“There are no disabled people in this community – we asked.”
“My organisation works with everyone, so we don’t need to focus on disability.”
“We’d like to do something on disability, but there’s just no extra money for it.”
It is estimated that 10% of the world’s population has a disability, or about 650 million people. But amongst the poorest people, this may be as high as 20%. This is because disability is both a cause and a consequence of poverty. Issues such as malnutrition, limited access to basic health care, or the need to undertake hazardous work, mean that poor people are more likely to be born with or acquire a disability. But people with disabilities are also more likely to be poor – for example due to the high costs of medication and treatment, or limited employment options due to poor education or discrimination.
Disability is present in every community and is part of the normal range of human experience. A rights-based approach to development emphasises the fact that development activities must aim to fulfil people’s rights to basic things such as clean water, health care and education. People with disabilities have the same rights as everyone else, but face additional vulnerability which means their rights are less likely to be fulfilled. So ensuring that development reaches people with disabilities is not an optional extra: it needs to be part of every program. It is also a practical necessity in achieving targets like the Millennium Development Goals. For example, about 40 million of the 115 million children not in primary school have disabilities, making Goal 2, Universal Primary Education, impossible to achieve without targeting children with disabilities.
Ideally, ‘inclusive development’ should be no different to ‘good development’. So why focus on disability? The reason is that people with disabilities have too often been left out of mainstream development activities. Infrastructure like schools, health centres or water points might be physically inaccessible; materials might not be provided in simple language for those with intellectual impairments; there might be no transport available to get to community planning meetings; sign interpreters might not be made available for those with hearing impairments; or stigma and discrimination might mean people with disabilities are excluded from activities or not recognised as stakeholders. Therefore agencies need to pay special attention to disability inclusion, to ensure that people with disabilities are equally involved in and benefit equally from development programs and activities.
Disability inclusion is not difficult. Essentially it’s about ensuring that principles of good development, such as inclusion, equity and access, are applied to interactions with people with disabilities. Simple inclusion measures might be inviting the local Disabled People’s Organisation to a community consultation; making sure that a school is constructed with ramps and wide doorways for wheelchairs; or encouraging recruitment of people with disabilities as employees, volunteers or community representatives.
To find out more about disability inclusive development, try the following starting-points.
CBM-Nossal Institute Partnership for Disability Inclusive Development
http://www.ni.unimelb.edu.au/inclusive_development/disability_inclusive_development/cbm_partnership
The CBM-Nossal Partnership runs regular training courses, including an upcoming course on Disability Inclusion within Development Programs (7-8 June 2011 in Melbourne) a Masters-level subject Disability in Developing Countries each year in September.
Australian Disability and Development Consortium
http://www.addc.org.au/
Australian Development Gateway
http://www.developmentgateway.com.au/cms/sectors/did
Hi Kathryn,
Thanks for such an interesting article. How do you think we can incorporate disability policies or related actions into international development projects? For example, in a community where disabled persons are obviously more marginalised and most likely even discriminated against, how would we ensure equal representation and opportunity for beneficiaries, both those with disabilities and those without?
Celia
Thanks for this blog entry Kathryn, this is a really interesting topic. I’m particularly interested in your opinion on what strategies a Program Manager could take if they have already begun implementing a project and wish to take a disability inclusive approach but there is no funding allocated to this in the project budget? Furthermore, what if the donor is unable to provide additional funding to provide resources towards this inclusivity? Are there measures that a Program Manager can take to promote a disability inclusive approach even if there are no financial resources available?
Thanks again for your insights Kathryn.
Pete
Thanks for the great blog Kathryn! I really enjoyed reading it.
Your piece reminded me of a mini-documentary I saw last year about a NGO working in the rural parts of Thailand with deaf children and the sadness of that story. It explains how deafness isn’t well understood in the uneducated, or undereducated, remote communities, and that children with the disordered are commonly shunned or even completely disbanded by the parents who believe it is some sorcery curse. It’s a sad story yet excellently well told by cinematographer, Chris Philips (who has incidentally worked with Oaktree previously).
The readers of this blog may be interested in checking it out. I highly recommend having a look at it yourself, Kathryn – I’m sure you’ll be touched by it, as I was. (http://vimeo.com/15495677)
Cheers
Hello Kathryn, thank you for your blog!
As one of the country managers here at Oaktree, this insight and background information will be very beneficial for our team as we seek new projects and monitor our existing ones. A project I will be monitoring in Cambodia this October, is overhauling three schools in a rural area. From here on I’ll have to look more closely at what our in-country partner is planning in regards to accessibility for the disabled.
Thanks again,
Steph
There’s a lot of great resources around to help with thinking about disability inclusion, including within various sectors. Check out the Australian Development Gateway (link above in the blog entry), or try AskSource: http://asksource.info/
[I can't seem to reply to individual comments, so I'll have to leave responses this way!]
Hi Paddy,
Thanks for sharing the video with me and the blog readers. It’s a really interesting story. A disability like a hearing impairment can raise very challenging issues about whether it is better for children to be educated in their own communities, or to leave their homes in order to receive intensive assistance in learning sign language etc. These brothers seem to be flourishing, but I wondered whether they will have the chance to learn to communicate with their mother and any siblings, to stay connected with their home community as well.
cheers,
Kathryn
Hi Celia and Peter,
Two great questions – I’ll try to reply to them with a single post.
In terms of promoting inclusion within projects, we sometimes refer to the ‘twin track’ approach to describe the strategy of both ensuring existing activities are inclusive (‘mainstreaming’ them), but also taking specific measures to address issues like discrimination or the specific needs of people with disabilities.
