Poverty and disability are linked. Disability feeds on poverty, and poverty on disability. As a result of poverty, people become disabled. Such people have very limited access to health care and facilities (including immunization); they have very rudimentary feeding and nutrition; they are exposed to a number of disabling conditions, such as a lack of disability-friendly healthy facilities and limited trained health personnel. As a consequence, poor people are more likely to become disabled.
It is also imperative to note that many disabled people lack education and skills training; hence, they cannot easily access employment. Due to a lack of inclusive education, children with disabilities face numerous barriers, including lack of assistive devices, inaccessible school infrastructure, and societal. Without education that is believed to be a pathway out of poverty, these children grow into adults with limited employability skills, thereby continuing the cycle of poverty. The physically demanding nature of unskilled labor makes it difficult for disabled people to be involved in labor-intensive activities. This situation is made worse by outright social exclusion of disabled people that constrains disabled people’s participation in the job market.
Anecdotal information suggests that disabled people are “borne into poverty” and that both poverty and disability are mutually reinforcing. A number of well-intentioned development programs in Uganda today exclude most disabled people either due to design faults or inappropriate inherent assumptions, and not much is known about the key factors that limit the participation of disabled people in poverty reduction initiatives.
According to the 2014 National Population and Housing Census, approximately 12% of the population have a disability, and 22% of unemployed Ugandans have a disability. Statistics indicate that the majority of persons with disabilities are subsistence farmers, comprising 73.7%, compared to persons without disabilities, who add up to 61.6%, according to the Uganda Bureau of Statistics report of 2019. The 2009/10 National Household Survey found that poverty rates in households where there was a person with a disability were 30% higher. Research indicates that persons with disabilities have fewer opportunities for employment as subsistence farming continues to dominate the economy.
Ubuntu Disability Action for Development advocates for agricultural programs that include persons with disabilities from the onset. Uganda’s poverty alleviation programs, such as the Parish Development Model and the Emyooga Fund, among others, need to be designed, implemented, monitored, and evaluated while considering people with disabilities at the center.
As a country, we must adopt and create more inclusive disability-friendly policies in health, education, and social economic programs that integrate persons with disabilities geared towards increasing household income. Persons with disabilities have often been left behind without food and abandoned on streets depending on begging. The government needs to be intentional in ensuring that persons with disabilities are incorporated into agriculture, a backbone of the economy, through giving them farming tools and machinery.
As Ubuntu Disability Action for Development, we make a clarion call to the government of the Republic of Uganda and other stakeholders to push for a complete change, ensuring persons with disabilities are not only beneficiaries of development but active participants in shaping Uganda’s future. Only then shall we break the cycle of poverty and disability.
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