World Bank, Partners Call for Global Cooperation to "Unlock" Opportunities for Millions of People with Disabilities

As the world celebrated this year's UN "International Day of Disabled Persons" on December 3rd, a two-day conference looked at ways to include the needs of people with disabilities in the fight against poverty.

As part of the international efforts to fight poverty through more inclusive development policies, on December 2, 2004, in Washington DC, the World Bank and its partners called for strengthening global cooperation and partnerships to "Unlock" opportunities for the more than 600 million people with disabilities worldwide, of whom 400 million live in developing countries.

At the two-day conference, held at the World Bank's headquarters and titled "Disability and Inclusive Development: Sharing, Learning and Building Alliances", representatives from diverse organizations and countries took stock of what has been accomplished in the field of disability—particularly its inclusion into development operations—over the past two years, when the Bank held its first international conference on disability issues.

"We need to unlock the opportunities for 600 million people or more who have one form of disability or another, but who have with these disabilities tremendous competencies," World Bank President James Wolfensohn said in his opening remarks to a packed room at Preston Auditorium.

About 600 participants—many with disabilities—exchanged experiences and information through panel discussions and 11 break-out sessions covering a variety of topics such as inclusive education, access to health services, employment of disabled people, urban infrastructure and transport, the legal dimension of inclusive development, and others. Among the participants were public and private sector executives, development practitioners, academics, civil society and media representatives from developed and developing countries.

"The World Bank considers it crucial that countries adopt development policies that include the concerns and needs of disabled people so that they can contribute to the societies in which they live," said Wolfensohn. "In fact, if we are to achieve the Millennium Development Goals of halving poverty by 2015, dealing with education for all, halving the rates of birth and child mortality, it is simply impossible to conceive of doing that without the inclusion of the disabled community." According to Bank research, disability is affecting countries in different ways.

In Uganda, for example, households headed by a person with a disability are 38 percent more likely to be poor. In Serbia, the poverty rate of disabled people is 70 percent. In Honduras, people with disabilities have an illiteracy rate of 51 percent compared to 19 percent for the general population. In the United States, there is almost a 70 percent rate of unemployment among disabled people. And in some parts of the world, as many as 80 percent of disabled children die before the age of 5, even in areas where the overall child mortality rate has been brought down to under 20 percent.

In a keynote address, Dr. Amartya Sen, Lamont Professor at Harvard University and 1998 Nobel Laureate in economic science, noted that social intervention against disability had to include prevention as well as management and alleviation. "An understanding of the moral and political demands of disability is important not only because it is such a widespread and impairing feature of humanity, but also because the tragic consequences of disability can be substantially overcome with determined societal help and imaginative intervention," Sen said. "Given what can be achieved through intelligent and humane intervention, it is amazing how inactive and smug most societies are about the prevalence of the unshared burden of disability."

Dr. Catherine Le Gales-Camus, Assistant Secretary of the World Health Organization (WHO), spoke on the effect of HIV/AIDS on women, girls and disabled persons. "Poverty, HIV/AIDS, and people with disabilities are linked in a dangerous spiral," she said. "We are deeply concerned that among all people with disabilities, women and children suffer the most." She also noted that a recent Global Survey on HIV/AIDS and Disability released from the World Bank found that people with disabilities have a two- to three-times higher risk of acquiring HIV/AIDS due to widespread abuse and that lack of information for the visual and hearing impaired is a factor. She added that "the HIV/AIDS Department of WHO is now coordinating its efforts with the disability and rehabilitation team to guarantee that information on HIV/AIDS will be, and can be, available to everyone."

UN Ambassador Luis Gallegos, chairman of the ad-hoc committee on the Convention for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, said that people with disabilities were prominent leaders in the process of creating this new international human rights instrument. "They are enriching every aspect of the discourse on the Convention, thereby contributing to promoting the human rights of all persons," he said.

U.S. Senator Tom Harkin, Iowa, said that one of the biggest challenges facing the disabled community was changing people's attitudes and expectations with regards to persons with disabilities. Harkin, who was one of the forces behind the Americans with Disabilities Act signed into law 15 years ago, noted that the international community needed to work toward three main goals: access, inclusion and awareness of the rights of disabled people on a global scale. "Unfortunately, the barriers that people with disabilities face here in America, the barriers of isolation, exclusion, low expectations, are pervasive around the world," Harkin said. "In my view, these are the attitudes that we have got to change, and I believe we can change them."

Partnerships The conference also aimed to strengthen partnerships with client countries and other international organizations to build and disseminate good practices in order to help countries achieve the goals of access, inclusion, and poverty reduction of people with disabilities.

Judith Heumann, Disability and Development Advisor at the World Bank, explained "the Global Partnership on Disability and Development (GPDD), which grew out of the 2002 disability and development conference, is a good example of an informal coalition, including the Bank and more than one hundred other organizations, that are trying to enable partnerships by focusing on economic development issues and the strengthening of human rights for disabled people. Today, a GPDD discussion group of about 25 people are considering a draft declaration of purpose, possible creation of a steering group, and next steps. While disabled people remain the poorest of the poor, we need to better understand and identify the economic impact of disability in poverty reduction, as we work to integrate disability into the development agenda of the Bank and other organizations. We need to recognize that if disabled people are afforded opportunities like other non-disabled people, then they can also make meaningful contributions. That's why we are helping our global colleagues learn what the disabled community is, and how to include it into their daily work."

For specific regional data, visit: worldbank.org/disability