Summary

Realizing the rights of persons with disabilities requires disability data and statistics. It requires statistics that are based on concepts that are in line with a human rights approach to disability, disaggregated by disability status, and reflect various aspects of the lives of persons with disabilities and their diversity. This report provides (i) a systematic analysis of the disability questions in national censuses and household surveys globally between 2009 and 2018 and (ii) indicators disaggregated across disability status for 41 countries with census or household survey data that are based on internationally comparable disability questions.

This report finds that disability questions of any kind are absent for 24% of countries and 65% of datasets. In addition, disability questions that meet international standards of comparability, i.e. those that collect information on functional difficulties (e.g. difficulty seeing, hearing, walking) have been increasingly adopted. Yet, only 84 of 180 countries and 16% of the household surveys and censuses under review have internationally comparable functional difficulty questions. In many countries’ national household surveys and censuses, persons with disabilities continue to be invisible.

This report also presents a microdata analysis for 41 countries with censuses or national surveys with functional difficulty questions in four domains (seeing, hearing, walking, cognition). For 28 countries, data is also available for the self-care and communication domains, including 21 countries with the internationally tested Washington Group Short Set of questions. This report provides results on functional difficulty prevalence and education, work, health, standard of living and multidimensional poverty indicators for adults aged 15 and older with and without functional difficulties using several disaggregation methods.

In the 41 countries, functional difficulties are not rare. Across countries, the median share of the adult population with any functional difficulty stands at 12.6%, while the median share of households with adults with functional difficulty is at 27.8%. Functional difficulties are more common among women and older age groups and in rural areas. Seeing and walking difficulties tend to be the most common functional difficulties. The extent to which some of these functional difficulties might be preventable through policies that address environmental barriers and underlying health conditions needs attention.

This report finds significant inequalities associated with functional difficulties in terms of education, health, work and standard of living (e.g. electricity). A disability gap, i.e. a disadvantage for persons with functional difficulties compared to persons with no functional difficulty, is consistently found across countries and disaggregation method in terms of educational attainment, literacy, food insecurity, exposure to shocks, asset ownership, health expenditures and multidimensional poverty. This gap persists even though adults with functional difficulties are more likely to receive social protection. In addition, for a majority of countries, there is a disability gap for the employment population ratio, the youth idle rate, the share of adults in informal work, living conditions and domestic violence. For many countries and indicators, there is a graded association between functional difficulty and disadvantage, with persons with more severe difficulties experiencing worse disadvantages. A multidimensional analysis, either by considering multiple deprivations or on an indicator-by-indicator basis, shows large and consistent inequalities.

The stark inequalities shown in this report highlight the urgent need for policies for the rights and the wellbeing of persons with disabilities.