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Inclusive and integrated mother, newborn and child health programming: Beyond mortality

OLCHINI, Davide
November 2017

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This policy paper describes the operational terms of Handicap International’s mandate and values as applied to Mother, Neonatal and Child Health (MNCH). Presenting the approaches and references underpinning Handicap International’s actions, choices and commitments, its purpose is to ensure consistency across its practices while taking account of different contexts. Intended as a document to guide programme staff, the paper defines the topic, describes the target populations and sets out the methods of intervention (activities and expected results) and the indicators used to monitor and evaluate. It also aims to ensure that Handicap International programmes implement all projects in accordance with the presented methods of intervention

 

The SDGs focus on a broader scope of activities and are thus slowly but surely shifting from mortality to address in a more comprehensive manner the well-being and achievement of maximum potential for children and adolescents. With a robust component in sexual and reproductive health, this represents a significant frame of reference for Handicap International’s work in MNCH as it has paved the way for integrating MNCH-related impairments into existing health services. The framework of the SDGs provides a clear vision of the importance of multi-sectorial interventions, which encompass the limit of vertically-organised health systems centred on curative aspects, to offer a more integrated and preventive package of interventions that include chronic conditions, impairments and health for all. After many years of implementing MNCH projects, Handicap International is well-positioned and firmly established as a major player in this process.

Global Report on the participation of organisations of persons with disabilities (DPOs) in VNR Processes

INTERNATIONAL DISABILITY ALLIANCE
2017

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Within the Stakeholder Group of Persons with Disabilities, a working group was created on the Voluntary National Reviews (VNRs) aimed at raising awareness among Organisations of Persons with Disabilities (DPOs) to engage with their governments in the national consultation processes on SDG implementation, with particular focus on the 2017 44 volunteering countries. The VNR working group are compiling an outcome document reflecting the work that DPOs carried out at the national, regional and global levels. A comprehensive report – called the Global Report on DPO Participation in VNR Processes – will be issued in draft form prior to the HLPF and will be updated afterward with concrete findings. 

The report will showcase the national level DPO work carried out in different regions as well as best practices and challenges, and will serve as a case study for Member States. It will additionally be useful for DPOs as a model to engage with their government. The case study will feature the volunteering countries of Denmark, Italy, Sweden, Nigeria, Togo, Kenya, Ethiopia, Argentina, El Salvador, Peru, Guatemala, Indonesia, Bangladesh, India and Jordan.

‘Civilising’ Deaf people in Tibet and Inner Mongolia: governing linguistic, ethnic and bodily difference in China

HOFER, Theresia
SAGLI, Gry
2017

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The People’s Republic of China is home to over 20 million d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing people, many among them belonging to ethnic minorities. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in two minority regions, the Tibet Autonomous Region and the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region, this article comparatively discusses findings on sign language use, education and state welfare policies. The situation in these domains is analysed through the framework of the ‘civilising project’, coined by Harrell, and its impacts on the d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing among ethnic minorities are shown. For instance, through the promotion of Chinese and Chinese Sign Language over and above the use of local sign and written languages as well as through education and the medicalisation of disabilities.

CRPD Course (with an emphasis on how users and survivors of psychiatry can use the CRPD to advance our human rights)

Tina Minkowitz
March 2017

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The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is a watershed in the human rights of users and survivors of psychiatry. This course is offered with an emphasis on how users and survivors of psychiatry can use the CRPD to advance human rights of persons with disabilities.

 

The Convention of course guarantees the rights of all persons with disabilities, in all their diversity.  Major constituencies organized at the international level included the World Network of Users and Survivors of Psychiatry, World Federation of the Deaf, World Blind Union, World Federation of the Deafblind, Inclusion International (persons with intellectual disabilities and their families), International Federation of Hard of Hearing Persons, and Disabled Peoples’ International (cross-disability).  They organized all disabled people’s organizations and allies into the International Disability Caucus, and aimed for the Convention to be equally relevant to all persons with disabilities irrespective of the type of disability or geographical location.  Every constituency finds what it needs in the text, and the Convention can be approached from a number of different starting points to uncover its potential.

 

The course is taught by Tina Minkowitz, Esq., a human rights lawyer and survivor of psychiatry who was instrumental in developing the relevant provisions.  She represented the World Network of Users and Survivors of Psychiatry (WNUSP) in the drafting and negotiation of the CRPD, and subsequently founded the Center for the Human Rights of Users and Survivors of Psychiatry (CHRUSP).

Quality inclusive education at the heart of the SDGs

Julia McGeown
Marion Steff
Andrew Balchin
Majken Disch
February 2017

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These two posters have been designed to showcase how the Sustainable Development Goals ( SDGs)  and Inclusive education are linked, using visual diagrams with photographic examples.  The first of these posters details the importance of inclusive quality education, particularly for children with disabilities , in all of the 17 SDGs. The second one focuses on goal 4 and gives concrete actions to be taken  to implement the different targets,  with a special focus on  student with disabilities.

Precarious lives and resistant possibilities: the labour of people with learning disabilities in times of austerity

BATES, Keith
GOODLEY, Dan
RUNSWICK-COLE, Katherine
2017

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This paper draws on feminist and queer philosophers? discussions of precarity and employment, too often absent from disability studies, to explore the working lives of people with learning disabilities in England in a time of austerity. Recent policy shifts from welfare to work welcome more disabled people into the job market. The reality is that disabled people remain under-represented in labour statistics and are conspicuously absent in cultures of work. We live in neoliberal- able times where we all find ourselves precarious. But, people with learning disabilities experience high levels of uncertainty in every aspect of their lives, including work, relationships and community living. Our research reveals an important analytical finding: that when people with learning disabilities are supported in imaginative and novel ways they are able to work effectively and cohesively participate in their local communities (even in a time of cuts to welfare). We conclude by acknowledging that we are witnessing a global politics of precarity and austerity. Our urgent task is to redress the unequal spread of precaritization across our society that risks leaving people with learning disabilities experiencing disproportionately perilous lives. One of our key recommendations is that it makes no economic sense (never mind moral sense) to pull funding from organisations that support people with intellectual disabilities to work.

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