In celebration of International Day of Persons with Disabilities, the IOM Global Migration Data Analysis Centre hosted the webinar “Disability-Inclusive Data in Migration: How far have we come?” on Friday, 3 December. The following is a transcript of the webinar.
Note: The below transcript has not been officially edited.
Moderation and speakers
- Moderator: Poonam Dhavan, Senior Migration Health Policy Adviser, IOM Migration Health Division)
- Speaker 1: Dr. Frank Laczko, Director of IOM’s Global Migration Data Analysis Centre (GMDAC)
- Speaker 2: Simone Holladay, IOM DTM Disability Focal Point
- Speaker 3: Professor Jo Vearey, African Centre for Migration & Society at Wits University
- Speaker 4: Diana Hiscock, the Inclusion GLobal Adviser from HelpAge International
- Speaker 5: Javier Teran, HDX data partnership team lead
Transcript
Moderator: Just a quick note we just have two minutes and it looks like some, some participants have already joined us. Yeah. Do you want to start from them at least two minutes past.
Sure, happy to. I'm a very good morning, and a warm welcome to all the panelists, all these participants want joining us to be on the location of the internationally of persons with disabilities.
We are here for a webinar, organized by the IOM global migration Data Analysis Center on disability inclusive data in migration, how far we have an excellent group of speakers here today, we will structure, the webinar with opening remarks, followed by four speakers, the attendees are all the chat box to include remarks questions reactions, and we hope to have at least 10, if not 15 minutes towards the end for the panelists to respond to your questions and comments. And just as housekeeping, as you will also see in the chat box.
This session is being recorded. And there is also the possibility to have life closed captioning, that you can opt in, using the bottom screen, please refer to the points one two and three in the chat box that the organizers have just included for your awareness. So with that, I'm very happy to stop this session, by giving the floor to Mr Frank Laczko, who is the director of the IOM global migration Data Analysis Center RGM doc for short.
He has over 20 years of experience working in the field of international migration, with published reports on a wide range of migration issues, including on development, labor irregular migration, the environment, as well as governance overall.
He's currently the co chair of the UN export group on migration statistics, as well as co editor of migration policy practice, Frank, the floor is yours.
Speaker 1 (Dr. Frank Laczko): Thank you very much for that warm introduction. We're absolutely delighted to be organizing this webinar on the International Day of Persons with Disabilities. And let me say right up front that this is a topic that I think those of us working here at gym they're going in the data field have perhaps neglected for too long. And we want to start doing something about that.
So today I mean we're issuing a blog. But we plan to do much more work in this area, and to produce more guidance and promote I think exchanges and discussions around this topic. Because, you know, it is very relevant to migration mobility and displacement. I mean internationally or the figures are not very solid.
I think the word, there is an estimate that 15% of the world's population has some persons with some form of disability. and I mean many of us can expect through our lives as we get older, there's some point we will also be affected by some form of disability. This is really, you know, something that that these happening to every to a wide range of the population. And we don't have enough good information and data and statistics on this topic.
And there are a number of reasons for that and we're going to hear from speakers from the African center for migration and society with university help age international Iowans displacement tracking matrix, an archer center view for humanitarian data exchange about the data challenges and also about some of the interesting work that is being done to overcome these data challenges because sadly in this world.
The bottom line is, if you are not counted sometimes, you simply don't count in the eyes of policymakers and practitioners. So it's really important when we're thinking about policy and practice in this area targeted persons with disabilities that we have a better data and information.
And, you know, we, there are already there is already a Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which 16 years ago highlighted the need to improve disability related data.
We have a global development framework the SDG is agenda 2030, which underlines the fact that people should not be left behind, either because of the migratory status or because they are disabled persons, but it's very difficult to track progress in relation to those goals and targets. If you're not able to have accurate timely data on the movement of people with disabilities.
So that is why we're here today, I think, as I told you about some of our efforts to try and make this webinar, as inclusive as possible, and no doubt you'll hear more about that as we go along.
All I would like to say from my side is somebody who is currently the Director of Im global migration Data Analysis Center is that I know there are lots of webinars on migration topics, the whole time and on a day to topics.
I think this is the third or fourth webinar we've had this week, but this is really something that we think is it should be is a neglected area of work that we should really be looking at much more closely here at Jim DAC IOM, and in partnership with other agencies, whether they be in the UN and beyond. And all I can say is that following on from this meeting, that's what we're going to be doing on our site.
