Recovery, Renewal, Resilience

People with disabilities are more likely to be unemployed or not in education or training, which makes them more vulnerable to the impacts of the pandemic, including increased risk of poverty. Recovery strategies to address the economic impacts of the pandemic should be disability-inclusive. Consider:

• Review/amend social protection systems to better protect people with disabilities during COVID-19:
  • Raise poverty thresholds to take disability-related additional costs into account
  • Revise the definition of disability in assessment procedures, to ensure they are functioning-based rather than impairment-based
  • Train volunteer community members to support the rapid identification of people with disabilities for social protection or other assistance: these community volunteers are sometimes called 'key informants' (KIs), are knowledgeable about the topic, the local area and the people who live there
• Ensure application procedures for social protection programmes and support services are accessible in the light of COVID-19 social distancing regimes:
  • Include disabled people's organisations when reviewing the accessibility of application processes and when disseminating information about support programmes
  • Adapt application and enrolment procedures to support the inclusion of people with disabilities
  • Provide disability training to programme staff and volunteers, e.g. disability awareness
  • Ensure programme information and application materials are available in a variety of accessible formats, e.g. Braille/videos/simplified text
  • Establish COVID-safe community-based registration services to bring services closer to people, and offer person/home-based assessment procedures for those with mobility limitations
• Ensure methods to deliver social protection services and welfare payments are accessible:
  • Allow welfare payments to be paid electronically or enable people with mobility difficulties to nominate a trusted individual to collect their
  • Ensure service points are physically accessible and within the person's local community
• Ensure employment schemes are adequate and accessible for people with disabilities during COVID-19:
  • Set up employment schemes to actively employ persons with disabilities, integrating such schemes into broader employment recovery schemes, e.g. green recovery
  • Make infrastructure accessible, e.g. buildings and workplaces
  • Introduce unemployment insurance to cover the informal sector, as people with disabilities, in particular women with disabilities, are more likely to be employed in the informal sector where there is an absence of job security, unemployment insurance and paid sick leave