An example might be a water, sanitation and hygiene project, which is constructing water points and promoting hygiene practices. Mainstreaming would involve ensuring that people with disabilities can participate and benefit to the same extent as others. Your organisation might develop guidelines about pump design to promote accessibility – pumps that don’t require upper body strength are easier for people with certain impairments, as well as children and the elderly, to use. It might ensure meetings of the water committee are held in accessible locations.
Often however, factors like discrimination and stigma can be just as important, or even more significant than physical barriers, in preventing inclusion. People with disabilities might be prevented from using communal facilities because it’s believed they have a contagious illness or are ‘cursed’. Or they may not join the water committee, for fear they will not be welcome or their perspectives not valued.
Specific measures to address these might include: engaging community leaders to address local negative beliefs about people with disabilities; supporting the local Disabled People’s Organisation or facilitating people with disabilities to meet, discuss the issues that affect them and organise to empower themselves. An example of a measure to address specific needs might be working with a person with vision impairments to install a railing or rope, so they can guide themselves to the water point without assistance.
Ideally, where discrimination and marginalisation are a big issue for people with disabilities, a project should seek to take this ‘twin track’ approach – be inclusive yourselves, but also identify and address the reasons why people with disabilities are excluded within the wider community and society.
In terms of where there is no ‘extra’ money available, it can be tricky to implement more costly measures but there is still a lot that can be done to promote inclusion. Where they exist, Disabled People’s Organisations (DPOs) can be a great resource to find out information about people with disabilities in a particular community, their needs and interests. Meeting with a DPO or inviting representatives to your community meeting is free or very low-cost. Such networking can help a project manager better understand the ways that people with disabilities are (or aren’t) involved in the project, and what could be improved. It could highlight opportunities for referral or partnership – for example, ensuring people with disabilities in the community are aware of rehabilitation services or agencies that provide aids like crutches or prosthetic limbs.
Other simple and free/cheap efforts towards inclusion might be: printing materials on effective handwashing in large print as well as standard size; making sure the livelihood training session is held on the ground floor of the community centre; or reserving some seats at the front of the community meeting to make it easier for hard of hearing or vision-impaired people to participate.
Measures that seek to change attitudes can be both the cheapest and most effective strategies for inclusion. If you are producing a pamphlet or poster, it’s no more expensive to include images of people with disabilities in them, but sends a powerful message that disability is a normal part of human experience, and that your program wants to include people with disabilities.
Of course, I’d say that this is also part of an education process for donors. If they are taking a rights-based approach to development, inclusion of people with disabilities (or other vulnerable groups) is not an ‘optional extra’ they can choose not to fund – it’s a necessity. But I acknowledge that a lecture on this isn’t likely to be effective! Instead, things like surveying the number of people with disabilities in the community and the types of impairments they have, can illustrate to donors that people with disabilities are present in the community and should be included. Highlight the fact that the costs of inclusion can sometimes be quite low – and it’s definitely cheaper to build in inclusion rather than change things later. For example, it’s much cheaper to design a building with wide doorways and a ramp, than to retrofit and include these features later.
Kathryn
I am a Disability Support Worker here in Australia (who is also a development studies student) and I have recently returned from doing Community Development work with a disabilities organization in Cambodia. I really appreciated this article. As with many other forms of development, one of the biggest keys to releasing people from poverty is education. I witnessed a 27-year-old woman with a severe physical disability who had been denied social inclusion because there was no wheelchair or phyislcal assistance that would have allowed her to participate. The local people in this rural community had not moved her from the bed she was born in out of fear that they may do damage to her, but they continued to feed, clothe and love her. In this case, the small community had all the best intentions in the world, but weren’t aware how best to respond to her disability in a way that would make her beneficial to, rather than a burden on, their poor rural community. With the education now being provided to them, both the woman and the community are benefiting. Thank you for considering social inclusion of disabled people important to ending poverty.
Your story is a great illustration of the dramatic difference that inclusion can make in someone’s life. We might wonder what this academic concept of ‘inclusion’ could really mean to someone in rural Cambodia – but as you’ve shown, it could mean the difference between living in one room all their life and actually getting to participate in their community.
Hi Kathryn
Thank you for your blog.
I have heard a lot about overseas organisations running specific projects designed to address the needs of disabled people but not so much about disability inclusive approaches in broader community projects.
What do you think of a community project taking on a “specific disability approach” by only providing for a particular disability? For example, if a school isn’t able to finance building wider doorways but can provide resources for blind students, should this be done? A similar example could be whether a program should focus on being inclusive of physical disabilities as opposed to mental disabilities. Focusing on being inclusive of a particular disability could be a more financially viable option for a program but on the other hand it could perpetuate discrimination of those suffering from the disabilities that aren’t addressed. Should small steps be taken in developing a disability inclusive program?
Hi Margot.
Ideally, inclusion involves being inclusive of everyone – but that’s an ideal. We have to start somewhere. If a project can find a practical way of being inclusive of one impairment group (e.g. students with vision impairments in your example), then yes, I definitely think it should do so. Inclusion is a journey, not an end-point, and if programs can begin to make aspects of their programming inclusive, this is an important step on the journey. Disability inclusion is a fairly new area for many agencies and we should be supportive of even small changes and celebrate the impact this can have.
The caveat to this is that focusing energy on aspects of inclusion for one group shouldn’t allow us to ignore the needs of others. The example you give of people with intellectual impairments is a good one – this is a group which is often marginalised, even within the disability community.
In some situations it might be appropriate for a project or organisation to focus on a particular impairment, if that is where its speciality is or if there’s a specific need. For instance, an organisation might specialise in prosthetic limbs, or in providing Braille translation. Or a non-government organisation might work to fill a gap in services – if, say, people with intellectual impairments are particularly marginalised in a community, they might work specifically with this group. I talked a little bit about this regarding the ‘twin track’ approach in my mega-post responding to Celia and Peter above.
cheers,
Kathryn
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