Breaking the Cycle

Mont and the World Bank's Disability and Protection team are part of an international push to improve the collection of data on disabilities in developing countries. While the "best guess" estimate puts the level of disability at about 10 percent in most developing countries - about 400 million people - the lack of data makes it difficult to measure.

"The way you define disability, how you collect the data, has a big impact on what sort of percentage, what sort of number you get."

The World Bank is working in  partnership with the  the Washington Group on Disability Statistics which has been established by the United Nations Statistical Commission to improve the collection of data on disability issues in developing countries. The group's work will include producing survey questions and working with national statistical offices to create more detailed measures of disability. Mont says several countries have shown interest in the past few months.

True Impact Unknown

Mont says this vicious cycle of poverty faced by disabled people is an important issue for the development community. A study in Uganda found that households with a disabled person were 38 percent more likely to be poor, and the PRSP from Serbia-Montenegro reports that 70 percent of disabled people are poor.

He says dealing with disability has important implications for economic policy. For example, in countries emerging from conflict, preliminary studies show high levels of clinical depression and other mental health disorders.

"You are not going to go into some place and say let's have micro-credit programs and try to get people retrained and entrepreneurial when they are depressed. Also, often people who are depressed show up to health clinics claiming other health problems and you end up treating the wrong thing." 

The Impact on Families

Another strand of the work involves improving poverty estimates for households that include a disabled member.

Mont says there is little doubt that the issue of disability has a widespread impact. A survey in China found that while about 5 percent of the population had a disability, about 20 percent of people lived in households where someone had a disability.

Mont says that eventually the team wants to create surveys to find out where the bottlenecks are in programs that prevent them from improving disabled people's lives.

"Because a very large majority of people with disabilities can make contributions to family life, economic life, community life."

Defining Disability

"Disabilities range from being very moderate to extremely significant. They range from being temporary to permanent.

"And the nature of the disability interacts with the various supports and environments in such a way that the same person with the same impairment placed in a different position, whether it's their family, their culture, their infrastructure, will have extremely different outcomes."

The focus, therefore, should be on creating mainstream programs that take into account accommodating people with disabilities, rather than creating separate programs.

"Basically we are saying that there are differences in human functioning. If you are going to design a program - whether it is to do with education or roads or water systems - that program should be able to serve and reach everybody regardless of their functioning level."

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