So thanks very much for your attention, and I look forward to listening to the discussion.
Moderator: Thanks for that, and appear and loud message for our participants here today in terms of this being indeed a very critical topic, however, or rather neglected area when it comes to timely, accurate data.
So we look forward to hearing more from our panelists, and also discussing with the participants later on.
I'm very happy now to give the floor to our first panelist, Simone quality, a displacement tracking matrix program officer with IOM at the headquarters in Geneva.
Simone has a master's degree in Public Health, and a Bachelor's in geography and regional development, I understand. She has almost two decades of experience in proposing methods and tools planning activities and building country capacities, on a myriad of data and statistics programs including censuses household surveys, as well as assessments in over 20 countries.
She has worked with, I Wednesday dm programs in Somalia and Yemen and presently our headquarters. She works to promote technical assistance and training for regional offices and in documenting good practices, as well as access the disability inclusion for combined within the displacement drinking matrix team. So with that, I'm really, really excited to hear from someone, and perhaps the organizers can share the slides, I believe she had some slides, she would like to present.
Speaker 2 (Simone Holladay): Thank you. If I could share the screen that would be great.
So when I can share your slides for you. Sorry I I made some updates, I, I made some updates. Yeah, I would like to show them. So you can share your screen. Just if you can't, I can't.
Okay, I could when we tested today and. Okay. Well,
I'll start by introducing myself and if it doesn't work then you can share the older older slides. I would like to start by thanking the host for inviting me to speak to the International Day of people with disabilities. It's an honor for me to be here today, and hear from the other panelists.
Sorry. Now I you know with all these multiple screens to hear from the panelists about the realities of disability inclusive data. My name is Simone holiday and I work with International Organization for Migration as I mentioned, engineer that was a program officer
Today I want to talk to you about some tools and practices developed to understand and communicate the barriers and risks disabled people face and humanitarian settings, often with the human mobility dimension, whether internal displacement or migration.
Next slide please.
I want to start by talking a little bit about DTM. It's a tool mainly used to track and monitor displacement in places that have natural disasters also conflict, Haiti, and Iraq being some of our first operations. The scope of the program has been extended over the past years, and the ATM is now taking tracking other population movements through its mobility.
Sorry, flow monitoring component, more active in over 70 countries and have worked in over 100 countries so we have quite a broad global scope.
I also want to start with definitions and scope. I'm sorry because I have not seen that the slides. I, Yeah.
So I'm not sure where we are all gonna see more you I don't base to have your slides. Yeah, it's just, I was expecting a whole nother set up I had set myself up.
Yeah and I changed my slides on anyway. During my presentation I wanted to set the stage with definitions and context, as I described some of the tools to better describe disability in these complex environments.
Disability is the result of the interaction between someone's medical condition, their impairments or mental health conditions barriers, environment, and personal factors. So barriers in the environment, include things like lack of accessibility, negative attitudes stigma, lack of laws and personal factors, including things like gender financial situation IDP refugee migrant status, religion, education, neighborhood.
And then when you add specific vulnerabilities, with crisis in the mix, you get increased vulnerability, women with disabilities are more likely to experience harassment violence and sexual violence than women without disabilities, children, especially girls with disabilities are less likely to attend school, or experienced bully and abuse, while in school by their peers and teachers.
Persons with Disabilities risk losing their assistive devices, if they use any during force displacement or migration, which can worsen their medical condition limit their ability to communicate, or move. And then children with disabilities are exposed to more Child Protection violations, including domestic violence, and neglect.
And in the case of Syria, for example, over eight years of conflict has displaced millions damaged essential infrastructure and increased exposure to violence and injury. These risk not only increased individual vulnerability to physical or psychological difficulties. But persons with pre existing disabilities now faced increased risk of compounded injury, like I mentioned, or barriers to accessing accessing services.
So, the figures from a data collection exercise, conducted in Syria from the 27% of people age 12 and above, within Syria, found to have a disability. And this is significantly higher than the World Health Organization 15% that Frank mentioned earlier.
