Impact of living or working environments on persons with disabilities

People with disabilities are often the most marginalised and vulnerable groups in the Asian and Pacific region, as they tend to face not only activity limitations but also environmental and social barriers. These barriers include stigmatisation, prejudice and discrimination and a failure to modify work or living environments to make them fully accessible.

This paper assesses quantitatively the importance of living or working environmental constraints in people's activity limitations in day-to-day work/school and participation restrictions. Age, school year, and country specific factors are considered in this empirical analysis, with particular attention to gender.

The paper highlights that environmental barriers have a negative and statistically significant influence on a person's life activities. Women and girls with disabilities in developing countries face double discrimination due to their status as a woman and a person with disabilities. The challenges for policy makers in the region is to identify these environmental constraints, to formulate more targeted disability policies and to implement programmes in order to mitigate those barriers.

On physical barriers the authors call on policy makers to:

• ratify and adopt international conventions, declarations, resolutions and recommendations concerning the rights of persons with disabilities
• support and enforce the implementation of international and existing national legislation
  and policies
• formulate, implement, monitor and evaluate barrier-free policies and projects

To address barriers relating to education and attitude they recommend:

• improved education provision tailored to the special needs of persons with disabilities
• governments should work more  closely with civil society organizations to mitigate environmental barriers, and ensure  that political processes are inclusive.