Why Disabled People Are Crucial To Development

[Guest guest]

Why Disabled People Are Crucial To Development

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=46067

Indian researcher and activist Minal Doshi has a mission: to get the

world's policymakers to pay attention to disabled people.

If they fail to do so, she warns, the Millennium Development Goals

(MDGs, the internationally agreed targets for improving the lives of

the majority of the world's population) will also fail.

It is true, in the words of activist Indumathi Rao, regional advisor

for a South Asian network, that in many parts of the world " the MDGs

look like stars and moon up in the sky…Most of the goals in the past

have failed to move beyond mere catchy slogans. " But most development

agencies are geared - at least on paper - to achieving the UN-backed

goals.

So they remain the best hope for reducing poverty worldwide.

Doshi, however, realised that the eight basic Goals - which include

halting the spread of HIV and AIDS, halving extreme poverty and

providing universal primary education - have a major flaw: they do

not mention disability.

Most estimates say one person in 10 is disabled, a word that covers

everything from legs blown off by landmines to mental illness, and

from epilepsy to deafness.

That's about 600 million people, who the World Bank says " are more

likely than other people to live in grinding poverty…they live at the

bottom of the pile. "

" I realised that international funding would eventually be directed

only at areas covered by the MDGs, and that groups representing

people and issues not included in the Goals - including the disabled -

would find it harder and harder to get funds " , she recalls.

During a meeting on disability in the Indian city of Ahmedabad

organised by the Disability, Knowledge and Research Programme (funded

by the UK Department for International Development, she suggested

that the UN be petitioned to acknowledge disability as a key factor

in achieving the Goals.

Participants at the meeting backed the suggestion - and left it to

her to take the idea forward.

Doshi admits that she was not particularly well qualified for the

task: " I am just a ground-level worker but I saw a lot of people

doing good work getting agitated and upset about the whole issue. I

didn't understand the approach of the human rights organisations that

took up the issue and I didn't know how to deal with the UN. "

Nevertheless, she wrote a draft petition and got the 500 signatures

that were considered necessary to show there was support for the

initiative.

During this first stage of the work she temporarily left her social

work activities in India for a stint at the Third Millennium

Foundation, a New York-based organisation working on tolerance and

human rights issues - " a perfect opportunity to be where the UN is

and try to understand its work. "

She was also made a visiting scholar at Columbia University, where

she was able to share ideas about her new project with the School of

International and Public Affairs.

She has been meeting lawyers, academics, disability groups and

attending UN meetings. The second draft of the petition

(http://www.disabilityindia.org/mdgsign.cfm) has been completed and

is being circulated for feedback.

Is she confident that she will be able to break the resistance to any

change in the Goals, which were agreed only after a lengthy process

of negotiation?

" I feel the petition has a good chance " , she says. " Everyone I have

spoken to is taken aback at first because they have not heard or

thought about the argument that says disability impacts on the

economic and on development. This reaction tells me we are onto

something good. "

She emphasises that supporters of the initiative are not pressing for

a new and separate Goal on disability, which is not practical

politics. What they want is to interweave disability into the

existing Goals. For example, since the sheer number of persons with

disabilities makes them the largest group of people vulnerable to

extreme poverty and hunger, they want the UN to acknowledge that

disability is a key indicator of poverty.

Similarly, for the education Goal they want the wording to recognise

the UN's own estimate that 98 per cent of children with disabilities

in developing countries are not in school.

The London-based Healthlink Worldwide - which co-manages the

Disability KaR programme and organised the Ahmedabad meeting -

considers the omission of disability from the Goals as " grievous " .

Wolfensohn, former president of the World Bank, has said

that " unless disabled people are brought into the development

mainstream, it will be impossible to cut poverty in half by 2015 or

to give every girl and boy the chance to achieve a primary education

by the same date… "

Still, Doshi admits to uncertainty " because this is my first venture

into the area of human rights " . In addition, she is still working

largely on her own, has not yet received much media coverage, has a

lot to learn about lobbying and needs the support of big

organisations and, ultimately, of a national government prepared to

espouse the issue and push it through the UN: individual petitions to

the world body end up in the paper shredder.

She has meetings lined up with Salil Shetty, director of the UN's

Millennium Campaign, and with Sachs, UN Secretary-General

Kofi n's Special Adviser.

In August, she plans to show the petition to participants at a week-

long meeting at the UN on disability. " This is one event where

everyone who matters in the field of disability development will be

available. It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to bring the issue

up. "