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Global Report on Children with Developmental Disabilities: from the margins to the mainstream

WORLD HEALTH ORGANISATION (WHO)
UNITED NATIONS CHILDREN'S FUND (UNICEF)
September 2023

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This WHO-UNICEF Global Report is a call for action to intentionally include children and young people with developmental disabilities in renewed global and country level efforts to enable transformations towards the SDGs.  It proposes priority actions to accelerate individual-, family-, community-, and society-level changes to achieve inclusion and health equity. The report makes the case for greater investment and accountability to build inclusive and responsive multisectoral care systems for children and young people with developmental disabilities. Using findings from research and practice and guided by the tenets of international human rights conventions, the report provides key insights into the state of knowledge, policy, programming, and public monitoring in respect of developmental disabilities.

WHO standards for prosthetics and orthotics. Assessment package. Assessment guide

WORLD HEALTH ORGANISATION (WHO)
April 2023

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The Assessment package has been developed for countries to evaluate the implementation of the WHO Standards for prosthetics and orthotics. It enables identification of areas in need of strengthening and facilitates relevant planning. The complete Assessment package consists of four components:

Assessment guide: gives directions on how to organize and implement the assessment.
Assessment tool: Excel instrument used to carry out assessments and record results.
User manual: explains how the Assessment tool should be used.
Planning document: Excel file into which the recommendations that are generated by the Assessment tool can be pasted for easy use in subsequent planning.

 

Before undertaking the assessment, stakeholders at the country level should familiarize themselves with the package components and the WHO standards for prosthetics and orthotics (Parts 1 and 2). A PowerPoint presentation describing the assessment process and a video presenting the main assessment steps and key functions of the tool are also available to download from the links below. It is recommended that assessments are undertaken in collaboration with the ministry of health and other ministries responsible for assistive technology, prosthetics and orthotics, and/or rehabilitation.

Related links:

Assessment guide

Assessment tool

User manual

Planning document

PowerPoint presentation

PowerPoint presentation in pdf

Video 

Global Report on Assistive Technology

WORLD HEALTH ORGANISATION (WHO)
UNITED NATIONS CHILDREN'S FUND (UNICEF)
May 2022

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The WHO-UNICEF Global Report on Assistive Technology (AT) reveals that more than 2.5 billion people need one or more assistive products, such as wheelchairs, hearing aids, or apps that support communication and cognition. Yet nearly one billion of them are denied access, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, where access can be as low as 3% of the need for these life-changing products.

The Global Report provides the best available evidence about the barriers currently preventing access, how access can be improved, and how enabling environments and AT can enable persons with disabilities to enjoy their human rights while generating a tremendous return on investment for governments. The report also makes 10 key recommendations for concrete actions that will improve access to AT, for everyone, that needs them. 

Access to assistive technology for children with disabilities is often the first step for childhood development, access to education, participation in sports and civic life, and getting ready for employment like their peers. Children with disabilities have additional challenges due to their growth, which requires frequent adjustments or replacements of their assistive products.

Intersectionality Resource Guide and Toolkit. An intersectional approach to leave no one behind

UN WOMEN
UN PRPD
2022

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The Resource Guide and Toolkit has been developed to help both organizations and individual practitioners and experts to address intersectionality in policies and in programmes. It may be used by individuals or teams to assess their own knowledge, attitudes, and practice, at a programme level as a supplement to existing design, adaptation, and assessment processes or at policy level to better understand and address the different and intersecting effects of policy on marginalised persons.

This Resource Guide and Toolkit emerged from an identified need to use an intersectional approach that included people with disabilities in all their diversity in the development, implementation and evaluation of policies, programmes, advocacy and inter-governmental processes. However, the authors and collaborators realised that an effective intersectionality resource needed to go beyond a focus on specific intersecting identities, such as disability and gender, as this would still exclude those who are most marginalised

Inclusive education training guide

LEWIS, Ingrid
July 2021

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This package is designed to assist with the training of staff within CBM and its partners. It has been prepared with country and regional advisory staff in mind but will have value for project/ programme management and other staff too. It has been designed for use with small groups of participants (e.g., maximum 10-15).

