Role of CBR in Achieving MDGs

This week, we continue discussing and illustrating how Community-Based Rehabilitation (CBR) can contribute towards the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015, with a focus on goal number seven and eight.

Goal number seven is on environmental sustainability. Environmental risks, such as poor sanitation and water quality, and natural disasters can cause ill health and disability. Persons with disabilities often find it difficult to move around their homes and communities due to inaccessible buildings. They face barriers in accessing community facilities such as wells and latrines and they are often excluded from disaster management activities. CBR contributes to environmental sustainability by ensuring communities involve people with disabilities when designing safe water and sanitation facilities; making recommendations and modifications to ensure access to existing facilities; and ensuring disaster response training within communities considers the needs of people with disabilities and appropriate strategies are in place.

Goal number eight is on global partnership for development. CBR is a partnership approach, and works with all development sectors to achieve positive outcomes for people with disabilities. For example, the International Disability and Development Consortium (IDDC) and three other CBR global alliances – CBR Asia-Pacific Network, CBR Africa Network, and the CBR American and Caribbean Network – work to promote CBR and inclusive development. CBR contributes to global partnerships for development by networking with government sectors, NGOs (local, national and international) and communities; and promoting CBR as a strategy for mainstreaming disability across all development sectors.

Finally, let’s conclude by stating the fact that while the MDGs do not specifically mention disability, it is increasingly being recognised that the MDGs will be impossible to achieve without inclusion of people with disabilities. In September 2010, the UN General Assembly adopted the resolution, "Keeping the promise: united to achieve the Millennium Development Goals", recognising that policies and actions must also focus on persons with disabilities so that they benefit from progress towards achieving the MDGs. Disability-inclusive MDGs would also support the implementation of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). What is left now is for countries like Malawi to begin pondering on how they can strategically reposition its development policies to respond to the needs of persons with disabilities.

It is, therefore, for this reason why civil society organisations like Federation of Disability Organisations in Malawi (FEDOMA) and Child Rights Information and Documentation Centre (CRIDOC) are appealing to Government and other key stakeholders to seriously consider the inclusion of issues affecting persons with disability even in the new Malawi Development Growth Strategy (MDGS). Unless persons with disabilities are brought into the development mainstream, it will be impossible to cut poverty by half by 2015 or to give every girl and boy the chance to achieve a primary education by the same date agreed to by more than 180 world leaders at the United Nations Millennium Summit in September 2000.