No One Left Behind? Comparing Poverty and Deprivation between People with and without Disabilities in the Maldives

Abstract

The 2030 Sustainable Development Goals call for the disaggregation of all indicators by disability and other characteristics so as to "leave no one behind" from development progress. Data on disability, however, is acknowledged to be lacking, which is essential for informing policy and planning. Consequently, this study estimates the prevalence of disability in the Maldives and compares indicators of poverty and living conditions between people with and without disabilities, using nationally-representative, population-based data (n = 5363). The prevalence of disability was estimated at 6.8%. Overall, this research finds that people with disabilities are at risk of being left behind from progress across multiple Sustainable Development Goal domains, including in combatting income poverty, food insecurity and exclusion from health, education, work and social participation, and vulnerability to violence. Further, amongst people with disabilities, people with cognitive and mental health impairments, people living outside the capital, Male', and children and working-age adults tend to face the highest levels of deprivation.

Interrogating and Reflecting on Disability Prevalence Data Collected Using the Washington Group Tools: Results from Population-Based Surveys in Cameroon, Guatemala, India, Maldives, Nepal, Turkey and Vanuatu

“…In Turkey, the sample was selected from one population sub-group only (Syrian refugees) using the municipality refugee database as the sampling frame [24]. All remaining surveys used two-stage cluster-based sampling from the most recent census, with clusters first selected with probability proportionate to size, and modified compact segment sampling within these to reach the desired cluster size [20,23,25,26].…”

Childhood disability in rural Niger: a population-based assessment using the Key Informant Method

“…For example, the Washington Group-UNICEF module on Child Functioning used in this study as a preliminary screening tool has been used on its own to generate estimates of disability in population-based surveys. Prevalence of disability (using the cut-off of “a lot of difficulty” in at least one domain) in children 2–17 has been estimated at 2.6% (1.8–3.6%) in north-western Cameroon [ 35 ], 2.3% (1.4–3.7%) in Telangana state, India [ 35 ], 3.3% (2.6–4.3%) in the Maldives [ 36 ] and 4.7 (4.0–5.4%) in Guatemala [ 29 ]. In children 5–17 years, prevalence has been measured as 1.5 (1.0–1.7%) in Vanuatu [ 37 ] and 1.5% (1.0–2.1%) in Nepal [ 38 ], which covers a similar age range as in this study and are similar to the estimates produced from this KIM.…”

Disability among Older People: Analysis of Data from Disability Surveys in Six Low- and Middle-Income Countries

“…All the surveys were conducted by the International Centre for Evidence in Disability (ICED) at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) in collaboration with national and international partners and approved by relevant ethics committees. Details of the datasets included in the study are summarised in Table S1 , and full methods have been published previously [ 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 ]. Members of Disabled Persons Organisations were involved in the design, dissemination and reporting of the research in some settings.…”