Professor Finn Tarp, the Director of UNU WIDER, at the Finnish Foreign Ministry

It is always extremely interesting for me to learn from different disciplines how they deal with the same issue. Today, I had the chance to attend a seminar, “Does Aid Contribute to Economic Development?” at the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs (more in details at http://www.wider.unu.edu/events/ReCom-events/en_GB/15-05-2012/). The presenter was Professor Finn Tarp of the Director of UNU WIDER (United Nations University, The World Institute for Development Economics Research). He is an economist. He made his presumption very clear that the aid (sic) has contributed to economic development and growth of recipient countries even though some money has been wasted. Based on his research and statistics, he argues that the presumption is correct with the example of 3 out of 36 studied Sub-Saharan African countries had positive effects on GDP or investment. He explained with 25 USD per capita aid per year in a Southern country would increase GDP per capita by 0.5% compared with a country without it, poverty (less than 1,25USD per day) decreases by 3,5%, increases life expectancy at birth by 1.3 years and so forth. He stresses the importance of macro statistics by articulating them as “careful evidence” and “proper works” compared with critical statements to aid without macro statistics. During the discussion session, he introduced 69 formula. For instance, when the annual growth is 3%, it takes 23 years to double the growth. He highlighted, “growth is just one element, but often an important element.” Throughout his presentation, I felt uncomfortable with his generalized concept of growth as if it is a positive thing for everybody. Economic growth of a country could jeopardize relative situation of more marginalized groups of people, when they are left out from the general development. General growth can be both opportunities and challenges for such people and not necessarily a positive thing to take for granted, if the growth leaves them behind. In this regard, his concept of growth has excluded persons with disabilities because trickle-down effect does not take place as a natural matter of fact to persons with disabilities. For instance, UNESCO states, “More than 90% of children with disabilities in developing countries do not attend school” still today (http://portal.unesco.org/education/en/ev.php-URL_ID=32969&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html). Along with the same line, his focus on macro statistics leave out equally important qualitative evidences of lived experiences of persons with disabilities, thereby systematically exclude them from the mainstream discourse of growth, because persons with disabilities are often officially not registered and thus not recognized in different kinds of statistics. Here, I am not arguing that international and development cooperation does not make impacts, to be clear about my positioning. As a social scientist, I am questioning the quality of data in such macro statistics whether they accommodate 15% of the world population who are persons with disabilities. Economic growth is indeed only one element, as he states. However, I got the impression from today’s seminar that it still dominates over a number of important elements including rights to development of persons with disabilities.

Tarja Halonen and Helen Clark at Helsinki University

(From the left, Chairperson Professor Teivo Teivainen, Tarja Halonen, and Helen Clark) With the theme of “Resetting the global development agenda at the Rio+20 summit,” Helsinki University organized lectures by the two distinguished speakers in collaboration with the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs, European Commission and UNDP on 7.5.2012. The former Finnish President, Tarja Halonen, stressed political leadership as well as strong commitment of all actors for sustainable development which entails not only economic but also environment and social justice as a whole. She called for the end of “tyranny of GDP” and for the need of establishing more comprehensive index of measuring development. She highlighted human rights as important to empower people for making sustainable choices. Helen Clark, former Prime Minister of New Zealand and administrator at UNDP, also stressed human development. She pointed out the lack of political will and incentive because of the fact that political cycle rewards short-term actions. Various challenges are there such as divisions between politicians and activists, poorer people and rich people (the former of whom disproportionally face risks), poorest countries and middle-income countries (the former cannot access to existing international funding) and so forth. She, however, stressed that sharing best practices is important. For instance, the global reaction to the Ozone layer was possible, while Ethiopia has green economy strategy even though it is one of the poorest countries. In the question and answer session, which invited also questions from Tweeters who followed the seminar online on live, Halonen introduced an example of Cider index. When different kinds of Cider are evaluated, it is hard to say which is better because people look at different aspects of Cider with different values. Development is the same. There needs to be many different indexes, from which good political balance on different issues should take place, she argued. During the whole session, “poorest people,” “women,” and “unemployed people” were mentioned but once again disability not even once. Halonen says, “All these are ethical choices.” How ethical it has to be for persons with disabilities to be included in the mainstream discourse? Perhaps good aspiration and ethical consideration are not enough any longer, as evidences have been accumulated. She encourages university students to “try to find new ideas seriously.” I hope many of the readers are encouraged to study this area seriously.

