Disability and Poverty in the Global South

Numbers remain a powerful force in a world compelled to simplify and contain life’s nuances and complexities. They are work, money and power for those producing them, but they can also be strong political tools for action. The urge to enumerate has not spared disability in the attempt to make it epistemologically, discursively and practically manageable. The much-anticipated World Report on Disability, published by the World Bank and WHO in 2011, estimates that some 15 per cent of the world’s population, or rather some 1 billion people, are disabled people. Following the lead from earlier WHO figures, the report states that around 80 per cent of these are located in the so-called global South. Many are said to be women, the bulk living in rural areas, often in conditions of intense poverty.

This chapter seeks to position disability within the specific Guatemalan context, while framing this context in historical terms. Guatemala is a very complex and hetero\geneous country that can hardly be captured in a few pages, as in this chapter. What I do provide here is a very partial and selective picture, but one which I hope still serves to position, even if conditionally, and provide a background for the disability and poverty relationship explored in the chapters that follow. It then moves on to map out the disability policy and service scenario in the country. Again, this picture is most likely fragmented, not least because there are dramatic research and information gaps.

This chapter, together with the following two, addresses the relationship between poverty and disability, the core part of this monograph. The first section reframes this relationship, offering some theoretical repositionings. It then moves on to address the impacts of disability on poverty. The rest of this chapter, together with Chapter 5, is devoted to exploring the factors and processes impacting and shifting this poverty for disabled people based on evidence from this study. Chapter 6 follows up closely, addressing the family-level dynamics and impacts.

This chapter positions the disability experience within the institutional¹ scenario. It does not seek to provide a comprehensive picture of this landscape in Guatemala but simply an institutional outline emerging from disabled people’s accounts, and which serves to, at least partially, frame, compensate and contextualise the analysis and narratives presented in the previous chapters. This is critical in positioning and understanding how disability and poverty are constructed and impacted (if at all) institutionally and discursively in rural Guatemala, and how they are experienced and lived and how they interact and even transition over space and time. It is surprising how much work on disability and development continues to ignore politics and political processes when these determine if and how policy discourse is constructed and understood (or not) and if and how policies, including the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), are known, interpreted, implemented and enforced, if at all. Carothers and de Gramont (2013), for example, emphasise how the gross ambitions of development aid (including peace) are too often shot down by the lack of planning and accounting for macro and micro political issues and the barriers and possibilities they impose. Disability and poverty are not only social and embodied, they are political, politicised and politicising.

This book has sought to explore the various connections between disability and poverty in this one context. Perhaps it raises many more questions than it answers, but I hope these provide opportunities for further interrogation and indeed research and practice that can make a difference to the lives of disabled poor people on their own terms. Over the next sections, I reflect backwards on the narratives to discuss the issue of rights in practice as they meet contexts of extreme rural poverty. Following this, I conclude this book by briefly reflecting outwards on the broader disability/global South debate.