How Hlobisile Masinga is shifting the conversation on disability and sexual health
Hlobisile Inamandla Masinga is direct about inclusion. She works to ensure people with albinism have access to sexual and reproductive health services without feeling excluded, and that university students with disabilities aren’t separated into different residences.
Building on this commitment, Masinga, part of the Activate 2016 cohort, has albinism and visual impairments. While she has spent a significant amount of her advocacy career ensuring that her disability is not an excuse for exclusion, she also advocates for others in the same way. She focuses on sexual and reproductive health rights (SRHR) for people with disabilities, an area where assumptions run wild and actual service delivery falls short.
Assumptions within healthcare
One of the assumptions that Masinga addresses is that people with disabilities are asexual,
meaning that healthcare providers often presume they do not need sexual and reproductive
health support. She regularly encounters this misconception in healthcare settings and hopes to shift this belief through her advocacy. Among her responsibilities are educating healthcare providers and advocating for SRHR policies that consider the needs of people with disabilities.
Additionally, she has advocated for comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) and sexual
orientation and gender identity (SOGI) issues for people with disabilities. People with albinism should be represented when SRHR policies are drafted in the country.
Exposure Therapy
A key aspect of Masinga’s approach to improving society’s perception of disability is exposure therapy. Simply put: “You can’t be weirded out by something you see every day. The more people with disabilities are in regular spaces not cordoned off in special programmes or isolated residences, the more normalised disability becomes.” This idea underpins many of Masinga’s actions and attitudes.
“Spaces made specifically for people living with disabilities feel like a concentration camp, “she says.” "Like you are being punished for being different." This candid perspective has informed her advocacy and the changes she fights for.
Though candid, her views have guided some of her most remarkable advocacy victories. For example, at the University of Zululand, she convinced management to change the practice of housing students with disabilities in two isolated residences. Today, all first-floor single rooms across campus are reserved for students with disabilities to ensure that they can live freely among their peers.
In 2020, she collaborated with Dr Jill Hancock to review the National Strategic Plan, making it more disability inclusive. Her efforts two years later helped create a LGBT desk at Mangosuthu University. The changes are not immediately apparent, but they have a real impact on people’s lives.
Fulfilling the promise of inclusion
To Masinga, inclusion means building systems that recognise everyone’s needs, not only those of people who already fit in. She believes change begins when accessibility is part of how we plan, design, and communicate not a detail to be added later. Her advocacy questions a world that expects people with disabilities to keep adjusting, when the world itself rarely does.
“If inclusion is real, it has to reach everyone,” she says. “It has to show up in classrooms, clinics, and workplaces – not just in policies.”
Much of what she speaks to reflects a truth we often overlook: that those with access hold the power to act. Before inclusion becomes practical, it must start as a mindset shift. Equitable spaces take time to build, but the effort must be shared. The brunt of the conversation cannot rest solely on those still waiting for access.
Much of what she speaks to reflects a truth we often overlook: that those with access hold the power to act. Before inclusion becomes practical, it must start as a mindset shift. Equitable spaces take time to build, but the effort must be shared. The brunt of the conversation cannot rest solely on those still waiting for access.