Poverty Reduction of the Disabled

Livelihood of persons with disabilities in the Philippines

Soya Mori, Celia M Reyes, Tatsufumi Yamagata

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317671749
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economía
• Subtopic: Teoría económica

A third of poor people are disabled in the developing world. How much do we know about their livelihood with hard data? Are they entirely powerless and dependent on family members? How do they earn income? These questions have become more important than ever, now that persons with disabilities (PWDs) in developing countrieshave awakened to rights and entitlements and that the international community started considering the incorporation of disability into the context of poverty reduction. This book highlights opportunities and challenges faced by PWDs in the developing countries.

This book also illustrates the analyses with a case study which was conducted in the Philippines and this case study has made a good progress in legislation for PWDs. A field survey was jointly conducted by the Institute of Developing Economies, Japan, and the Philippine Institute for Development Studies in Metro Manila, the capital city of the Philippines, in 2008. Around 400 PWDs were interviewed, and the data was investigated with econometrics. The book highlights a remarkable disparity in earnings and education among PWDs. The book also examines the positive role of organizations such as Disabled People's Organizations and how empowerment of PWDs is made through dissemination of useful information such as programs given by the central and local governments.

The book concludes that all measures, i.e. education, training, DPOs and institutional preferences, must be mobilized harmoniously to boost the livelihood of PWDs sinking in the bottom stratum in income.

Part I

Circumstances of persons with disabilities

1 Introduction

Disability and development in international contexts

Soya Mori

Significance of Disability

Underestimation of significance of Disability in population censuses

How many people with disabilities (PWDs) are there in the developing world? This is an elusive but critical question that is important when measuring the significance of Disability¹ in the context of international development. Currently, the official statistics of many countries showing the number of PWDs in the total population of each country, as shown on Figure 1.1, appear to underestimate the number because the scope of the surveys in developing countries was limited.

For example, some countries do not include intellectual disabilities in their statistics. Other countries have stricter definitions for PWDs that do not include disabilities caused by senility.

The underestimation also might be due to the implementation process of surveys. In many cases, the enumerators hired for a large-scale survey, such as population census, do not receive proper and sufficient training for collecting data on disabilities. For many of the enumerators, it is difficult to identify who should be classified as a PWD and as a result some PWDs might be missed because of insufficient knowledge about disabilities. On the interviewee’s side, there is a tendency for the family of a PWD to hide the status of the PWD from the enumerators to avoid neighbors’ eyes.

There are difficulties applicable to many countries concerning collecting data on disabilities. This study focuses on the specific case of the Philippines, which the author observed closely.

Most of the official data on Disability in the Philippines is based on the regisration of PWDs for the purpose of receiving services from the government. Four specific problems were found in the survey process. (1) The enumerators rarely receive training about Disability. Therefore, the enumerators sometimes count some diseases as disabilities. (2) There are many PWDs who are not notified about the survey and therefore cannot participate in the survey. (3) Even when local community leaders know of unregistered PWDs, there is no feedback mechanism to share this knowledge. (4) Family members feel ashamed and try to hinder the counting of a relative as a PWD.

Figure 1.1 Estimates of the prevalence of Disability (%).

Source: WHO and World Bank (2011).

As Reyes and Due (2009, p. xvi) discussed, in many developing countries, the statistical information is collected to meet specific national government initiatives and needs. Resources and training opportunities are more likely to be given to the central government and are rarely given to local governments. Without enough resources for the data collection, local governments, which are often subcontracted by the central government to undertake actual data collection, still have difficulty conducting surveys properly. As is discussed in the next section, the international community is trying to set up a better way to implement surveys, the Disability Inclusive Census system, as the issue of training statistics staff in local governments becomes more important (Balgos, 2001).

Thus, for Disability-related data collection, many countries still do not have enough knowledge and have not accumulated sufficient experience to ensure accuracy. This book tries to show a new good data collection practice related to understanding PWDs’ livelihoods in the context of Development Studies and pursuing poverty reduction.

UNCRPD and statistical data

As a result of encountering the difficulties discussed above, the United Nations decided to incorporate the promotion of a collection of statistical data on Disability in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD). Without effective data on Disability, policy makers cannot further poverty reduction of PWDs. The UNCRPD was adopted in 2006 and entered into force in 2008. Article 31 of the convention states principles on collection of Disability data are as follows.

Article 31 – Statistics and data collection

1. States Parties undertake to collect appropriate information, including statistical and research data, to enable them to formulate and implement policies to give effect to the present Convention. The process of collecting and maintaining this information shall:

a) Comply with legally established safeguards, including legislation on data protection, to ensure confidentiality and respect for the privacy of persons with disabilities;

b) Comply with internationally accepted norms to protect human rights and fundamental freedoms and ethical principles in the collection and use of statistics.

2. The information collected in accordance with this article shall be disaggregated, as appropriate, and used to help assess the implementation of States Parties’ obligations under the present Convention and to identify and address the barriers faced by persons with disabilities in exercising their rights.

3. States Parties shall assume responsibility for the dissemination of these statistics and ensure their accessibility to persons with disabilities and others.

The UN asked the state parties to improve Disability data and statistics following the Convention, and the statistics policy of the state party is required to follow design, planning, and evaluation from the Disability perspectives. As a result, the state parties now need to begin to review their national statistics on Disability.

New attempts to measure significance of Disability accurately

According to the principles incorporated into Article 31 of the UNCRPD, some new attempts to collect Disability data have been made (United Nations, 2011).

