Poverty, Agency, and Human Rights

Meyers, Diana Tietjens

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199975877.001.0001

Cited by 7 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 129 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…These included women substituting labour, worked around economic (earning potential) among other factors. This demonstrates the agency of the poor and also ability to strategise when afforded some or other opportunity (see also [39]). Daughters, for example, on occasion assumed caregiving duties (of the disabled family member and younger siblings) alongside household tasks, when this enabled mothers to engage in paid labour or micro-trade, for example to sell agricultural produce on the market.…”

Section: Caregiving Fissures In Labouring and The Gender Effectmentioning

confidence: 91%

Disabled Families: The Impacts of Disability and Care on Family Labour and Poverty in Rural Guatemala

Grech¹

2019

Societies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

An increasing body of literature has started to look at how disability impacts and shifts poverty in the global South in and through a range of areas, including health, education, and livelihoods. However, much of this research is limited to disabled individuals, while qualitative research focusing on and articulating the circumstances, needs and demands of rural families remains scarce, especially research focusing on Latin America. This paper reports on a qualitative study looking at how disability affects family labouring patterns in rural Guatemala, with a special focus on women carers of people with acquired physical impairments, in the bid to contribute to a more inclusive understanding of the disability and poverty relationship and its gendered dimensions. Findings highlight how in rural communities already living in dire poverty, the fragmentation of labour input of the disabled person, costs (notably health care) and intensified collective poverty, push fragile families with no safety nets into a set of dynamic responses in the bid to ensure survival of the family unit. These include harder and longer work patterns, interruption of paid labour, and/or induction into exploitative and perilous labour, not only for women, but also children. These responses are erosive and have severe personal, social, cultural and economic consequences, strengthening a deep, multidimensional, chronic and intergenerational impoverishment, transforming these families into ‘disabled families’, among the poorest of the poor. This paper concludes that research, policy and services need to move beyond the disabled individual to understand and address the needs and demands of whole families, notably women, and safeguard their livelihoods, because ultimately, these are the units that singlehandedly care for and ensure the well-being and survival of disabled people. It is also within these units that disability is constructed, shaped, and can ultimately be understood.

show abstract

Section: Caregiving Fissures In Labouring and The Gender Effectmentioning

confidence: 91%