Transcript of Talk by Sophie Mitra and Jaclyn Yap

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Towards a global data system inclusive of persons with disabilities

Script by Sophie Mitra and Jaclyn Yap for the United Nations COSP 15 side event Toward Inclusive societies

June 17th 2022

Slide 1: (Sophie starts)

Hi everyone,

Thank you very much Rosario for your introduction.

I am a middle-aged white woman with grey hair. I am wearing a maroon blouse.

In this presentation, Jaclyn Yap and I will give you an overview of the results of the 2022 Disability Data Report of the Disability Data Initiative.

This is the work of a team including seven very dedicated and talented students at Fordham University and Princeton university and myself. I would also like to thank the steering committee for their invaluable guidance and encouragement as well as the Wellspring Philanthropic Fund for funding support.

Slide 2:

You can access the 2022 disability data report at this link (and say it loud): Disability Data Report 2022

(Douglas will paste  the link the chat box.)

Slide 3:

Like last year, the report starts with a review of the questionnaires of national censuses and household surveys that countries use to produce national statistics. We covered the 2009 to 2021 period. We found that only about one in five of the datasets under review have disability questions that meet international standards of comparability, that is those that collect information on functional difficulties  in four to six domains as per the 2017 United Nations recommendations for censuses.

Only one in ten of the datasets have the internationally-tested and comparable Washington Group Short Set of questions.

Recently, the inclusion of the Washington Group Short Set of questions in the sixth round of UNICEF’s Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey has improved data availability for many countries.

Slide 4:

This slide shows a map of the world with countries where we found national datasets with functional difficulty questions in green. Such questions are in national datasets in all regions of the world, but more often were not found for Europe and Central Asia.

Slide 5:

Overall, much work remains for national surveys and population censuses to have functional difficulty questions to implement Article 31 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities which requires that States Parties “collect appropriate information, including statistical and research data, to enable them to formulate and implement policies to give effect to the Convention”.

International survey programs, for instance, the COVID-19 High-Frequency Phone Surveys program or the Survey of Income and Living Conditions (SILC) program, could help to improve the availability of disability questions in many countries and to inform policy.

Let’s now move to the results of the analysis of survey data by Jaclyn.

Slide 6 (Jaclyn starts)

Hi everyone,

The methods used in the microdata analysis are explained in Method briefs. The main results at the country level are summarized in Country briefs.

We used the UNICEF multiple indicator cluster survey or MICS round 6. MICS collects data to monitor the situation of women and children around the world. We used 35 micro datasets from countries in different regions and of varying development levels. The study covered 418,000 women ages 18 to 49 years old in urban and rural areas who responded to the adult functioning module.

Slide 7

The screen shows the world map with the 35 countries we used in this study shaded in blue. These include countries as diverse as Georgia and Belarus in Europe, the Dominican Republic and Honduras in Latin America, Mongolia in Central Asia, and Madagascar, Lesotho, Central African Republic, and Chad in Africa.

Slide 8

We aimed to find out inequalities between women with disability and women with no disabilities. We measured disability based on the six functional domains of the Washington Group short set: seeing, hearing, walking, cognition, self-care, and communication.

We disaggregated our data in different ways. For our main results, we compare women in three groups: women with no difficulty, women with some difficulty and finally women with at least a lot of difficulty.

Slide 9

We estimated 32 indicators of well-being which we categorized into seven dimensions: education, personal activities, health, standard of living, multidimensional poverty, insecurity, and subjective wellbeing. We use descriptive statistics and bivariate analysis in the report.

Slide 10

I want to share with you some of our key findings.

Some results confirm what we already know. For instance, in education, consistent with findings in our previous report and with the literature, women with functional difficulties tend to have lower educational attainment and literacy rates.

For Standard of Living, we considered indicators such as access to clean cooking fuel, access to electricity, and adequate housing, to name a few. We found gaps for only some countries, which may be due to sample composition since we included higher-income countries with relatively high levels of development where clean cooking fuel or electricity are almost universally achieved.