In the UN, the Washington Group on Disability Statistics was established to discuss how to collect Disability data. So far, most of their discussions have been devoted to questions on how to let statistical offices in developing countries include questions on Disability within their population censuses and how to measure the significance of Disability accurately. In most developing countries, Disability-related questions are not included in the population census. In 2011, the Census of India 2011 introduced Disability-related questions. Following India, several developing countries are expected to introduce the same questions into their census efforts.

In order to accelerate this trend, the international community has made great efforts. Among them, the most distinguished accomplishment would be the UN’s Washington Group’s contribution by designing a model question set that is concise and sufficient to measure the significance of Disability. The Washington Group was established in 2001 and now many countries and international organizations have joined this group to discuss international standards for Disability statistics.

A culmination of their efforts is the question set used in the World Health Survey, which is detailed in the report by WHO and World Bank (2011). Based on the social model of disability, which is discussed below, the Washington Group tried to make a question set that is applicable to the population census of developing countries. The typical question set is shown in Table 1.1.

Table 1.1 The feasible question set on Disability for national population census

1. Do you have difficulty seeing, even if wearing glasses?

a. No – no difficulty

b. Yes – some difficulty

c. Yes – a lot of difficulty

d. Cannot do at all

2. Do you have difficulty hearing, even if using a hearing aid?

a. No – no difficulty

b. Yes – some difficulty

c. Yes – a lot of difficulty

d. Cannot do at all

3. Do you have difficulty walking or climbing steps?

a. No – no difficulty

b. Yes – some difficulty

c. Yes – a lot of difficulty

d. Cannot do at all

4. Do you have difficulty remembering or concentrating?

a. No – no difficulty

b. Yes – some difficulty

c. Yes – a lot of difficulty

d. Cannot do at all

5. Do you have difficulty (with self-care such as) washing all over or dressing?

a. No – no difficulty

b. Yes – some difficulty

c. Yes – a lot of difficulty

d. Cannot do at all

6. Using your usual (customary) language, do you have difficulty communicating, for example, understanding or being understood?

a. No – no difficulty

b. Yes – some difficulty

c. Yes – a lot of difficulty

d. Cannot do at all

Source: A website of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC): www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/washington_group/WG_Short_Measure_on_Disability.pdf.

The question set covers six functional disabilities: vision, hearing, locomotion/mobility, cognition, self-care and communication in daily life.² As a result, the incidence of Disability, which is measured as the ratio of the number of PWDs to total population, is estimated to be about 15 percent in the world as well as each country.

Social model: the core concept behind the new attempts

The core concept behind the new attempts is the social model of disability (Oliver, 1996; Goodley, 2011; among others). The model was designed to be an alternative to the medical model of disability. The medical model assumes that the cause of a Disability is mainly the medical impairment of a PWD. Taking the impairment out of the status of a PWD is considered to be the main policy goal related to understanding Disability. The policy includes rehabilitation, medical care, provision of assistive devices, and assimilation of PWDs into the world of non-PWDs. For many years, the medical model has been dominant in facilities, schools, and communities where PWDs live and resulted in their long detention at the place of rehabilitation located far from home.

However, the social model offers a different view for the situations. The model demonstrates that we should pay more attention to barriers that societies create against PWDs. For example, because people who are Deaf ³ use their native sign language for daily communication, within their specific Deaf communities, they are not disabled and can communicate very effectively. The Disability, in other words disempowerment, comes when they meet people who do not know their sign language. The community treats the Deaf people as people without communication capabilities, which sometimes causes a presumption that they are incapable in terms of jobs and lives. The true Disability is not located within the body of the Deaf people, but within the community or the relations between the community and the Deaf people. With the creation of accessible buildings and positive attitudes of non-PWDs, many PWDs do not feel barriers in their daily lives. That is the point of the social model of disability.

The social model of disability is also important for developing countries because there are larger differences among the environments for PWDs who live in developing countries than for those living in developed countries. For example, individuals with the same degree of impairment from a medical viewpoint can face very different hardships and/or barriers in their daily lives depending upon where they live. For example, in many developing countries, especially in the rural area, roads are not paved roads and people using a wheelchair find it hard to move around. In an urban area, a blind person might find a job as a masseur or IT worker. However, in the rural area, these kinds of cash-income jobs would be very hard to find because in the rural area, the demand for such services is weak and very often production infrastructure, such as electricity, is not available. The medical model, which was implicitly assumed in the past, does not take into consideration the importance of differences in living environments and may result in over-medicalization (Stineman, 2002) in the formation of community-based rehabilitation (CBR).⁴ The over-medicalization sometimes happens because accurate information on PWDs living within a community is not transferred properly to medical specialists, such as doctors and therapists, from Disability specialists living in the community because it is without inputs from Disabled People’s Organization (DPO) leaders who know the social barriers in the community well.

It is notable that the social model of disability is a key concept for the UNCRPD. Furthermore, the Washington Group also follows the social model, in the sense that the questions that it elaborates are about barriers PWDs faced in their daily lives and the functions they perform, rather than PWDs’ medical impairment.

Livelihood study based on the social model

Importance of study of livelihood

The Washington Group’s attempt to create a question set that is consistent with the social model and to put it into use in national population censuses was an important step in expanding Disability statistics. However, the attempt has been mostly devoted to enhancement of accuracy of the significance of Disability. Meanwhile, the data on the economic lives of PWDs has additional importance to policy making for poverty reduction of PWDs. By collecting data on livelihoods, we may capture the relation between Disability and poverty in many developing cou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• List of abbreviations
• PART I Circumstances of persons with disabilities
• PART II IDE–PIDS survey of the livelihood of PWDs in the Philippines
• Appendix: Questionnaire
• Index