"Three per cent" isn't bad for a national census figure covering a lot of rural population and urban poverty. Even Einar Helander, who for years was the WHO 'expert' cruising the aid-and-development world, talking up the notorious "10%", finally came round to seeing that 3% is what you really find, when you ask about 'disability' in the places where most people live.
I'll never forget a Community Based Rehab managers training meeting in Tanzania where people were giving their interminable 'project presentations'. It was the afternoon of the third day, Helander must have been in his late 60s, still jet-lagged from wherever he had flown from, he and I were sitting at the back -- old adversaries, now lumped together as the only ones there who had been through all the CBR twists and turns since it began to get noticed around 1980. We were supposed to add a bit of pep to these sessions, to ask a few questions, make a few critical points; but we had had lunch, and now a chap from Malawi was droning endlessly through his handwritten presentation. Helander was slumped in his chair, practically asleep, the Malawian had read five pages, and got as far as 'The Survey'. Zzzzz. Now he was reading out columns of figures, Zzzzz, they had found that 10% of the population were disabled, he droned on.
Helander suddenly woke up - "What was that figure he read out just then?" he whispered. I smirked: "They found 10% in their survey - you should be happy!" Helander straightened up, cleared his throat, put his hand in the air and interrupted the speaker: "Excuse me, but you won't find 10%. If you go to the rural areas and ask people about disability, you may get about 3%!" The Malawian stopped, broke into the huge, full-face beam that only Africans do properly, and said, "Yes sir! Thank-you sir! Three per cent, that's just about exactly what we found in survey. But in honour of your presence here with us, I raised it up to 10%!"
A moment's astonished silence - then total uproar :)) Thirty participants completely cracked up. The men roared, the women shrieked, the combined howling and whooping went in waves. It took ten minutes before the session could resume. Helander was laughing as much as anyone :) Later, I read about the desperate efforts the Chinese had made [see M. Kohrman, 'Bodies of Difference'], when their colossal national disability survey reached only 5.9%. Because of the ludicrous "10%" slogan, Chinese officials 'knew' that 6% wasn't enough. They were phoning counterparts across the world to check it out, and had endless high-level meetings to see where and how they could fiddle it upward to within reach of the magic number. I wondered whether even the 'inscrutable orientals' would have let go and roared with laughter, if they had heard the Malawian's masterly solution to the difficulty :))
If you read the so-called "World Disability Report" carefully you can see that there too, amidst the baloney now inflated to "15%", it recognises that for the millions who are at the non-funny end of the population spectrum, with substantial impairments in an environment that is too impoverished to offer any significant relief or rehab, a figure somewhere near 3% is what your survey is likely to find. (Don't worry that it's too small. Whatever it says in the National Plan, the vast majority of the disabled population will see nothing of that. Such solutions are far from them. The realistic, local solutions -- to the locally-perceived problems -- lie mostly within the capacities and minds of the local people themselves, whether disabled or able-bodied or several other thing, if they really want to do something. But that stuff very seldom gets into any kind of national disability planning.)
m. miles
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