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World poverty is a disability issue"To a person who is poor, everything is dreadful - illness, humiliation, shame. We are disfigured, we are frightened, we are dependent. No one needs us. We are like garbage that everyone wants to get rid of."These are the words of a poor woman in Tiraspol, Moldavia. This particular woman is blind, but the same thing could have been said by any of the 1.2 billion people in the world who are living in abject poverty. And everywhere on earth, women and children are the poorest of all. At about the turn of the millennium the World Bank carried out a gigantic study in which sixty thousand poor people were interviewed. When they describe what poverty is like, it is in terms of hunger, losses, abuse, powerlessness, social isolation, corruption and the subordination of women. But also of capacity, resilience and solidarity with others who are poor. The descriptions of what it is like being poor have a familiar ring, because they are just like people's descriptions of living with disability. Being poor means being vulnerable, and so does disability. There are no firm data on the number of people having to live with both kinds of vulnerability - poverty and disability - but an estimated six hundred million of the world's inhabitants are disabled, assuming a figure of ten per cent. Another estimate suggests that four hundred million of them live in poor countries, the majority being numbered among the very poorest. People with disabilities there amount to much more than ten per cent of the population. So world poverty is a disability issue. And conversely, disability is a poverty issue. Hence the theme of this year's Handling: poverty and disability.
The poverty trap Everywhere on earth, people with disabilities are among those most liable to slip into poverty and least able to escape from it. People who own nothing cannot get medical care, treatment and rehabilitation. Perhaps there are not even roads and communications for them to leave their village by. Many disabilities make it impossible to do so the same as others and work hard to hold poverty at bay. People with disabilities often have to acquiesce in depending entirely on their family for survival. In addition, both attitudes and inaccessibility help to create poverty. Most children, girls especially, never get to school, and adults are often considered incapable of doing a job. All over the world, both poverty and disability are stigmatised, and the poorer one is, the greater the stigma attaching to disability. Everyone working with development assistance and international development feels that people with disabilities must have the same chance of a good life as other poor people in the world. No one contradicts, no one can contradict, this obvious truth. But, with few exceptions, development work is not organised so that people with disabilities can really participate. They are forgotten, unseen, their desire for a good life does not count, is not respected. It is not known, we are told, what can be done in order for people with disabilities to share in the support given to the poor. This is partly true, but many decades have passed without any serious effort being made to gather knowledge and use the experience accumulated, above all within the disabled persons movement.
Not just a matter of development assistance Little is known at all concerning development in poor countries. Eighty per cent of the world's population live in developing countries, but at most ten per cent of the world's research reports address issues with a bearing on the development of poor countries. One crucial fact, however, is already known: reducing poverty in the world is not primarily a question of development assistance. Assistance makes up only a small portion of the economy of the poor countries. The affluent countries could support the poor more decisively by altering the rules on movement of capital, trade and agriculture. The liberal rules on the movement of capital from one country to another, and the great power of the owners of capital to prevent the equalisation of incomes, have widened the world's income gaps. Besides, through trade barriers and support to its own agriculture, the affluent part of the world recoups from the poor countries far more than it gives them. The EU, for example, pays a hundred times more support for a cow in Europe than for a human being south of the Sahara in Africa. And high tariffs prevent poor countries from selling their agricultural produce to rich ones. In the spring of 2003 the Swedish government introduced a Bill on future activities for global development. The Bill notes that assistance alone cannot remedy the unfairness of the international order, and so its basic idea is for Swedish policy in every field to promote the development process. Sweden is to support poor countries, not only through international development policy but also through its policy on trade, agriculture, the economy and so on.
