Written by Adeyinka Onabolu, Gender, Protection and Inclusion Technical Specialist, World Vision Canada
The World Health Organization estimates that 16 per cent of the world’s population lives with some form of disability, with 80 per cent of those with a disability living in the global south. At the same time, the global south is the primary focus of development interventions to address poverty. The relationship between poverty and disability is complex. Poverty may cause disability through malnutrition, poor healthcare and dangerous living conditions. Alternatively, disability can influence poverty by preventing the full participation of people with disabilities (PWDs) in the economic and social life of their communities.
For PWDs, there is a strong cycle of impairment, discrimination and chronic poverty compounded by stigma and negative attitudes, assumptions, discrimination and lack of equitable access to services, facilities and systems. Yet, PWDs and their needs continue to slip through the cracks in development responses for various reasons, such as the absence of an enabling policy environment, lack of knowledge on disability inclusion, lack of data on persons with disability, perceived costs associated with disability inclusion and absence of the proper stakeholder’s participation.
The intersection of disability with factors such as sex, age, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, race, ethnicity and economic situation also affects the experiences and participation of persons with disabilities. While a livelihoods project may be working to improve economic empowerment by providing training, grant support or linkages with markets, there are other barriers to the full participation of persons with disabilities in project implementation and interventions, such as inaccessible physical environments and transportation, the unavailability of assistive devices and technologies, non-adapted means of communication, gaps in service delivery and discriminatory prejudice and stigma in society. These factors must be considered when planning and implementing development activities.
Our Commitment to Disability Inclusion
Nearly 240 million children have disabilities—1 in 10 of all children worldwide. World Vision, as a child-focused organization, recognizes that our promise to work with the most vulnerable children will not be fulfilled without the deliberate inclusion of children with disabilities. World Vision adopts the social model approach, which views society as limiting the participation of people with impairments due to obstacles. We seek to identify and remove attitudinal, environmental and institutional barriers that prevent those with impairments from equal inclusion in development programs and their societies.
Distribution of dignity kits to adolescent girls living with disabilities in Mozambique.
Disability in World Vision’s Programming
To live out our commitment to inclusion, World Vision works through disability-specific grants and mainstreaming disability into interventions in various sectors.
In Ecuador, World Vision Canada supports Disability Inclusion Action Learning with World Vision Ecuador to strengthen the team’s capacity for disability inclusion. This includes training technical staff to identify and address disability as a factor of child vulnerability, as well as supporting Area Programs to develop action plans for the inclusion of children with disabilities.
In Mozambique, World Vision has embedded a disability-specific project into the Government of Canada-funded Every Girl Can project. Referred to as The Access to Justice for Adolescent Girls Who are Hard-of-Hearing Project, supported by the Manitoba Council for International Cooperation (MCIC), it is working to improve gender equality and promote the right of hard-of-hearing adolescent girls to live free from sexual and gender-based violence and discrimination.
In a place where children with disabilities face challenges in accessing tools that facilitate justice for survivors, the project is adapting and translating the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Protocol (NICHD) into Mozambique sign language. This allows trained professionals to conduct forensic interviews with deaf/hard-of-hearing survivors and enables survivors to communicate their testimonies.
Other project interventions include capacity building for national and local actors, including organizations of people with disabilities, conducting the first provincial sex-disaggregated data on adolescents with disabilities to determine the population of adolescents with hearing impairments, the provision of assistive devices like hearing aids, dignity kits to adolescents with hearing impairments, farming implements and seeds as well as awareness sessions for families and communities to address stigma and dismantle social norms.
In Mozambique, community awareness sessions contribute to dismantling social norms and addressing stigma surrounding disability.
Moving Forward
People with disabilities continue to be among the most vulnerable in communities, yet they remain invisible and excluded from development programming. There is a need to rethink development programming to understand PWDs as right holders and meaningfully include them so all people can be part of the solutions to poverty.
World Vision is committed to supporting the needs of people with disabilities through its twin-track programming: working with technical experts to offer rehabilitation and disability-specific services and breaking down society’s barriers through strong community and government engagement.