Income Support for People with Disabilities

Developing countries have paid inadequate attention to the issue of disability and safety nets. Though awareness of the need for such attention is gradually growing, a good body of experience from which to draw definitive lessons is not yet available.  

Disability has often been defined as a physical, mental, or psychological condition that limits a persons activities. In the medical model of disability, the emphasis is on an impairment caused by a medical condition thus policy responses tended to emphasize health care, and when that failed to reestablish functioning, palliative social assistance or social care. The social model, which has recently come to dominate disability research and policy discourse, emphasizes peoples ability to function in their particular physical and social environment. Disability therefore arises when barriers prevent people with functional limitations caused by age, disease, injury, or other causes from participating fully in society. This approach leads to a wider range of policy options, especially with respect to accessibility to transportation, buildings, education, and employment. The World Health 

Organization s International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (WHO 2001) embraces this concept and includes gradations of disability rather than focusing on a dichotomy of with disability versus without disability. 

The difficulties of defining disability lead to serious problems in measuring it, both in relation to analytical work that could lead to a good understanding of the interactions between disability and poverty and in relation to operational problems encountered in directing assistance to those with disabilities. 

Roughly 10 to 15 percent of the populations of developing countries have disabilities, with 2 to 3 percent typically having severe disabilities that preclude them from working and thus put them in need of long-term income support. This figure is in line with older estimates by the United Nations and surveys in several countries that have used new methods agreed 

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The two basic options for income support for people with disabilities are providing them with specific disability-targeted programs (contributory or not) and/or including them in general social assistance programs in addition to complementing these options with other services. 

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