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> Posted by Jeffrey Riecke, Communications Associate, CFI
If you are in a wheelchair in Guatemala, lots of nice people will be willing to carry you up the stairs… But that’s not the point. A recent conversation with Alan Tenenbaum, a disability inclusion advocate based in Guatemala, offered me that perspective. Tenenbaum, who became a quadriplegic after suffering a spinal cord injury in his late twenties, focuses his work on the Latin American country. Those looking to advance disability inclusion in Guatemala, like in most countries, have their work cut out for them. Countrywide, according to Team Around the Child, less than two percent of Guatemalan adults with disabilities have work, most children with disabilities do not attend school, and only a small percentage of those in need of wheelchairs have one. To date, according to a recent paper from Trickle Up, most efforts to advance disability inclusion in Guatemala have been limited to urban areas – even though 50 percent of the country’s population resides in rural areas, where economic opportunities are harder to come by.
I sat down with Tenenbaum to get a sense for progress made and challenges still present in Guatemala for persons with disabilities (PwDs). Since his injury, Tenenbaum wrote a book sharing his story, En la Silla de Morfeo (On Morpheus’ Chair), started and led a foundation, Sigue Avanzando, and has regularly given speeches for schools, universities, news outlets, and private companies. At the heart of these efforts is what he identifies as the biggest barrier to disability inclusion: public awareness.
> Posted by Abhishek Agrawal, India Country Director, Accion
#133417011 / gettyimages.com
Over the past two years, CFI’s three MFI partners in India have included over 13,000 persons with disabilities (PWD) as clients in mainstream financial services, helping them become economically active. Almost all of these clients were first-time borrowers.
CFI and Accion, with our knowledge partner v-shesh and MFI implementation partners – Annapurna based in Odisha, Equitas based in Tamil Nadu, and ESAF from Kerala – have been working on the financial inclusion of persons with disabilities over the past two years. This working group created tools and an operating model for MFIs to incorporate PWD as staff and clients. The recommendations, which include policy changes in non-discrimination and other areas, are being piloted at the MFIs. Disability awareness trainings have been conducted for over 100 MFI staff across the country. Over the next several months these staff will train another 6,000 frontline MFI staff.
> Posted by Joshua Goldstein, Principal Director for Economic Citizenship & Disability Inclusion, CFI
#483548443 / gettyimages.com
Last week my colleague Sonja Kelly and Bancomer’s Ruben Marquez highlighted the importance of the cultural contexts of words that are used in financial services (e.g. the impact of using the word for saving instead of keeping in Mexico). This got me thinking about the consequences of the words we use as names for social groups, and where these names originate.
There is a consensus among disabled people in the English-speaking world today that person with disability is the preferred term when describing a member of their community and how they would like the non-disabled to refer to them. A couple of decades ago disabled person was preferred – for example, 1983-1992 was the United Nations Decade of Disabled Persons.
This is not a pedantic fuss over nothing, as it might at first blush seem. It goes right to the heart of establishing a positive identity for a downtrodden minority. The proper term is currently being worked out in Hindi – and perhaps in many other languages around the world – where persons with disabilities are just now insisting on their rights to full participation in civil society.
> Posted by Siddhartha Chowdri, Program Manager, Disability Inclusion, India, CFI
How does the microfinance community view persons with disabilities (PWD)? This economically disenfranchised population makes up less than one percent of microfinance clients around the world, leaving the vast majority of PWD excluded. Many PWD would benefit from financial services. Yet even the most intense Google, Bing, or Yahoo search will yield almost no in-depth research into how persons with disabilities are perceived among the leaders and staff of microfinance institutions (MFIs). For my focus country of India, no research at all is related to this topic. We hope that a new CFI paper authored by Vipin Gupta of Credit Suisse, Making Microfinance Accessible to Persons with Disabilities: Awareness and Attitudes Among Indian Microfinance Institutions, will be the starting point for more research and action in this area.
Annapurna Staff Members and v-shesh Researcher with Focus Group Discussion Participants, Odisha
Over the last two years CFI has been working with three leading Indian MFIs – Equitas, ESAF, and Annapurna – to refine and develop tools that institutions across the world can use to make themselves more accessible to PWD. CFI also partnered with v-shesh, an India-based social enterprise with expertise in disability inclusion. At the start of this work, CFI and v-shesh decided to conduct research on the existing environments at these MFIs. The purpose of this research was two-fold:
- Learn which areas related to disability inclusion should be emphasized during the planned trainings and accessibility audits.
- Establish a baseline understanding of the existing views of disability inclusion at the MFIs for subsequent monitoring of changes.
Last November, the v-shesh team surveyed hundreds of MFI staff at all levels as well as MFI clients – both with disabilities and without. They also conducted intensive focus group discussions to gather additional qualitative information to prepare for the trainings.
