A global Overview of the Disability Situation

According to a handbook for Parliamentarians on the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities entitled “From Exclusion to Equality: Realizing the Rights of Persons with Disabilities,” over 650 million persons around the world live with disabilities. Add to that their extended families, and a staggering two billion people daily live with disabilities.

The handbook – developed by the Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN-DESA), the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) – further says Persons with disabilities make up the world’s largest and most disadvantaged minority.

The numbers are damning: an estimated 20 percent of the world’s poorest persons are those with disabilities; 98 percent of children with disabilities in developing countries do not attend school; an estimated 30 percent of the world’s street children live with disabilities; and the literacy rate for adults with disabilities is as low as 3 per cent and, in some countries, down to 1 per cent for women with disabilities.

In every region in the world, in every country in the world, persons with disabilities often live on the margins of society, deprived of some of life’s fundamental experiences. They have little hope of going to school, getting a job, having their own home, creating a family and raising their children, enjoying a social life or voting. For the vast majority of the world’s persons with disabilities, shops, public facilities and transport, and even information are largely out of reach.

Regardless of a country’s human rights or economic situation, persons with disabilities elsewhere are generally the last in line to have their human rights respected. Being denied the opportunities that would enable them to be self-sufficient, most persons with disabilities resort to the kindness or charity of others.

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation (OECD), disability rates are significantly higher among groups with lower educational attainment in the countries of the OECD. On average, 19 percent of less-educated people have disabilities, compared to 11 percent among better-educated people.

The Department for International Development (DFID) in the United Kingdom says mortality for children with disabilities may be as high as 80 percent in countries where under-five mortality, as a whole, has fallen to below 20 percent. It further states that in some cases, it seems as if disabled children are being “weeded out.”

Global statistics also show that the needs of children with disabilities, in particular, deserve special attention. Up to 150 million children globally have a disability and the numbers are rising.  50 percent of children who are deaf and 60 percent of those with an intellectual impairment are sexually abused. In some countries 90 percent of children with disabilities will not survive beyond the age of 20. 98 percent of children with disabilities across the developing world have no access to education.

Definitely, it is time to act. And the time is now!

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