About the Paper
Published as an advanced unedited draft in August 2022, the paper expands on earlier work by Daniel Mont and Alex Cote, with co-financing from Leonard Cheshire through the UK’s DFID-funded I2I project.
A flat cash payment sounds fair until you look at what it actually needs to cover. This paper on disability extra costs and social protection design, produced by the Center for Inclusive Policy (CIP) for ILO and UNICEF under the UN Partnership on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, lays out why one-size-fits-all benefits routinely fall short, and what governments can do instead.
Why Don't Standard Poverty Measures Capture These Costs?
Because most poverty lines are built around what a household needs considering they do not have family members with disabilities. People with disabilities face extra direct costs, on assistive devices, personal assistance, extra healthcare, and transportation, on top of everything else. Leave those costs out of a means test, and households that are effectively below the poverty line get excluded from support meant to reach exactly them.
How Can Disability-Related Costs Be Measured?
Goods and Services (GS)
This method asks people with disabilities to report what they currently spend. It’s useful for understanding real spending patterns but only captures what people can already afford, not what they actually need.
Goods and Services Required (GSR)
This method asks what would be needed for equal participation, whether currently affordable or not. It’s the most resource-intensive approach, but the only one that reveals unmet need, which is exactly what program design requires.
Standard of Living (SOL)
This method compares wealth between similar households with and without members with disabilities, using data already collected in standard household surveys. It’s cheap and easy to repeat regularly, but it only shows average impact, not what individuals specifically need.
Which Method Should Governments Use?
CIP’s recommendation is to use them together: GSR for designing the actual structure of benefits, since it shows both how much money is needed and what it’s needed for; SOL for national-level poverty adjustments, since it’s inexpensive to update; and GS to sanity-check both against real spending patterns.
How Should Social Protection Programs Respond?
The paper is blunt about the core finding: costs vary so dramatically by disability type and support level, ten times higher for people with high support needs in some studies, that a single cash transfer can’t realistically cover everyone. It recommends combining subsidized healthcare, a universal disability allowance for basic costs, a separate benefit for high-cost human assistance like personal assistants or sign language interpreters, targeted concessions, and continued investment in accessible public services.
What Does CIP Recommend?
Six concrete steps close the report: build extra costs into social protection design from the start; match measurement method to purpose; adjust means-test thresholds for mainstream programs; provide categorical disability benefits rather than relying on poverty targeting alone; guarantee healthcare and assistive device coverage; and combine cash with in-kind benefits rather than betting everything on one instrument.
