Disability, Development and Advocacy in LAC

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1. Disability and development policy. Working with national statistical institutes and selected regional and national disability NGOs, the project will develop policy briefs on disability and key development areas. These would include the education and health-related MDGs, poverty and employment and stigma and discrimination. The project will provide external technical assistance, using regional and extra-regional expertise, to national statistical institutes to strengthen their to capacity to collect and analyse disability data. The project will also support efforts to develop a regional consensus on the definition of disability, as a means of strengthening the quality of the database used for policy development. These efforts will include inter alia in country meetings to review the definitions of disability currently used and to identify of new definitions acceptable to all countries. National consultants will be hired to collect and review disability data from all available sources – census data, particularly the 2000/01 censuses, LSMS and disability surveys . Economists, with either labour or development experience, will be hired to a) review the causes of disability and to identify policy options for preventing disability, and b) identifying the impact of disability on households, paying particular attention to sector impacts, for example, in the health and education sectors, and on socially excluded populations – women and men who are either of indigenous or afro descent. This component builds on the previous TC project funded by Finland in 2004. 2. Dissemination. The dissemination activities will be linked to the IDB's for projects in each country. In country activities. In each country, the data collected and the policy briefs developed under component (1) above, will be presented in single sessions to staff from the executing agencies that involved in the Bank projects, (one session in each country has been chosen to increase the likelihood of attendance). The dissemination sessions will present the following: a) the national overview of disability and its impact on development, and b) options for including disability into the proposed pipeline projects, including and regional or international best practices in disability relevant to the proposed projects. The attendance of national disability NGOs at these sessions will ensure that their perspectives are communicated to planners. This will help establish communication links that can will be strengthened. National consultants will be hired to develop the dissemination strategies. In the Bank. Similar sessions will be held in the Bank, they will differ from the in-country seminars given the greater availability of the lead economists to participate in a series of seminars that look at disability data, policy, and implementation issues. The majority of the funding for this activity will be supported by the Bank's administrative budget. This component is exclusively linked to objective 2 above, and will use the output from component 1.