> Posted by Joshua Goldstein
What role can microfinance organizations play in helping to bring access to financial services to people with disabilities? The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities emphasizes that people with disabilities should not be treated as “objects” of charity but as “subjects” with rights, who are capable of living productive lives and contributing to society.
This shift in perspective sounds remarkably similar to the way that the perspective about the poor transformed in the seventies when the microfinance revolution took off. The poor, long viewed as objects of charity, became “subjects” determining their own destiny, fueled by loans to lift themselves out of poverty, rather than as lifetime wards of first world philanthropists.
Today, the WHO estimates that roughly 10 percent of the world’s population (650 million people) lives with some kind of disability, 80 per cent in low-income countries. There is a clear association between poverty and disability. Yet, the Millennium Development Goals where it is never even mention disabilities. Activists in the disability community are lobbying to rectify this situation.
Microfinance practitioners face a challenge to find viable and sustainable ways to serve this vast segment of the global poor. It won’t not be easy for MFIs to train loan officers and other staff to serve this diverse client base, since what constitutes a disability runs the gamut from mental illness to blindness, deafness or loss of limb. A deaf client might need a very different kind of vocational training and even loan product than someone who is blind, for example, to achieve economic independence.
The Center for Financial Inclusion is beginning to grapple with what is both a problem and enormous opportunity for microfinance providers As a first step we are talking with Professor Michael Stein, Executive Director, Harvard Law School Project on Disability to identify concrete first steps including pilots to address this enormous market failure. One thing is for sure – achieving full financial inclusion is impossible if the disabled are excluded from the equation.
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November 11, 2009 at 5:09 pm
Owusu-Ansah Kwame Atuahene
The impossibility of achieving full financial inclusion is very clear if the disabled are not included in the equation. ln my native country Ghana, there are rehabilitation centres and govermental institutions under the department of social welfare that have trained many disabled people who end up in the streets of the capital city and many other principal cities and towns begging for money. They have become liability to the poor state after the state has invested in them. This is because of inavailability of capital to invest in the trade they have and also no job opportunities for them due to stigma that is attached to them in that society.
I think microfinance organizations can do a great job when providing financial services to people with disabilities and private sectors who are willing to employ them and enjoy insentives like tax reduction.
November 12, 2009 at 3:06 pm
“They Are Bankable” – Inclusion Must Include the Disabled «
[...] the Center for Financial Inclusion, we couldn’t agree more that inclusion is meaningless if the disabled are excluded. In fact, at our recently concluded Advisory Council meeting held at the Center on October 22, the [...]