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Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. This book is about being disabled and being poor and the social, cultural and political processes that link these two aspects of living. Environmental barriers, limited access to services and discriminatory attitudes and practice are among key elements that drive disabled people into poverty and keep them there. 'Disability and poverty' explores the lived realities of people with disabilities from across the developing world and examines how the coping strategies of individuals and families emerge in different contexts.
Disability and poverty, and the relationship between the two, are complex and dynamic phenomena, and thus not easy to grasp in one theoretical model or within one scientific paradigm. Explanations of the disability–poverty circle may be social, structural, political, and cultural. It is interesting that the challenge to most literature on disability and poverty emerges through the voices of the poor and disabled themselves. This book provides an insight into the lives of people with disabilities living in poverty, and the vulnerability implied by living in poverty. Individuals with disabilities have struggled to survive under very difficult conditions, bringing evidence to the fact that they also represent a tremendous resource which can be used to improve the situation for the poorest of the poor. Without this expertise, and without challenging and breaking up established power structures, the fight against poverty will be jeopardised.
This book is about being disabled and being poor and the social, cultural, and political processes that link these two aspects of living in what has been characterised as a ‘vicious circle’. It is also about the strengths that people show when living with disability and being poor: how they try to overcome their problems and make the best out of what little they have. The book aims to provide cross-cultural perspectives on the situation of living with a disability and being poor. This chapter discusses disability and poverty; poverty dimensions such as absolute poverty and relative poverty; the disability concept; the vicious circle of disability and poverty; overcoming poverty for people with disability with opportunity, empowerment, and security; and research on poverty and disability.
Living conditions and poverty are two common quantifiers or parameters of socioeconomic status, and both have evolved from rather narrow economic and material concepts to encompass broader and more complex understandings. While poverty research has focused on defining poverty and establishing poverty profiles, identifying poor populations and strategies for reducing poverty, studies on living conditions are based on more loosely bound sets of indicators that are applied to measure, for example, level of income, education, access to information, access to healthcare, and social participation in a population, and to establish differences between population sub-groups for descriptive, comparative, and monitoring purposes. This chapter utilises data collected on the living conditions among people with and without disabilities in the southern African region to assess the disability–poverty relationship.
