Persons with Disabilities in Asia and the Pacific: A Legacy of Poverty, Illiteracy, Discrimination - Women & Children Suffer Most

A Threat to Millennium Development Goal for Universal Primary Education

BANGKOK - (United Nations Information Service) - Across Asia and the Pacific, persons with disabilities "remain disproportionately undereducated, untrained, unemployed, underemployed and poor," according to a UNESCAP review of the Asian and Pacific Decade of Disabled Persons, 1993 - 2002.

Despite this special decade dedicated to raising awareness and improving access to public facilities for persons with disabilities much work remains to be done, the 300 delegates attending the High-Level Intergovernmental Meeting to Conclude the Asian and Pacific Decade of Disabled Persons, 25 - 28 October at Otsu City, Shiga, Japan, will be told.

"Persons with disabilities are still discriminated against in many ways," UNESCAP Executive Secretary, Mr. Kim Hak-Su, told journalists today at a pre-Otsu news briefing in Bangkok. "Many barriers - physical, social and institutional - still stand in their way to rights and benefits that most non-disabled citizens enjoy and take for granted."

It is women and children with disabilities that have suffered the most in the Asian and Pacific region.

Women with disabilities are multiply disadvantaged through their status as women, as persons with disabilities and because, as a group, they make up the majority of those persons living in poverty.

Only one child in ten with a disability in the Asian and Pacific region has access to any form of education, compared with a regional enrolment rate of over 70 per cent for non-disabled children and youth in primary education.

The UNESCAP review concludes that because so many children with disabilities are being denied their schooling, the Millennium Development Goal of universal primary education will not be achieved by 2015 in this region without increased commitment by Governments and civil society.

The review urges UNESCAP Member and Associate Member Governments in the region to take further steps to prepare their school systems for inclusive education, and to officially acknowledge that every child has a right to attend school, and that it is the responsibility of the school to accommodate differences.

Some countries in the region have already taken steps to improve the lives of persons with disabilities.

"Japan has been actively involved in the major activities and programmes of the Decade," said H.E. Mr. Atsushi Tokinoya, Japan's Ambassador to Thailand, reaffirming Japan's commitment "to establish, in collaboration with Thailand, an Asian and Pacific Development Center on Disability, in Bangkok, which will be opened in 2004."

A new decade is expected to be dedicated at the Otsu meeting with the theme "Towards an Inclusive, Barrier-free and Rights-based Society for Persons With Disabilities in Asia and the Pacific." The aim of this new decade is to enable a paradigm shift from a charity-based approach to a rights-based approach to protect the civil, cultural, economic, political, and social rights of persons with disabilities.

For more information, please contact:
Mr. David Lazarus
Chief, United Nations Information Services
UN Building, Rajadamnern Nok Ave
Bangkok 10200, Thailand0
Tel: (+66) 02 288 1864-9
E-mail: unisbkk.unescap@un.org

Attention Photo Editors:

UNESCAP is providing, free of charge, two photos which can be used as companion photos to the above news release. They may be used one time only and must be accompanied by the following credit "UN Photo"

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