Summary
Standard prevalence rates underestimate the true impact of disability. When linked, for example, to poverty or extra expenditures of living, its effects extend to entire households.
It is easy to quote statistics, but it is also easy to quote them badly. One must always be careful to interpret indicators and statistics correctly, as well as to choose the most appropriate ones. If not, you will not get the most appropriate, or even true, picture of reality.
In this monthly column, we will highlight a statistic or indicator, briefly discussing its strengths and limitations, and how it should be interpreted.
The most requested statistic when it comes to disability is the prevalence rate. How many people are there with disabilities? Or what is the prevalence of disability in a specific country or region? One important reason why people are interested in this number is that they want to know the size of the population with disabilities in a country. If you want to address poverty, employment, or any other indicator and you ignore persons with disabilities, you are leaving out an important part of the population.
Apart from arguing for the basic human rights of persons with disabilities, any effort to achieve a goal for the whole population will be significantly limited by ignoring them. Exclusion affects many people – according to the WHO 2022 report, people with disabilities around the world account for more than one billion people.
But if we want to understand better how many people are affected by disability-related exclusion o we also need to think about families.
If disability is linked to poverty, it affects the poverty status of everyone in the family. If disability is associated with extra costs of living, those extra costs are shared by the whole household.
So, if we want to talk about the population that is affected by disability-related exclusion, another prevalence rate to consider is how many people live in a household with a person with a disability. That includes persons with disabilities but also their family members.
The table below shows us some examples. In Afghanistan, about 16% of the population has a disability, but if you include the people in their households, over 40% of the population live in a household with at least one member with disabilities.
The statistics in the table – from countries across three continents – all show the same thing, as is true everywhere.
If we want to talk about who is directly affected by disability, the standard prevalence rate is a serious under-estimate and we should consider the analysis of people living in households with at least one member with disabilities.