This training package focuses on inclusive education. It interprets inclusive education in a broad sense as a dual process of bringing about education system change, at all levels of education, to the benefit of all learners; and supporting the needs of individual learners, especially those with disabilities. It is not a training about specific impairments, nor will it show participants how to identify, teach and support learners with specific impairments. Instead the package helps participants to understand better the overarching challenges being faced and the systematic programme and advocacy approaches that CBM, its partners and other similar organisations need to engage with.

 

This training package consists of the following booklets:

A Inclusive education and CBM

B Inclusive education and the community

C Participation and achievement for all learners

D Education system change

A Global Agenda for Inclusive Recovery: Ensuring People with Intellectual Disabilities and Families are Included in a Post-COVID World

Inclusion International
June 2021

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This report documents the experience of exclusion of people with intellectual disabilities and their families during the COVID-19 pandemic. These experiences reveal pre-existing structural inequalities that affected the lives of people with intellectual disabilities and their families before COVID-19, during the pandemic, and beyond, and this report raises up the voices of those most excluded in a time of global crisis and demands an inclusive COVID-19 recovery.

 

This report includes the experiences of people with intellectual disabilities and families across eight different issue areas. Across these themes, we examined how and why people with intellectual disabilities were left out and excluded in pandemic responses, what pre-existing conditions and inequalities contributed to their vulnerability and exclusion, and how future policy structures could begin to address both this immediate and systemic exclusion.

 

Together, these experiences and policy solutions form our global agenda for inclusive COVID-19 recovery, an action plan to ensure that government efforts to ‘build back better’ are inclusive of people with intellectual disabilities and their families.

Social protection measures for persons with disabilities and their families in response to the COVID-19 crisis: An updated overview of trends June 2021

UNPRPD
INTERNATIONAL LABOUR ORGANISATION (ILO)
June 2021

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An overview of social protection measures announced in response to COVID-19 that have made specific reference to persons with disabilities. Rather than seeking to provide an exhaustive survey of measures, it identifies the main characteristics and trends for social protection responses that specifically sought to support persons with disabilities during the crisis. This brief focuses on specific crisis response measures adopted during the COVID-19 pandemic, acknowledging that persons with disabilities also benefited from access to health care and income support provided through pre-existing social protection schemes and programmes. The document provides an update to an initial analysis in May 2020 (UNPRPD, 2020).

 

This overview draws on a database of social protection measures specifically relating to disability, which is provided as an Annex to this paper. 

A global agenda for inclusive recovery: Ensuring people with intellectual disabilities and families are Included in a post-COVID world

INCLUSION INTERNATIONAL
May 2021

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This report documents the experiences of people with intellectual disabilities and their families during COVID-19 and proposes a global agenda for inclusive COVID recovery developed by Inclusion International’s membership. The global agenda is a set of imperatives for policy and programming to ensure that “building back better” creates a more inclusive world.

The effective engagement toolkit

LEONARD CHESHIRE
March 2021

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The engagement toolkit is a practical resource guide for anyone committed to ensuring the voice of disabled people is front and centre of their work.

Starting with influencing approaches on policy, campaigning and public affairs engagement, the toolkit provides:

• Step by step guidance on entry points for developing productive and mutually beneficial relationships with the disability community.
• Quick guides on key disability movement context, approaches and best practice
• A breakdown of key elements of the Influencing Cycle.
• Examples of where good practice has worked well.
• Links to in-depth information for further learning.

Rights of persons with disabilities : note / by the Secretary-General

DEVANDAS-AGUILAR, Catalina
November 2020

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The Special Rapporteur on the rights of persons with disabilities, Catalina Devandas-Aguilar, examines the importance of international cooperation to support the implementation of the rights of persons with disabilities and provides guidance to States on how to ensure that international cooperation is inclusive of and accessible to persons with disabilities.

 

In preparing the report, the Special Rapporteur analysed 40 responses to a questionnaire sent to Member States, national human rights institutions and civil society organizations, including organizations of persons with disabilities.  She also commissioned a study to assess the extent to which international cooperation was inclusive of and accessible to persons with disabilities, which included surveys and interviews with 26 bilateral and multilateral agencies and 10 private donors

Living in Chains - Shackling of people with psychosocial disabilities worldwide

HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH
October 2020

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In order to show the scale and scope of shackling of people with real or perceived psychosocial disabilities worldwide, Human Rights Watch conducted a study of mental health legislation, relevant policies, and practices across 60 countries around the world.

