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Factsheet on Persons with Disabilities
Overview
- Around 15 per cent of the world's population, or estimated 1 billion people, live with disabilities. They are the world's largest minority. (WHO)
- This figure is increasing through population growth, medical advances and the ageing process, says the World Health Organization. (WHO)
- In countries with life expectancies over 70 years, individuals spend on average about 8 years, or 11.5 per cent of their life span, living with disabilities. (Disabled World)
- Eighty per cent of persons with disabilities live in developing countries, according to the UN Development Programme. (WHO)
- Disability rates are significantly higher among groups with lower educational attainment in the countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), says the OECD Secretariat. On average, 19 per cent of less educated people have disabilities, compared to 11 per cent among the better educated.
- In most OECD countries, women report higher incidents of disability than men.
- The World Bank estimates that 20 per cent of the world's poorest people have some kind of disability, and tend to be regarded in their own communities as the most disadvantaged. (World Bank)
- Women with disabilities are recognized to be multiply disadvantaged, experiencing exclusion on account of their gender and their disability. (Disabled World)
- Women and girls with disabilities are particularly vulnerable to abuse. A small 2004 survey in Orissa, India, found that virtually all of the women and girls with disabilities were beaten at home, 25 per cent of women with intellectual disabilities had been raped and 6 per cent of women with disabilities had been forcibly sterilized.
- According to UNICEF, 30 per cent of street youths have some kind of disability. (UNICEF)
- Mortality for children with disabilities may be as high as 80 per cent in countries where under-five mortality as a whole has decreased below 20 per cent, says the United Kingdom's Department for International Development, adding that in some cases it seems as if children are being "weeded out". (World Bank)
- Comparative studies on disability legislation shows that only 45 countries have anti-discrimination and other disability-specific laws.
- In the United Kingdom, 75 per cent of the companies of the FTSE 100 Index on the London Stock Exchange do not meet basic levels of web accessibility, thus missing out on more than $147 million in revenue.
