The fourth podcast of the WeThe15: Access All Areas focuses on the theme of business and employment and features Founder of Mitti Café, Alina Alam and Global DEI Adviser at Sanofi, Iulia Brehuescu in conversation with broadcaster and host Andy Stevenson.

In the episode, Alam and Brehuescu discuss how persons with disabilities (PWDs) can better approach and navigate employment to maximise productiveness, changing perceptions of employees with disabilities. The pair also talk about the importance of giving PWDs opportunities to work and gain confidence.

Alam set up Mitti Café to create employment opportunities for persons with disabilities by training and hiring them in a chain of cafes. Presently there are 35 cafes across India with 11 million meals served to date. Alam highlighted that despite initial apprehension, the local community came together to help establish the first cafe, and donated equipment, services and stock as well as identified potential staff. Today recruitment takes place through a network of non-profit partner organisations and focuses on rehabilitating candidates with disabilities while providing accommodation, logistics, food and medical attention.

Alam said: “Whenever we set up a Mitti Café, the objective [is] to exponentially generate more livelihood opportunities within that ecosystem, change perceptions within that ecosystem, that is why we exist. So, after we come in, we bring about a lot of sensitisation, a lot of hiring for people with disabilities gets accelerated and we [can] show the magic and the abilities of our team members. A lot of our competing vendors hire persons with disabilities after looking at what we do.”

In contrast to Mitti Café, leading French pharmaceutical giant Sanofi, which has more than 91,000 employees in 90 countries, adopts a different approach to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).

“Something that really works for us is having a top-down, also a bottom-up approach. We have a lot of leadership commitment, we have an external diversity and inclusion board. In that board sits the CEO, half of the executive committee, and then we have three external diversity and inclusion representatives.

“But then through [our Ability Plus employee resource groups] communities, we can initiate grassroots initiatives through awareness, keeping leadership accountable, making sure that whatever we do within the digital or workplace experience space, it actually serves the disability community. We have communities of employees with disabilities, caregivers, and allies across 22 countries. And that's very useful for me to understand the disability state in specific countries,” noted Brehuescu.

Brehuescu also pointed out that one of the key challenges to identifying employees with disabilities is the varying definition of disability in many countries. To manage this, Sanofi has launched a global demographic survey where it defined what disability is and gave examples so that individuals could self-identify. Results are expected to be released later this year.

For more details and the full episode, subscribe and listen to the series here.