Hisayo Answered Questions

A university student found this blog site and turned to me with some questions for her research. I thought of sharing my answers with wider audience. • Given your experience working in Uganda, how do you judge the effectiveness of the government's policies concerning the rights and needs of PWDs? In my opinion, using the "effectiveness" measure is not quite correct for any intervention in the field of disability due to the history of profound discrimination against many persons with disabilities. Any single intervention cannot make significant change not due to ineffectiveness of the intervention but due to such historical factor in terms of both disabling environment and consequently under capacity of persons with disabilities, both of which make it difficult to create quantifiable positive impacts. In this sense, this question is somehow out of the context perhaps, particularly when “persons with disabilities” are not monolithic but heterogenic, while rights are many. Having said that, if I dare to answer your question, those persons with disabilities who had been more empowered have benefited from a number of government policies, such as affirmative action policy. For instance, political representation and higher education have empowered as well as mainstreamed a number of persons with disabilities. • What role do you believe disabled people's organizations play in effecting change in the lives of PWDs in Uganda? Again, as persons with disabilities as well as DPOs are diverse, generalizing question as this one is a bit difficult for me to answer. It would be easier when both “persons with disabilities” and “DPOs” are more specific, because different DPOs play different roles and even the same DPO could play totally different roles for different persons with disabilities under different conditions. For instance, some receive essential assistive devices from DPOs and thereby improve their quality of life to a great extent, whereas others get more moral and psychological support from peers. It is difficult for me to say what is more important role. However, in general, Northern actors tend to believe in the role of advocacy or watchdog as important, while Ugandan persons with disabilities expect the role as service providers. In reality, I have observed that Ugandan DPOs play multiple roles for meeting different needs of their constituencies and for making positive changes in their lives. • What do you think are the greatest challenges facing PWDs in Uganda today? Different persons with disabilities face different challenges depending on their situations, capacities, personalities, environments and so forth. Some told me that the greatest challenge is to pay for school fees for their kids, while others claim lack of information is, particularly for deaf and blind people. By answering your questions, I feel that perhaps the biggest challenge facing persons with disabilities in Uganda today is that their heterogeneity has not been fully understood by many. They are, for instance, mothers, daughters, caregivers, breadwinners, women, and/or wives, as well as women with disabilities. Many of women with disabilities face similar challenges as other mothers, daughters, caregivers, breadwinners, women and/or wives, in other words. For instance, illiteracy is not only a challenge exclusive to persons with disabilities. Even some persons with disabilities do not perceive to face a big challenge depending on their capacities, personalities and/or environments. Having made my point clear, if I dare to answer your question in a general term, challenges are many such as prejudice, low expectation, lack of accessibility, lack of medical treatments and services, malnutrition, neoliberalism to name a few. • How do you believe accessibility to resources, facilities, and information for PWDs relates to Uganda's overall development? When they are secured for Ugandan persons with disabilities, I believe that its impact to the overall development is significant. Statistically, persons with disabilities are a big part of the total population (15% by the latest World Report on Disability by WHO and WB) and when their family members are also taken into account in this discussion, it is not too difficult to imagine how big impacts uplifting of persons with disabilities alone could make for the whole country development. Moreover, universal design is for everybody including persons with babies, elderly, and those who are temporarily injured or could potentially become disabled at some stage of lives by accident or by age. The whole population, as a result, would benefit from secured accessibility. • Are there any strategies or initiatives that you believe DPOs should be implementing, but currently are not? It is difficult for me to generalize DPOs and persons with disabilities once again. When statutory and international services and interventions are non-existent or extremely limited, many DPOs are expected to play many roles to fill the huge gaps. For many persons with disabilities, DPOs cannot change their lives dramatically due to disabling environment and their under capacity. DPOs are only part of the society and DPOs alone cannot make big impacts when other actors both locally and globally continue to exclude persons with disabilities. Thus I believe not only DPOs but all actors should be inclusive and keep dialogue and negotiation among us to make eventually equal society for all.

Our book of 2009 is now available on-line

Please visit the free on-line copy of a book from 2009: J. Kumpuvuori and M. Scheinin, 'United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities - Multidisciplinary Perspectives'. http://www.kynnys.fi/images/stories/VIKE-web/vike_tieteellinen_julkaisu.pdf

