Hidden sisters: women and girls with disabilities in the Asian and Pacific region

Throughout Asia and the Pacific, women and girls with disabilities face triple discrimination because they have a disability, are female, and are poor. At the same time, disabled women’s concerns have remained invisible, addressed by neither women’s rights movements or self-help movements people with a disability.

This publication highlights the main issues concerning women and girls with disabilities and makes recommendations for their advancement within the framework of existing international instruments, especially the Agenda for Action for the Asian and Pacific Decade of Disabled Persons, 1993-2002, adopted by ESCAP in 1993.

Key problems facing women and girls with a disability include:

• social stigmatisation, resulting in social isolation and low self-esteem
• a high risk of being regularly abused physically and mentally, most commonly by those around them
• lack access to health care and rehabilitation services for people with a disability generally, and often those that are offered are not accessible by women
• limited opportunities to attend education or attend training courses
• discrimination in employment and a lack of access to workplaces, as well as exploitation by employers.

To advance the rights of women with disabilities, the publication proposes a two-pronged strategy. It emphasises that the underlying principle of this strategy must be the direct involvement of disabled women.

The first element of the strategy will both meet their practical needs, particularly for health care, rehabilitation, education, training and employment, and social integration. It advises that mainstreaming girls with disabilities into society must begin with increasing their access to mainstream schools, and suggests that the best hope for improving access to productive work may lie in self-employment, probably on a cooperative basis with others. To support this, there is a need for credit schemes, entrepreneurial skills training and advisory services to include disabled women.

The second prong of the strategy should aim to empower women with a disability to actively seek more opportunities, greater access to resources and more equal participation in decision-making. This should include efforts to increase collaboration between the self-help movement of people with disabilities and the women's movement, increase efforts to raise awareness of gender issues among members of self-help organisations for people with a disability, and ensure greater inclusion of self-help organisations in international fora.

The publication concludes with a series of case-studies of women with a disability from the Asia-Pacific area who succeeded in overcoming prejudice and barriers to marry and participate in education, work, and advocacy for the needs of disabled people.