This report includes research and testimonies collected by 16 Human Rights Watch researchers in their own countries. We worked closely with partner organizations to visit private homes and institutions in Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Ghana, Indonesia, Kenya, Liberia, Mexico, Mozambique, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Palestine, Russia, the selfdeclared independent state of Somaliland, South Sudan, and Yemen. Human Rights Watch researchers interviewed more than 350 people with psychosocial disabilities, including those who were shackled at the time of research or had been shackled at least once in their lives, and more than 430 family members, caregivers or staff working in institutions, psychiatrists, psychologists, nurses and other mental health professionals, faith healers, lawyers, government officials, representatives of local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), including organizations of persons with disabilities, and disability rights advocates. The testimonies were collected between August 2018 and September 2020 through in-person and phone interviews.

Desk research and consultation with international disability experts was also undertaken

Product Narratives: the challenges of supply and demand-side barriers for priority AT

HOLLOWAY, Cathy
OLDFREY, Ben
END FINEBURG, Alison
SEGHERS, Frederic
SOENDERGAARD, Dennis
September 2020

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This Disability Innovation Live session, looked at the Assistive Technology (AT) Product Narratives (PNs). The Product Narratives were developed by the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) under the FCDO funded AT2030 programme, led by GDI Hub, in support of the ATscale Strategy.

These PNs set out what we know about the state of the global market for each AT product, and identify global recommendations for how to address some of the barriers to access currently experienced in low and middle-income countries. In this session, we hear from the experts about what the PNs are, how they will inform global policy, and how we hope they will help us reach more people with life-changing AT

COVID-19, Amplifying Voices: Our Lives, Our Say: Learning from COVID-19 through the experiences of blind and partially sighted persons across the world

ZAYED, Yana
et al
August 2020

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The World Blind Union (WBU) conducted a study to examine the extent to which COVID-19 pandemic has exposed some deep structural inequalities in society. Data gathered from the study is evidencing that persons with disabilities, older persons, and persons from lower socioeconomic status backgrounds are among those hardest hit by the pandemic. While this report puts a spotlight on the voices of blind and partially sighted persons, many of the experiences shared strongly resonate with numerous other studies that are also highlighting how marginalised groups have been affected by this crisis. Through this report, WBU hopes to raise awareness on the specifics of what those challenges have meant in reality for its constituents, as well as shed light on what have been effective resilience strategies for them. The study was made possible with the support of CBM Global

To understand the situation of our constituents, the World Blind Union (WBU) conducted a global survey in collaboration with key stakeholders. In April 2020, the WBU launched an open online survey for seven weeks in Spanish, French and English, seeking information from blind and partially sighted persons on how COVID-19 was impacting their day to day life. 853 people participated in the survey. The respondents expressed in their own words how their lives had been and continue to be impacted by the coronavirus pandemic. This report is a compilation of those voices. It depicts the ways in which COVID-19 response measures taken by state and non-state actors have created additional barriers and challenges for blind and partially sighted people. It also includes powerful testimonies on how people have shown resilience in the face of adversity.

 

 

What do we know about how to support mental health and wellbeing during the COVID-19 pandemic from past infectious disease epidemics?

QURESH, Onaiza
SCHERER, Nathaniel
July 2020

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The question and the problem:

Symptoms of mental ill-health are common during widespread outbreak of an infectious disease, with high rates of depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) reported during recent epidemics, such as the recent Ebola crises and SARS-CoV-1. Elevated symptoms of mental ill-health are not limited to patients only, and are seen in healthcare workers, family members and indeed more widely across the general population. Early evidence coming from the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates high rates of mental ill-health and mental health service provision is needed. This evidence brief summarises evidence on mental health support during COVID-19 and other recent pandemics, informing policy and practice during this crisis.

Inclusion and education: All means all. Global Education Monitoring (GEM) report 2020

GLOBAL EDUCATION MONITORING REPORT TEAM
June 2020

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The 2020 GEM Report assesses progress towards Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4) on education and its ten targets, as well as other related education targets in the SDG agenda. The Report also addresses inclusion in education, drawing attention to all those excluded from education, because of background or ability. The Report is motivated by the explicit reference to inclusion in the 2015 Incheon Declaration, and the call to ensure an inclusive and equitable quality education in the formulation of SDG 4, the global goal for education. It reminds us that, no matter what argument may be built to the contrary, we have a moral imperative to ensure every child has a right to an appropriate education of high quality.