Hisayo in Ethiopia with the UN Special Rapporteur on Disability

(In the picture, the UN Special Rapporteur and myself are in front of the older AU building. The new AU building is on the back.) Human rights-based approaches are multi-layered and both bottom-up and top-down. In Uganda, I investigated on bottom-up approaches. This time in Ethiopia, I accompanied the UN Special Rapporteur to observe his mission with a top-down approach. Namely, he had meetings with the African Union (AU), UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), the African Decade Secretariat Regional Office, the Ethiopian government, Finnish Embassy, American Embassy and an Ethiopian DPO for soliciting what it is called African Union Disability Architecture (AUDA) and African Disability Forum (ADF) that institutionally and practically facilitate promotion of human rights of persons with disabilities in Africa. The Special Rapporteur is going to establish the ADF in the form of an NGO as part of AUDA. When it comes to a top-down approach at this level, the biggest challenge is perhaps coordination. International agencies such as AU and UN ECA are required to listen to member states and coordinate for collective consensus for both policy and action. As the actors are many, coordination among them becomes one of the keys. Another challenge is to attract the actors’ attention to prioritize disability in their activities. As such international organisations have mandate to diverse issues, disability often becomes invisible, unless continuous reminder is made. For instance, ECA does not have any focal point or a staff whose mandate is to promote human rights of persons with disabilities. ECA has one staff who is personally interested in disability and works for it on a part-time basis along with his own mandate. AU has a Department of Social Development which encompasses disability. Considering the population ratio of persons with disabilities, 15% of the total population, as found out in the World Report on Disability (WHO and World Bank, 2011), it is disproportionate not to have staffs specifically dedicated to disability. Disability has to be taken more seriously both in policy and practice including allocation of staffs and resources. Today, various actors including the UN Special Rapporteur are concerned about this fact that disability has not been taken seriously. With his capacity as the UN Special Rapporteur, he visited these organisations and people to exchange and share information on the AUDA to be strengthened in the near future by combining their force. Finland and United States of America are now collaborating to facilitate the process on mainstreaming disability in African Continent. This so-called “Trans-Atlantic Initiative” is only at the initial stage. This was a fascinating opportunity for me to learn how disability is (tried to be) mainstreamed from the top of this level, which has not been interrogated in my previous studies except for the mainstreaming of disability in Japanese and Finnish development policies and practices at the governmental level (Katsui, 2008). The road map is becoming clear but the road itself is bumpy and far from straightforward. One concern would be that the AUDA process has the risk of leaving proper and meaningful involvement of organisations of persons with disabilities (DPOs) behind. For instance, when the African Decade Secretariat Executive Director, AK Dube, was discussing with the African Union and the UN Special Rapporteur concerning a working group meeting for finalizing the Continental Plan of Action for the second Decade, the number of DPOs to participate in this meeting has to rely on how much budget the Secretariat can use rather than securing enough budget for all the relevant DPOs to participate. That is to say, a top-down approach faces a similar challenge as a bottom-up approach: low prioritization, resource constraint, lack of capacity of actors and so forth. More thorough analysis on this trip to Ethiopia will be written in my forthcoming book to be published by the end of September this year. But these are immediate thoughts compiled in Addis Ababa Bole Airport, while waiting for my flight back to Finland.

In Memory of Maija Könkkölä

By Hisayo Katsui

I heard the very sad news on last Monday morning when I went to my office.

I first met her as soon as I started my PhD study on disability and development in 2000. I attended one seminar and she made her presentation on accessibility, as she was an architect. I had the privilege of attending other presentations of her in the following years. In one of the presentations, she introduced her latest publication on accessible homes. After the presentation, I approached her to ask for a copy to purchase it. She said, “It’s free. You can have it for free. If some information makes lives of persons with disabilities better, such information has to be free.” This has been very important for me whenever I produce some writings, unless articles were included into someone else’s books.

Likewise, she has influenced many people’s thinking in her life and such influence definitely continues to live. I would like to thank her, deeply.

Kony 2012 campaign: Are you creating discrimination against persons with disabilities?

By Hisayo Katsui


Many might have seen the Kony 2012 video in youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4MnpzG5Sqc) or elsewhere. It was launched 10 days ago and already watched by 80 million people. On 8th of March in the morning when I visited the site of Invisible Children (http://www.invisiblechildren.com/) that started this campaign, 30,000 “liked” it already on the facebook, which is now 3 million. It has become a global phenomenon. Even the biggest Finnish newspaper, Helsingin sanomat, introduced this phenomenon already twice. Youth are targeted and reached effectively by internet and social media. As a researcher who visited the Northern part of Uganda in 2008, I feel I have to write something about it from the viewpoint of women with disabilities.

