Healthlink Worldwide

Disability and poverty - an overview

People’s health is severely affected by poverty. Many of the factors associated with poverty, such as malnutrition, make people vulnerable to illness. The majority of the world’s poor live in countries where good health care is a privilege of the rich, while poor people lack access to appropriate treatment and care.

As a result, in poorer countries, life expectancy is significantly lower overall than in richer countries, infant and child mortality are higher, and women’s chances of dying in childbirth are greater, and disability has the effect of compounding the problems of poverty.

Poverty and disability
One of the aims of the internationally-agreed UN Millennium Development Goals is to halve the number of people living in absolute poverty by the year 2015. As with poverty and ill health, poverty and disability are closely linked, too.

Poor people are more vulnerable to disability for a number of reasons. The conditions in which poor people live and work make them and their children more vulnerable to mental and physical impairments and they are less likely to receive the health care they need. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that more than 500 million people - between seven and 10 per cent of the world’s population - have impairments that are preventable and treatable. Over 80 per cent of these people live in developing countries.

Poor people living with disability are particularly vulnerable to stigma and abuse. For instance, children with impairments may be hidden away at home, they are more likely than their peers not to go to school, to receive less food and to generally be neglected, which makes it even harder for them to find employment when they grow up. People who are poor and disabled are more likely to die prematurely.

Improving access to health care
The World Bank’s report Dying for Change explored the views of around 60,000 people who were defined as poor. The report highlighted the problems these poor people had in accessing appropriate and affordable health care. The problems they spoke of included:

• cost of treatment and care (including costs of transport and loss of wages during treatment)
• low quality of health services available
• staff shortages and absenteeism
• lack of drugs and equipment
• difficulties in accessing and understanding information.

Another problem that poor people commonly talk about is the rudeness and lack of respect shown to them by health workers.

See the disability and inclusion section of the Source website for resources;

www.asksource.info

This article was produced by Anna Pattenden for Healthlink Worldwide, in response to requests from our partner organisations. Individuals and organisations are welcome to adapt or reproduce the article provided that Healthlink Worldwide and the individual author are clearly credited.