> Posted by Joshua Goldstein aka Mr. Provocative
There is unfortunately no reliable substitute for family support when it comes to helping a person succeed with their schooling, with their disability, or with their microfinance loan.
Thomas Friedman of The New York Times recently asked educators in Shanghai what made Chinese schools successful, compared to schools in the United States. The unequivocal answer was that while improved teacher training that the U.S. emphasizes was of course important, far and away the key to student achievement was intensive parental involvement; Chinese schools spend time and resources insuring that parents are trained in how to help their children learn.
A heretical Mr. Provocative agrees with conservatives that throwing billions into the latest education reform fad will have extremely limited success as long as family support is anemic or absent. (This is not to say that reformers don’t routinely ask parents to take more responsibility but clearly such a nudge is not enough.) “It’s the parents, stupid,” or, “It’s the family, stupid.”
We have to point at the family as the prime mover even when this is hurtful and it causes “guilt and shame.” Nothing wrong with pricking the conscience. This is a “theory of change” that is millennia old and has long had some success for most religions—in a positive way. But public policy cognoscenti shun the language of judgment and conscience. In not asking more of families are we not party to what George W. Bush called “the bigotry of low expectations?”
My “it’s the family, stupid” sentiment has been reinforced by listening to a recent Ted Talk by Stanford graduate and Rhodes Scholar, Rachel Kolb, who was born profoundly deaf.
> Posted by Joshua Goldstein, Principal Director for Economic Citizenship & Disability Inclusion, CFI
#AA035998 / gettyimages.com
#AA035998 / gettyimages.com
“Age Invaders” is the cover story of a recent issue of The Economist. Today, 8 percent of the global population is over 65. This figure will increase dramatically in the coming years and, with low and declining birth rates in many developed and developing countries, respectively, it is projected that by 2050 the global population 65 years and older will be 2.5 times that of 0 to 4 year olds. This is an exact reversal of the situation in 1950 and is a proportionality unseen since the hominids began to walk upright.
All human institutions will be affected by the greying demographic, but I would like to narrow my scope to just one area: the implications for providing financial services to those customers who fall prey to age-related cognitive decline.
Dr. Jerome Groopman, in the May 22 edition of The New York Review of Books, reports on an important new study of persons who reached 65 without any signs of dementia. He indicates that for these individuals, the chance of their developing Alzheimer’s disease over their ensuing 10 years is more than 35 percent. Groopman describes, “This sobering statistic translates into a cascade of symptoms by the persons struck down by the disease, beginning with short-term problems, and then gradually long-term memory, in conjunction with difficulties in cognition including confusion, disorientation, and poor emotional control.”
Families everywhere are trying to cope with a loved one who is experiencing some kind of life altering dementia resulting from Alzheimer’s or from another cause – perhaps a multitude of silent micro-infarctions (tiny undetected strokes).
Families like mine.
My mother still manages to live on her own with almost no support. She usually bristles when we suggest help. She does her own housekeeping, volunteers at a hospital, and takes a mile walk everyday—an enviably spry 87.
> Posted by Joshua Goldstein, Principal Director for Economic Citizenship & Disability Inclusion, CFI
I spent the first two hours of the conference in a speed dating exercise called First Connections, where delegates had five minutes to give each other their elevator pitches before moving chairs to meet the next delegate. I recognize that common perceptions of this sort of activity perceive it as always awkward and often a waste of time. In this case, however, my speed dating was at the annual Skoll World Forum, and its value was indicative of the diverse connections needed to solve the complex challenges of my work on disability inclusion, and of those attending the Forum.
The Skoll World Forum, held in Oxford, England, brings together social entrepreneurs, as well as funders, politicians, media, and others who, in Founder Jeff Skoll’s words, are committed to “solving the world’s most pressing problems.” I was lucky enough to be invited to participate in the 11th annual Forum, based on my contribution to a global civil rights struggle to end discrimination against persons with disabilities. My scope of work within this ambitious movement has been developing a set of tools and trainings with my colleagues at the Center for Financial Inclusion to make microfinance institutions and other financial service providers disability inclusive. Along with facilitating the industry’s integration of these tools and trainings, we’re working with in-country stakeholders to develop disability inclusion plans in Ecuador, India, Paraguay, and elsewhere. But achieving disability inclusion in financial services requires more than financial services providers. It also requires the involvement of technology providers, telcos, government officials, educators, community groups, and other actors.
Over 1,000 people from 60 countries gathered to share their ideas and innovations at Skoll. The hope of event organizers is that such a high-level convening of disparate leaders will produce new collaborations and lead to new innovations. And when I say disparate, I mean disparate. I crossed paths with Eli Williamson, Co-Founder of Leave No Veteran Behind, an organization providing educational and employment assistance to veterans facing hardship, as well as Chris Underhill, MBE, Founder of the global mental health organization Basic Needs, and Mabel van Oranje, Chair of Girls Not Brides, which combats child marriage.
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