A ministerial meeting in Amman last week barely registered outside Jordan’s own newswires. An Indonesian government delegation sat down with Jordan’s Minister of Social Development to compare notes on how each country supports people with disabilities.
On its own, it looks like a courtesy visit. Set against Indonesia’s fast-growing ties with the wider Middle East and North Africa, it raises a bigger question: could disability policy become a real tool in how Indonesia and the region build closer relations with each other?
Indonesia’s relationship with the Middle East used to run mainly through two channels: buying oil and gas, and sending pilgrims to Mecca. That is changing.
Trade between Indonesia and the United Arab Emirates has grown to $5.1 billion a year since the two countries signed a deal lowering the taxes charged on goods traded between them. Indonesia and the six Gulf states — Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman — are negotiating a similar deal, and hope to finish it by the end of 2026. In November 2025, Jordan’s King Abdullah II travelled to Jakarta and offered Indonesia a $1.3 billion package to invest in gas pipelines, toll roads and logistics.
Cooperation on disability policy is a small thread next to all that money. But it’s practical, unlikely to spark political disputes, and could give the relationship something sturdier to stand on than trade figures that rise and fall with prices and politics.
The numbers matter here, because they show this isn’t a case of one side having the answers and the other side taking notes.
Indonesia’s own statistics agency counts roughly 22 to 23 million Indonesians — about 8.5 percent of the population — as living with some form of disability. Fewer than a quarter of them have jobs.
Disability advocates in the country openly say the government’s data on disability is scattered and inconsistent, which makes good policy harder to design in the first place.
Across the Middle East and North Africa, the picture is just as uneven. In Jordan, about 13 percent of the population — roughly 1.1 million people — has a disability, yet only around 8 percent of them are employed. Saudi Arabia estimates that about 5 percent of its population has a disability, has made disability support part of its official long-term reform plan, and passed a new disability-rights law in 2023. Even so, people who care for family members with disabilities say many still struggle to find out what support even exists.
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The UAE has built one of the region’s more thorough legal systems for disability rights, using the term “people of determination” since 2017 as part of a push to change public attitudes. Egypt has a decades-old law requiring larger employers to make sure 5 percent of their staff are people with disabilities. That rule is widely acknowledged to be poorly enforced.
No single country here has a finished model the others should just copy. So which side is meant to be teaching the other?
Jordan has built up detailed laws and institutions over nearly two decades. Indonesia’s own disability law only dates to 2016, and could learn a lot from studying Jordan’s approach closely.
Saudi Arabia and the UAE, both with deep pockets, have built accessible buildings, transport and digital services that many poorer parts of the Middle East — and plenty of Indonesia’s own smaller cities — still lack.
Indonesia, for its part, has decades of experience delivering low-cost health and social support through small community health posts that reach even remote villages. Some Middle Eastern countries are only now trying something similar, as a cheaper alternative to large institutions and city care homes. Each side has something to offer. Each side has something to learn.
There’s a reputational angle too. Indonesia and much of the Middle East and North Africa have spent years trying to present themselves as moderate, tolerant, reform-minded societies — bridges between different parts of the world, not places defined by conflict.
Disability policy is one of the few areas of government work where that image can actually be demonstrated, rather than just claimed in speeches. Progress is easy to measure. It rarely provokes political controversy. And it’s something ordinary citizens in every one of these countries can relate to directly.
A properly organised, two-way partnership could turn a handful of one-off ministerial visits into something other countries actually want to copy. Indonesia already has channels for this: its regular high-level talks with Jordan, its trade negotiations with the Gulf states, disability programmes run by the wider grouping of Muslim-majority nations.
But will it stay at the level of study trips and photographs, or actually go further?
What would make the difference is a jointly funded programme for sharing expertise. Shared targets that both sides report progress against. And, most importantly, a seat at the table for organisations run by people with disabilities themselves — from Indonesia and across the Middle East and North Africa — rather than government ministries speaking on their behalf.
Cooperation on disability won’t fix Indonesia’s trade imbalances or the region’s security worries. But could it become one of the more lasting parts of a relationship that, for once, doesn’t need to follow anyone else’s script? That’s still an open question — and one worth asking before the next delegation lands.
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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.
