Enabling development of community support and care systems for inclusion of persons with disabilities across the life cycle

The Programme

Under the CRPD, persons with disabilities have the right to live independently in the community and states have to ensure access of the support they require to do so. However, around the world, at least 150 million persons with higher support needs do not receive any publicly funded disability support required for basic participation in their communities.

In most Low-and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs), persons with disabilities rely on unpaid care work from families and communities, particularly women and girls and receive very little or no publicly funded formal support except for placement in segregated settings in some regions. This status quo is increasingly challenged by the impact of aging populations, increased demand of women in the labour market, urbanization, growing awareness of persons with disabilities about their right to autonomy, and demand for gender equality. While the expansion of social protection across LMICs as well as the CRPD and the care economy momentum create an opportunity for a new model to emerge, there is a lack of clarity among stakeholders about the actual needs and demands of the diversity of persons with disabilities for community support and care as well as benchmark and models for context relevant policy framework, system development, service delivery and financing.

Building on the joint work initiated prior to GDS 2022 and the conceptual and normative framework proposed by OHCHR in its recent report to the Human rights council (A/HRC/52/52), this project seeks to contribute to change by clarifying the demand from an OPD perspective, developing an assessment tool to improve concrete understanding of the normative framework and its implication at country level and to support elaboration of costed policy scenarios exploring viable pathways for progressive development of community support and care systems in Kenya and Colombia.