What they do is to advocate (perhaps American) youth to “do more than just watch” by knowing that Joseph Kony has been abducting children from Northern area of Uganda and forcing girl children to become sex slave of soldiers. They target to catch him by the end of this year. On 20.4. people around the globe to place awareness raising posters everywhere to catch him. They have already “successfully” managed to convince the US government and mobilized 100 US soldiers to be sent to northern Uganda. They ask for the audience to join the force to catch him. Otherwise, the soldiers are to be withdrawn, they claim. The video shows the American leader’s little son who learns to know who is the bad guy. He says, “We have to stop him.” Even a small child like him can understand the logic, which is the message. The video is 30 minutes long and hopefully many used more minutes for investigating more about the historical background of this civil war, complexity of aid, validity of this quest and modality etc. At least, it has increased visibility of Uganda and the civil war to the world, which has become the topic of everyday talk for many, at least for a while. It is just so impressive to see how fast information could be delivered to so many people instantly. Self-activism (at least in the virtual world) has become core of global social movements.

Already many criticisms were written instantly against this campaign such as a Ugandan journalist, Rosebell Kagumiren, (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLVY5jBnD-E) who explains much complex picture of the war and the current situation of reconstruction rather than on-going fight that the video describes. There is no voice of Ugandans and misses out local initiatives, as if Africans are all helpless, which has been a very problematic stereotype.
Schomerus (http://edition.cnn.com/2012/03/10/opinion/kony-2012-video/index.html) asserts that it is the Ugandan government propaganda that the movement is promoting, and seemingly modern message due to the mobilized modern technologies is too comformist: fight violence with violence by dismissing steps for social change. Finnish KEPA also placed a blog writing of Salminen that criticizes the movement as dangerous “White man’s burden” (http://www.kepa.fi/blogi/11027). Only America can save the situation and with force, which are criticized by many. Invisible Children quickly answered many questions raised directly to them (http://www.invisiblechildren.com/critiques.html). Whether the video supports the propaganda of the Museveni regime or not, there has been a huge impact of this campaign, which cannot be denied.

When I was there in 2008, the situation was already peaceful, though I saw some soldiers around. Many cars carrying logos and names of international organisations made me realized that this is a war-torn zone. I visited two internally displaced people’s camps: Bwongatira and Koch Goma in Gulu. I followed activities of National Union of Women with Disabilities (NUWODU) which went there to monitor their activities of HIV/AIDS advocacy trainings for women with disabilities living in these camps. Human Rights Watch made a review on the realities of women with disabilities in Northern Uganda (http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cedaw/docs/ngos/HRW_CEDAW47_uganda2.pdf), which facilitates your understanding why NUWODU has such activities. NUWODU went there as soon as the situation was stabilized, though they decided to remain near the Gulu center for their security reasons. During the armed conflicts, many women with disabilities were left behind when others fled from home for safer places. In the camps, many of them have been raped. Humanitarian aid agencies did not take disability into account first, and with the intervention of the National Union of Disabled Persons of Uganda, they gradually started to take persons with disabilities into account in their delivery of aid. Before that, persons with disabilities could not compete with the able-bodied people for food and other aids and were left without aid. Even after the Universal Primary Education policy was introduced, many children with disabilities living in the camps cannot access education. Now majority of the people have gone back to their villages, while many persons with disabilities are left to the camps. Lang and Murangira warn that camps will soon become “disability ghetto” (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/lc-ccr/downloads/scopingstudies/dfid_ugandareport) The video has touched none of these critical issues for women with disabilities in Northern Uganda caused by the war, thereby further marginalizes women with disabilities from the discourse.

Boys became soldiers and girls sex slaves as victims, it says. But their parents, other families, so many more people were affected seriously, and many have become persons with disabilities due to the war. Invisible Children organization has been building schools and supporting reconstruction works with local people, it says in its homepage. They claim they are not naïve. But I would like to know whether those schools accommodate children with disabilities and children of women with disabilities. At least, newly built structures and activities are not to exclude children and persons with disabilities in the area.

Perhaps it applies to any global movements of today among youth that use internet to mobilize them, but it is worrisome that “participation” is only one or a few clicks away. That means, you can also withdraw in the same way. Moreover, you can feel your part of contribution is done, which is far from a human rights-based approach but rather a charity-based approach in which givers decide what, when, and how to do it. This way of engagement could be forgotten easily, I’m afraid.

I went there and saw how local disability organisations had been making so much effort in mainstreaming persons with disabilities in conflict and post-conflict discourses and practices. They say it is very challenging because so many other much bigger and influential organisations and international agencies are ignorant about persons with disabilities and their specific needs. Consequently, many discriminatory structures are still built and rebuilt by international interventions. As this video has become a phenomenon, I would like you to stop and think whether your contribution is at least not making any more discriminatory structures against persons with disabilities. Many Ugandan organisations are there as your alternatives.