A Partnership between the The CHGN Uttarakhand Cluster, the Nossal Institute for Global Health (University of Melbourne), South Asia Centre for Disability Inclusive Development (PHFI), and CBM India

Aim

To improve quality of life for people with disabilities in Uttarakhand and Andhra Pradesh through promoting their equal participation in community life and fulfilment of the rights to health, education, employment and social participation.

Purpose

This project seeks to understand the barriers experienced by people with disabilities when participating in and accessing community services (eg health, education), in Uttarakhand and Andhra Pradesh and to strengthen the capacity of the organisations to design, implement and measure the effectiveness of disability inclusive community health and development programs.

Background

Improving the lives of people with disabilities and their families is a significant challenge in India, as it is around the world. Achieving comparable disability data is also a major challenge. This is highlighted by the UN General Assembly in three recent resolutions, which stresses the importance of improving disability data and statistics to enable better comparison at the national and global level for the purposes of policy design, planning and evaluation.

The proportion of India’s population with disabilities is somewhere between 2.1% according to the Indian government 2001 census, and 25% in the 2002-2004 World Health Survey. The wide variety of estimates requires a more precise approach to measurement which informs practice and policy. Background

Improving the lives of people with disabilities and their families is a significant challenge in India, as it is around the world. Achieving comparable disability data is also a major challenge. This is highlighted by the UN General Assembly in three recent resolutions, which stresses the importance of improving disability data and statistics to enable better comparison at the national and global level for the purposes of policy design, planning and evaluation.

The proportion of India’s population with disabilities is somewhere between 2.1% according to the Indian government 2001 census, and 25% in the 2002-2004 World Health Survey. The wide variety of estimates requires a more precise approach to measurement which informs practice and policy.

The RAD Tool

The Rapid Assessment of Disability (RAD) survey tool,was developed by the Nossal Institute for Global Health in collaboration with the Centre for Eye Research Australia, funded by AusAID, to fill a substantial gap in the development sector. It will provide aid agencies, non-government organisations and governments with the ability to rapidly measure disability in a population and understand barriers to participation across a range of life domains, thereby gathering program design information and establishing a baseline against which to measure effectiveness of efforts towards disability inclusion.

The RAD tool aims to provide organisations with an easy‐to‐use, comprehensive method of identifying information on disability and barriers to participation. The toolkit containsthree questionnaires (designed for different age groups) which measure: - Demographic information - The prevalence of disability - Individual perception of well‐being and quality of life, and - Barriers to and facilitators of the participation of people with disabilities in theircommunities.

The RAD India Partnership

The CHGN Uttarakhand Cluster of community health programs and the PHFI South Asia Centre for Disability Inclusive Development and Research (SACDIR), working in partnership with the Nossal Institute of Global Health (University of Melbourne) and CBM India recently tested the RAD tool in Sahaspur block of Uttarakhand and Prakasham District in Telangana.

The Dissemination

The results of this RAD prevalence study undertaken in 2014 were presented at a dissemination workshop on the 25th May 2015. These results are very useful in that they will inform practice and policy by:

1. Providing baseline information on prevalence of disability and barriers to participation amongst people with disabilities.

2. Informing the development program of initiatives, in particular the formation of Disability People Organisations, with the aim to improve the access of people with disabilities to health and development services.This information will provide valuable information to the 50 Uttarakhand Health programs on the barriers people with disabilities face within their communities, and the effectiveness of the Clusters efforts to overcome these barriers.

3. Informing policy makers in Uttarakhand in their quest to aim to improve the access of people with disabilities to health and development services. This will provide information regarding the type of support or services needed to strengthen processes and policies for inclusion of people with disabilities in health programs.