The Report also explores the challenges holding us back from achieving this vision and demonstrates concrete policy examples from countries managing to tackle them with success. These include differing understandings of the word inclusion, lack of teacher support, absence of data on those excluded from education, inappropriate infrastructure, persistence of parallel systems and special schools, lack of political will and community support, untargeted finance, uncoordinated governance, multiple but inconsistent laws, and policies that are not being followed through.

Profiles Enhancing Education Reviews (PEER)

GLOBAL EDUCATION MONITORING REPORT TEAM
June 2020

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The PEER on-line tool has been designed to support the monitoring of national education laws and policies. It provides systematic, comprehensive information on laws and policies for every country in the world and is meant to support policy dialogue and peer learning.

The first set of country profiles cover inclusion and education, the theme of the 2020 GEM Report

How can social protection responses to COVID-19 be made disability inclusive?

BANKS, Lena Morgon
HUNT, Xanthe
June 2020

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Question & problem

The COVID-19 pandemic and strategies essential for its containment are resulting in severe strains on economies, particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). These impacts will be felt most by groups already in or at risk of poverty, including the estimated 1 billion people with disabilities globally. Interventions to address the short- and long-term economic effects of the pandemic are urgently needed. Some countries have begun implementing or announced plans for interventions addressing the economic impacts of COVID-19, such as food assistance, emergency cash transfers, unemployment assistance or expansions to existing social protection programmes. As these programmes are developed, it is important to consider the extent to which their design and delivery is inclusive of people with disabilities. Failure to adequately include people with disabilities in this process will lead to widening inequalities.

HLPF 2020: "Will the SDGs still be relevant after the pandemic for persons with disabilities?

INTERNATIONAL DISABILITY ALLIANCE (IDA)
June 2020

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In the framework of the 2020 High-level Political Forum, the event provided a platform for governments championing disability-inclusive sustainable development. Governments were able to share the measures that they have and will carry out to ensure that the “leave no one behind” and “reach the furthest behind first” will still be achievable despite all the challenges caused by the pandemic. The event also featured diverse testimonies from persons with disabilities, in particular underrepresented groups, sharing their experiences and requests with world leaders in order to rebuild a more disability-inclusive future

Assistive technology use and provision during COVID19: Results from a rapid global survey

SMITH, Emma M
HERNANDEZ, Maria Luisa Toro
EBUENYI, Ikenna D
SYURINA, Elena V
BARBARESCHI, Giulia
BEST, Krista L
DANEMAYER, Jamie
OLDFREY, Ben
IBRAHIM, Nuha
HOLLOWAY, Catherine
MacLACHLAN, Malcolm
June 2020

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The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has impacted all segments of society, but it has posed particular challenges for the inclusion of persons with disabilities, those with chronic illness and older people regarding their participation in daily life. These groups often benefit from assistive technology (AT) and so it is important to understand how use of AT may be affected by or may help to mitigate the impacts of COVID-19. The objectives of this study were to explore the how AT use and provision have been affected during the initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, and how AT policies and systems may be made more resilient based on lessons learned during this global crisis.

This study was a rapid, international online qualitative survey in the 6 United Nations (UN) languages (English, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Mandarin Chinese) facilitated by extant World Health Organization (WHO) and International Disability Alliance networks. Themes and subthemes of the qualitative responses were identified using Braun and Clarke's 6-phase analysis.

 


International Journal of Health Policy and Management. 2022 Jun 1;11(6):747-756

doi: 10.34172/ijhpm.2020.210.

 

Persons with disabilities in the context of internal displacement. Report of the Special Rapporteur on the human rights of internally displaced persons (A/HRC/44/41)

UN HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL (UN HCR)
May 2020

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In her report, the Special Rapporteur on the human rights of internally displaced persons, Cecilia Jimenez-Damary, provides an account of the activities she has undertaken pursuant to the mandate given to her by the Human Rights Council in resolution 41/15.

In the thematic section of the report, the Special Rapporteur examines the specific experiences of persons with disabilities in the context of displacement. She analyses the obstacles to the equal enjoyment of their rights and recommends actions to ensure inclusive protection, assistance and durable solutions.

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