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‘We create our own small world’: daily realities of mothers of disabled children in a South African urban settlement

VAN DER MARK, Elise J
CONRADIE, Ina
DEDDING, Christine W M
BROERSE, Jacqueline E W
2018

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Parents of disabled children face many challenges. Understanding their experiences and acknowledging contextual influences is vital in developing intervention strategies that fit their daily realities. However, studies of parents from a resource-poor context are particularly scarce. This ethnographic study with 30 mothers from a South African township (15 semi-structured interviews and 24 participatory group sessions) unearths how mothers care on their own, in an isolated manner. The complexity of low living standards, being poorly supported by care structures and networks, believing in being the best carer, distrusting others due to a violent context, and resigning towards life shape and are shaped by this solitary care responsibility. For disability inclusive development to be successful, programmes should support mothers by sharing the care responsibility taking into account the isolated nature of mothers’ lives and the impact of poverty. This can provide room for these mothers to increase the well-being of themselves and their children.

Inheritance, poverty, and disability

GROCE, Nora Ellen
LONDON, Jillian
STEIN, Michael Ashley
2014

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Inheritance is a significant means of transferring wealth from one generation to the next, and therefore increasingly attracts attention from researchers and pol- icy-makers working on intergenerational and multidimensional poverty. How- ever, until now disabled persons have been overlooked in these discussions. This oversight is particularly unfortunate because, as a group, the estimated one bil- lion people with disabilities (some 15% of the world’s population) are among the poorest and most marginalized of the global population. Over the past dec- ade, a small but growing literature has examined the recursive connections between poverty and disability throughout the developing world. In this paper, we argue that disabled individuals are routinely denied inheritance rights in many low-income and middle-income countries, and that this is a significant and largely unrecognized contributor to their indigence. The denial of inheritance is both a social justice issue and a practice that can no longer be overlooked if disabled persons are to be brought into the development mainstream.

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