For multidimensional poverty, our estimates suggest that persons with functional difficulties, on average, experience multiple deprivations at higher rates than persons without any functional difficulties.

Slide 11

In addition to these results that confirm earlier quantitative studies, we are able to provide statistical results that, to our knowledge, are new with nationally representative data for women with functional difficulties for many countries.

For health indicators, we find that 46%, 43%, and 39% of women with no difficulty, some difficulty, and at least a lot of difficulty, respectively, report having their family planning needs met. We also found that 30% of women with no difficulty saying that a husband is justified in hitting his wife. This is lower than the 35% of women with some difficulty, and 37% of women with at least a lot of difficulty.

Slide 12

For insecurity, fewer women with functional difficulty report feeling safe walking alone in their neighborhood after dark compared to women without functional difficulty. We also found that 23% of women with at least a functional difficulty report feeling discriminated against, compared to 17% of women with some difficulty and 10% with no difficulty.

Slide 13

For personal activities, we examined indicators such as access to information and access to information and communication technologies or ICT. Overall, we found that there is no disability gap when access is low. However, in countries with higher overall access rates, our results demonstrate a digital divide between women with and without functional difficulties in most countries.

Slide 14

For example, mobile phone ownership among women with no difficulty is at 69% compared to 61% and 60% for women with some difficulty and at least a lot of difficulty, respectively.

Slide 15

Finally, for subjective well-being across countries, we found that having any functional difficulty is significantly associated with a lower score for life satisfaction and a lower share of women reporting that they are very happy or somewhat happy.

Slide 16

Our findings lend support to the disability and development gap hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, inequalities between persons with and without disabilities become larger as countries develop due to development processes that are not inclusive, for instance in education or in the labor market. For instance, as more kids stay longer in school and maybe get to attend or finish secondary school, that progress may not be realized for children with disabilities.

If this hypothesis is true, then inequalities should be larger for countries at higher levels of development.  This is something we confirmed for some indicators only, in particular multidimensional poverty, that is the share of women who experience multiple deprivations (e.g. low educational attainment, inadequate housing)

The graph on the slide illustrates the correlation between the human development index and the disability gap in multidimensional poverty, that is the difference between women with and without disabilities.

Slide 17

For some indicators, we find a graded association between the severity of functional difficulty and of disadvantage.

In other words, women with some functional difficulty are, on average worse off than women with no difficulty but better off than women who report a lot of difficulty or unable to do in at least one domain. That is for instance the case for educational attainment, multidimensional poverty and subjective wellbeing.

We need to keep shining a light on women with some difficulty as they may be disadvantaged and cannot be assumed to be similar in terms of wellbeing outcomes as women with no difficulty.

Slide 18 (Sophie concludes)

The 2022 Disability Data Report first demonstrates that disaggregation of national survey data, even among a subgroup of the population, here women age 18 to 49, is feasible.

Results overall show that more data collection, research and policy work are necessary to curb the inequalities that women with disabilities face.

The MICS program has brought visibility to women with disabilities age 18 to 49 in many countries. Other survey programs need to include functional difficulty questions to make older women with disabilities visible.

The 2022 report shows inequalities among women with and without disabilities in two dimensions of wellbeing on which we had little to no data so far: first, insecurity, in particular measured by the share of women feeling unsafe and the share of women feeling discriminated against, and second, subjective wellbeing measured through happiness and life satisfaction indicators.

These indicators  reflect deprivations and barriers that women with disabilities face around the world, that may be worsening in the context of the climate crisis and the pandemic and where more work is necessary to realize SDG 5 to end all forms of discrimination and violence against women and girls and to realize the CRPD.

Slide 19

We look forward to feedback from panelists and the audience to inform our future work. Questions or feedback welcome at rcd@fordham.edu

Thank you so much for your attention.