People with disabilities are people who need assistance to be able to carry out the basic activities of life. The disability may be physical or mental, and it diminishes the independent living of one’s life. There is no exact number of people with disabilities worldwide. International organisations estimate that 16% of the world's population experiences significant disabling conditions. This is approximately 1.3 billion people.[1] However, the social boundaries of what has been called the 'third nation of the world' are far more extensive. The lack of a common language defining disability makes these numbers variable,[2] uncertain, yet very relevant; and the lack of a mapping, distribution and spread of cases of disability, especially types of cases and forms of disability, limits the extent to which the study of disabilities can be related to their environment.
Disabilities, in their different forms and gravity, are common to all societies and do merit our attention and study. For, the cry of the disabled is part of the cry of the poor which reaches us not as mere statistical data, but as an invitation to solidary compassion, daring to turn what happens to people with disabilities into our own personal experience and to discover how our societies can respond to the cry.
This is the subject of study for the 2024 Plenary Assembly of the PASS, in preparation for which PASS is holding this preparatory webinar to study and to discover trajectories along which to travel to make the Plenary Assembly’s treatment of Disability comprehensive and useful.
[1] Cfr. World Health Organization. (2022). Global report on health equity for persons with disabilities. World Health Organization. Geneva.
[2] Cfr. Pettinicchio, D. & Maroto, M. (2021). Who counts? Measuring disability cross-nationally in census data. Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology, 9 (2), 257-284.