People with disabilities around the world face discrimination in their daily lives, including in their abilities to access public services and infrastructure. But what are the experiences of people with disabilities during disasters and emergencies? Do emergency responses take into account their needs? In this blog, Obindra B. Chand and Pallav Pant look at the current challenges facing people with disabilities during times of crisis in Nepal.
More must be done to ensure the needs and rights of people with disabilities are fully recognised in disaster risk reduction and emergency responses. Accelerating progress will require inclusive humanitarian programming and the use of technological solutions to be effectively promoted and incentivised, and people with disabilities and their organisations to be involved from the outset in the design and implementation of policies and programmes.
This Rapid Response briefing argues that It is important to follow a twin-track approach, having both accessible mainstream responses as well as dedicated responses for specific needs. Donors could also make the inclusion of people with disabilities a mandatory component of response funding or earmark funding for disability. More work is also required to make field staff in humanitarian responses aware of disabled people’s needs and of the resources available for them. As crises have demonstrated,
Being caught in a humanitarian crisis with a disability can lead to abandonment and neglect. How can we make humanitarian response more inclusive?
hen the shooting started Simplice Lenguy told his wife to take their children and run. It was 5 December 2013, and the war in Central African Republic (CAR) had arrived on his doorstep. “I couldn’t go fast with my canes and I didn’t want them to wait for me,” says Simplice. “All our friends and relatives had already fled in fear.”
As the rapid response briefing on “Including people with disabilities in emergency relief efforts” from IDS shows, emergencies have a disproportionate impact on those already marginalised by society, including people with disabilities and their families.
For example, people with disabilities are often left behind in responses to the current Syrian crisis and Ebola epidemic.
Natural disasters and disasters that directly derive from human actions, both evolving and sudden, trace the structural fault lines of the societies that they affect. Disaster outcomes disproportionately impact those with the least access to social and material resources: women and children, and people who are elderly, disabled or impoverished.
Using a disability conceptual framework,the essays in this volume focus on disasters within their social and environmental ecologies, with particular attention to the ways in which conventional disaster planning and responses ensure that existing social inequalities will be perpetuated as consequences of disasters. We argue that by foregrounding the needs of those with the fewest resources, an applied anthropology of disaster points to potential benefits to all when disaster preparedness, response, and recovery plans include the expertise of disabled people.