A major key initiative in this region which has facilitated the initiation of the website itself is the regional project of “Creating spaces for women with disabilities (WWD) to communicate and advocate for their rights in India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh”, a partnership of Healthlink Worldwide, UK based, Association for Women with Disabilities (AWWD), India, Association of Women with Disabilities (AKASA), Sri Lanka & Social Assistance for the Rehabilitation of the Physically Vulnerable (SARPV), Bangladesh, and supported by DFID, UK.

The project aims to empower and improve the capacity of women with disabilities (WWDs) to effectively communicate and represent themselves, and to mobilize movements in each of the operating countries and the other countries of the region as well, through which they will collectively demand their rights and entitlements at community, regional and national levels.

Some major activities of the project are development of up-to-date and relevant research on the current policy environment in relation to disabled women in each country; training of key WWDs in each operating country, first through a regional training and then through subsequent cascade trainings; development of national networks of WWDs in all the three operating countries and at the regional level; advocacy activities based on the priorities set by WWDs themselves; development of evidence based documentation on issues related to disabled women, south-south exchange on networking and advocacy best practices thereby allowing less structured groups to derive lessons from their counterparts who are further advanced in terms of disability advocacy and lobbying.
It is intended that through the above actions, positive changes in the opinions, policies and practices of the targeted stakeholders will be achieved and these include the governmental and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), Disabled People's Organizations (DPOs), Women's Organizations (WOs), community members (groups/leaders) and the media.

There have been some significant accomplishments of the project in the year 2007-2008. One is the baseline survey, which was conducted in three core partner countries (India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka) along with Nepal, in order to find out the situation of women with disabilities and the attitudes & policies toward WWD by key actors in development. Another important achievement was the Regional Leadership Training of WWDs of south Asia region at the end of March 2008 in Kolkata, India. The inauguration of the training was combined with the release of the survey report highlighting the situation of women with disabilities in five states of eastern India. The main objective of this training was to motivate girls/women with disabilities for mobilizing other G/WWDs to take the challenge of making their presence felt at all levels of the society through leadership, advocacy and networking. The training created a new band of leaders among WWDs who would take forward the training at grassroots level. The entire training was documented to capture the experiential learning of the WWDs and this report along with the learning from the subsequent cascade training would contribute to the development of a leadership training manual. Also, the cascade training programmes (National Leadership Training) for women with disabilities were conducted in each of the core partner countries (India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka) in 2008.

The same training for secondary partners in Nepal, Bhutan, Pakistan and Afghanistan will be held in 2009.