World Bank demands for structural adjustment The World Bank is one of the world's biggest financiers where the fight against poverty and measures to promote development in poor countries are concerned. In 2002 it distributed 19.5 bn dollars to various projects. But the conditions laid down by the World Bank have not always favoured the poorest. Far from it, in many countries the Bank has insisted on heavy spending cuts and a liberal market policy as a quid pro quo for loans and grants. The Bank has demanded cutbacks and privatisation measures in the small welfare sector existing. When the countries have done as they are told and introduced charges for medical care and education, the poorest have of course been the first who have had to go without medical care and refrain from sending their children to school. The victims of this "structural adjustment", needless to say, also include people with disabilities. For seven or eight years now, the World Bank has been changing its policy. The new policy is for the recipient countries to "own" their development and for government, civil society and the private sector all to be involved in the development process. Among other things, this means that the World Bank wants the DPOs also to be given a hearing. The Bank professes to be putting poverty first. This change of policy is the reason for our interviewing World Bank President James Wolfensohn for this issue. There is good reason to report on the World Bank's growing awareness of disability issues, but there is also good reason to keep a close watch on the real implications of the policy change. Will the work of the World Bank benefit the very poorest, including people with disabilities?
The DPOs have been given more chance of making themselves heard in the World Bank's efforts to combat poverty. The only trouble is that poverty and disability combined make it so hard for people to join forces and formulate their demands. People with disabilities often need support first in order to meet and have a chance of making themselves heard. In this book researcher Karin Ljuslinder describes her visit to Nicaragua in order to plan a project together with vision-impaired women. She writes: I thought that together we would discuss how the economic and political power hierarchies of Nicaraguan society impact on the women's lives. But how could I expect the women to have the time or inclination to discuss discrimination and subjection when many of them are single mothers whose everyday lives are a perpetual struggle for the family's daily bread? And how had I expected vision-impaired women to be able to gather for meetings when many of them have no means of travelling to a single meeting point? The most important international initiative taken by the SHIA federations is that of supporting people with disabilities in their efforts to join together, devise democratic working procedures, listen to one another and agree on their demands. This is no easy task. Roland Håkansson of DHR (the Swedish Federation of Disabled Persons) describes how his Federation is supporting the CHAWATA disabled persons' organisation in Tanzania in its progress towards democratic governance. A feature article from Russia describes how contact with young Swedes enables Russian youngsters to find out what life can be like, even if you have diabetes. They understand that a good life is possible. For each of the Russian youngsters, this is mainly a question of their own lives and futures. But contact with Sweden also gives the Russian diabetes organisation a chance of being both seen and heard in Russian society. From Nepal comes the story of projects which several Swedish DPOs have been running for eight years and which have helped many people with disabilities to make a god life for themselves and their families. The work done by the Shia member organisations in Nepal differs from most other Shia initiatives in the world because the organisations have worked together, instead of drawing boundary lines round separate disabilities.
Poverty the biggest issue for the disabled persons movement In this book Shuaib Chalklen, a member of the South African government, calls on all the world's DPOs to try and look further than the single disabilities they represent. Let us disregard the fact that we have different disabilities, he writes. Let us rally round the biggest and most important issue, that of poverty, which overshadows everything in life for the majority of the world's disabled population. Poverty is not blind fate, it is politics. Something can be done about it, as the nations of the world have shown by agreeing to reduce it by half. Poverty is oppression. Author and journalist Anders Ehnmark contributes an article on oppression and liberation. Hidden injustice can persist indefinitely, he writes, and you can't fight oppression if you don't see it. He takes as his starting point the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci, who argued that the path to liberation was entry into the great dialogue. If the oppressed cannot enter the dialogue, they cannot liberate themselves. Even though the international disabled persons movement does not usually speak in terms of oppression and liberation, Shuaib Chalklen's appeal can be construed as meaning that the movement must make sure of entering the great dialogue. It has the strength and competence to do so, he writes.
Participation in human rights In this year's Handling we report on the African Decade of Disabled People. DPOs throughout the continent are joining forces to make themselves both seen and heard, and the nations of the world have agreed to draw up a convention on the rights of people with disabilities. The struggle against poverty and the struggle for human rights must proceed hand in hand, as is abundantly clear where people with disabilities are concerned. On the one hand, hundreds of millions of poor people with disabilities will never escape poverty unless they can share in human rights, obtain education, have a chance of taking part in the democratic process and are seen and respected as citizens. On the other hand, they will never be able to exercise their human rights without escaping from poverty. It is only when a person sees some hope of life changing that they can perceive the usefulness of forming an organisation to press demands. It is only when they no longer need to feel helpless and incapable that people can believe that their voices and votes will count for something. Malena Sjöberg | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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