD founder, Kampong Cham
Sopheak raises chickens, ducks, and geese in Kampong Cham province and founded a local organisation of persons with disabilities. He travelled 60 kilometres to join five ELEVATE workshops and a festival in Phnom Penh, and now helps his own community secure disability ID cards and teaches others to verify facts online before posting complaints.
“Before, I heard about leadership but didn’t truly understand it. Now I have a clear understanding of leadership roles, stance, and community communication.”
Vindhy Ariella
Founder, Bipolar Care Indonesia
Vindhy came to Impact Hub Jakarta through her former psychologist’s connection, not long after coming through a difficult depressive episode. She joined ELEVATE’s product collaboration initiative and designed a workshop for Deaf participants that wove perfume-making together with art therapy. The collaboration has continued beyond ELEVATE project.
Carol Catacutan-Sam
Cofounder, ATRIEV; accessibility advisor
Carol has a visual impairment herself and has spent two decades building accessibility and technology training for people with visual impairments. Working with Spark, she helped turn that experience into documented, shareable training modules for the first time.
“We have the freedom to propose what we think is best. We don’t lose our identity or focus.”
— Behind the changes
OUR ELEVATE JOURNEY
All four teams followed the same path, and shaped every step of it around local context and community.
1
We trained our teams first.
19 staff completed a regional Disability Inclusion Training with Mekong Inclusive Venture and our own Impact Hub DEI Specialist, and nine staff learned the Art of Hosting for meaningful engagement and conversation.
2
We listened before we built.
We consulted 330 stakeholders across four ecosystems to understand the strengths, needs, and challenges facing innovators with disabilities. Those findings shaped our approach and every following activity.
3
We rebuilt our resources, piece by piece, and invited people in.
84 physical and digital accessibility upgrades across our four teams, tactile flooring, accessible toilets, lever door handles, screen-reader-friendly websites, turned existing rich resources into what entrepreneurs with disabilities could actually access and use.
4
We built trust and nurtured connection.
More than two dozen community events, including Cambodia's Berk Chet Festival, Jakarta's Sinema Rasa whisper-cinema screening, and the Philippines' IMPRINT Festival with Best Buddies Philippines, gave each team a real touchpoints to engage with and spotlight people with disabilities as leaders and innovators.
5
We take our accessibility dream beyond our network.
We brought ELEVATE's approach to ANDE's Pan-Asia Convening and several other conferences and workshops, sharing our lessons with the wider entrepreneurship-support field.
— Looking ahead
Carrying this forward.
Practices we’re keeping
We design around real demand, not assumptions
We bring in accessibility experts with real community trust, not just technical checklists
We renovate in the open, so everyone can see it and take part
Ideas for future initiatives
Dedicated support for market access, so products get valued for quality, not sympathy
OPD partnerships built into programme design from day one, not added later
A deliberate mechanism for spreading capacity beyond a handful of champions
Looser budget and timeline rules, so local teams can adjust as they go
— Our Learning
BEST PRACTICES WE HAVE LEARNED THROUGH THIS JOURNEY
What has worked well?
- We design around real demand, not assumptions
- We bring in accessibility experts with real community trust, not just technical checklists
- We renovate in the open, so everyone can see it and take part
Ideas for future initiatives
- Dedicated support for market access, so products get valued for quality, not sympathy
- OPD partnerships built into programme design from day one, not added later
- A deliberate mechanism for spreading capacity beyond a handful of champions
- Looser budget and timeline rules, so local teams can adjust as they go
IMPACT BY NUMBER
990
PWDs engaged
138
returning participants 14% return rate
89%
average space accessibility satisfaction
95.3%
reported a shift in personal agency
84
physical and digital accessibility upgrades made
10
outside organisations recognising our spaces as accessible
15
staff reporting new confidence in inclusive service
10
cross-team learning sessions held
“Inclusion starts with intention and care. It doesn't stop until persons with disabilities are no longer seen for their disability status, but as a complete human being with an equal ability to contribute.”
Join our efforts
Grab a 1-1 coffee online with us!
MacKenzie King
Impact Hub APAC Partnership Lead [email protected]
Nadilla Ratman-Burnama
ELEVATE Regional Programme Manager [email protected]