Living conditions among people with disabilities in developing countries

Abstract

Living conditions and poverty are two common quantifiers or parameters of socioeconomic status and both have evolved from rather narrow economic and material concepts to encompass broader and more complex understandings.According to Heiberg and Øvensen (1993), studies on living conditions have evolved to include individuals' capabilities and how they utilise their capabilities. Likewise, the concept of poverty has expanded beyond a derived level of income or accumulation of material goods whereby 'poverty is now seen as the inability to achieve certain standards', poor people 'often lack adequate food, shelter, education, and health care', and 'they are poorly served by institutions of the state and society' (Wolfensohn and Bourguignon, 2004, p 4). The two concepts are not interchangeable, however; they stem from different research traditions and differ in use both for research and for practical purposes. While poverty research has focused on defining poverty and establishing poverty profiles, identifying poor populations and strategies for reducing poverty, studies on living conditions are based on more loosely bound sets of indicators that are applied to measure, for example, level of income, education, access to information, access to healthcare and social participation in a population, and to establish differences between population sub-groups for descriptive, comparative and monitoring purposes. Poverty is both a more general and complex phenomenon than living conditions, and the field of poverty research has recently been characterised as 'polyscopic', indicating that we are dealing with a multifaceted umbrella term and a conglomerate of perspectives and methods (Øyen, 2005). Surveys of living conditions in a population can, however, provide indicators on poverty and disability, and, if properly designed, they can be applied to study poverty mechanisms, poverty development and trends in a population, as well as contributing to decisions that may be applied to poverty alleviation. In this chapter data collected on the living conditions among people with and without disabilities in the southern African region will be utilised to assess the disability-poverty relationship.

Is There a Disability Gap in Employment Rates in Developing Countries?

“…In developing countries, studies published in peer-reviewed journals are limited and to our knowledge cover only eight countries. They all find lower employment rates for persons with disabilities (Hoogeven 2005 (Uganda) Expanding to other studies, a similar finding is also found in Eide et al (2003bEide et al ( , 2009 This paper uses a unique data set, the World Health Survey (WHS), collected by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 69 countries with a consistent measure of disability and employment in all countries. This is the first cross sectional international survey conducted to provide reliable and internationally comparable data on disability and this paper is the first systematic study of employment rates across disability status and their determinants in developing countries.…”

“…Other studies do find a higher share of workers with disabilities in self-employment compared to workers without disabilities in several countries (e.g. Eide et al (2003Eide et al ( , 2006Eide et al ( , 2009Eide et al ( , 2011b, Loeb et al (2004) and Mitra and Sambamoorthi (2006)). Further research is needed on informal/formal employment across disability status in developing countries.…”

Changing practice: Implications of the World Report on Disability for responding to communication disability in under-served populations

“…Alternative service models, including generic rehabilitation workers and communitybased rehabilitation workers, have been used to attempt to meet the needs of PWD, including PWCD. Despite these efforts, only 26 -55% of PWD surveyed across four Southern African nations reported receiving any medical rehabilitation, and the majority of this rehabilitation was reported to be for physical disabilities (Eide & Loeb, 2006;Eide & Yusman, 2009;Eide, Nhiwathiwa, Muderedzi, & Loeb, 2003;Loeb & Eide, 2004).…”

G292(P) Estimates of the burden of group b streptococcal disease worldwide for pregnant women, stillbirths and children

“…A lower standard of living is reported in households with a person with disability in both rural and urban Nepal. 1 Little is known about the impact of neurodisability among children in Nepal. Our aim was to understand the impact of childhood neurodisability in Eastern Nepal.…”