In honor of Blog Action Day, I thought I’d do a short post on poverty and disability from a global perspective. The World Bank cites the following statistics on the subject:
- In Uganda, 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.
Poverty and disability are constant companions, both in the developed and developing worlds. Policymakers are beginning to understand that disability need not be an automatic sentence to lifelong poverty. Smart investments in education, health care, and infrastructure can go a long way towards bringing people with disabilities into the economic mainstream. Unfortunately, old attitudes and prejudices persist. One of the greatest challenges of disability advocates in coming decades will be to convince their leaders to raise their expectations for people with disabilities as students, workers, and citizens.
