Abstract
An understanding of rural communities is fundamental to effective community-based rehabilitation work with persons with disabilities. By removing barriers to community participation, persons with disabilities are enabled to satisfy their fundamental human needs. However, insufficient attention has been paid to the challenges that rural community disability workers (CDWs) face in trying to realise these objectives. This qualitative interpretive study, involving in-depth interviews with 16 community disability workers in Botswana, Malawi and South Africa, revealed the complex ways in which poverty, inappropriately used power and negative attitudes of service providers and communities combine to create formidable barriers to the inclusion of persons with disabilities in families and rural communities. The paper highlights the importance of understanding and working with the concept of ‘disability’ from a social justice and development perspective. It stresses that by targeting attitudes, actions and relationships, community disability workers can bring about social change in the lives of persons with disabilities and the communities in which they live.
Highlights
With their rights, talents and potential to learn too often overlooked, persons with disabilities form a structurally disadvantaged group in society, who are excluded from opportunities to participate actively in community life
Thematic content analysis led to the emergence of five main themes related to the rural context of the community disability workers (CDWs) work:
The study confirms the relevance and value of community based rehabilitation, a strategy of community development that works towards the equalisation of opportunities, through rehabilitation, and by addressing poverty and structural barriers, and promoting the social inclusion of all persons with disabilities (WHO 2010)
Summary
Talents and potential to learn too often overlooked, persons with disabilities form a structurally disadvantaged group in society, who are excluded from opportunities to participate actively in community life. The focus has shifted from institutional or clinic-oriented rehabilitation services to the deployment of community disability workers (CDWs), whose main aim is to facilitate the social inclusion of persons with disabilities (WHO 2010) to ensure that their needs are addressed. A number of factors, at individual, family, community, local, national and global levels, feed into the processes leading to poverty and the social exclusion of various social groups These factors can be used to create an integrated framework for analysing social exclusion and poverty (Burchard, Le Grand & Piachaud 2002, cited in Haralambos & Holborn 2008). We pay particular attention to the community context which, though rural, is affected and shaped by factors at all levels, right up to global level
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