As you can imagine when working on emergencies involving human mobility weather migration natural disaster, there is a need for rapid reliable data and information on the places we work, so that we can count, who are count when when needed and identified barriers and risks, disabled people face. So when I'm thinking about data you need to think, for what purpose for water and sanitation we might use increased number of accessible might use disability data to help increase the number of accessible latrines and account site for shelter the percentage of households.
That could be rehabilitated with accessibility features for protection, we use barrier analysis to identify protection risks faced by people with disabilities and how to respond to them.
And for account management we think about how to ensure accessibility and account site and sort of dedicated committees.
So in terms of data, there's two main areas, there's data on prevalence and there's data on barriers.
If you want prevalence. The Washington group questions which were developed 20 years ago by the Washington group on disability statistics, after a un meeting on disability measurement.
They formed a set of questions that would reliably measure, disability, and a few years back, these questions were adopted to a short set of questions that can give us the prevalence, which is the proportion of the population will have a specific characteristic and a given time. These disability prevalence measures are complicated. They require investment. So where is not possible. One option is to use the 15% of global as an estimate.
In the interim period when there are no accurate, reliable statistics available in terms of barrier information, we want to look at information on the physical attitudinal communication barriers that person's with functional disabilities across different human mobility areas face.
And this is collected from can performance or persons with disabilities and of course with organizations of persons with disabilities. So people who are experts in the topic.
And we have a set of tools that help us collect intersect oral information on barriers that people with disabilities face. And these questions are always focused around the functional limitations.
So they look at what are the obstacles that people with a lot of difficulties in seeing, hearing, walking, communicating, understanding.
Or, for reasons other than their language spoken, based in earning an income for example. And then from there, the interviewer would hear the responses, and categorize them into physical barriers attitudinal barriers, institutional barriers.
And we have examples of those types of barriers already thought out in some of our toolkits.
Some of the examples that people who have difficulties, seeing walking hearing communicating understanding face in earning an income are obstacles on way to work.
Obstacles at the job site perceptions or beliefs of families that think that it's impossible for them to work or earn an income was attitudinal barriers bureau harassment, lack of documentation or don't have accessible information about where they can get a job.
We also have barrier questions about access to health care services, always structured around, difficulty seeing, hearing, walking communicating understanding, and then the attitudinal institutional and physical barriers that people with disabilities have in accessing that service, or, or that information.
And all of this has been well thought out and something that we call the disability inclusion field companion, and it's in the presentation, or it will be in the presentation.
Once we share it. It's a, it's basically a link of spreadsheets that have spreadsheets and well thought out, qualitative questions that have been coded into uniform responses about disability barriers and risk. I've also shared in the presentation some, some reports and links one from South Sudan. On some barrier analysis that our teams did and then another report from Syria. The same report I referenced earlier.
And I look forward to hearing your questions I've also left some references in the, in the presentation, the Washington group questions. And then some guidance on strengthening disability inclusion and humanitarian response plan.
Thanks again, and I look forward to continuing this discussion as Frank mentioned, we're not quite there yet. And there's still a way to go but I think there's enough interest and impetus to continue this. Thanks again. Bye.
Moderator: Thanks very much similar times also to you on the organizing team for your patience with the technology.
We make sure that the correct updated slides are also put on record and very clear messages from Simone's intervention, the need to look at both the prevalence as well as barriers, when considering the populations that we work with, resolving disabilities and inclusion and some, some excellent emerging practices and tools including the themes companion, as well as the, the survey tools. So thanks again someone indeed if there are any questions reactions experiences, participants wish to share, please feel free to use the chat box or the q amp a box and web that I'm very happy to give the floor to Joe very.
She has a background in public health, and excels, I should say, excels in interdisciplinary research looking at the intersection between migration and how an associate professor of wits University and john and spark joy is also the director of the African center for migration and society directs the African research universities. Align Center of Excellence in migration on mobility and also somehow finds the time to be vice chair of the global migration health and development Research Initiative.
Joe has in all the years we have all worked with her we've seen her commitment to social justice, to generating and communicating knowledge to improve responses to migration health and well being in southern Africa, and we look forward to hearing from Joe, and our perspectives from what's in the session, or what do you too.
Speaker 3 (Jo Vearey): And thanks very much Poonam and thanks colleagues for the invitation. And it's great to be here and I and I echo, you know the fact that we know that issues around disability in the context of migration are often left behind.
And the question that Frank posed around you know if people aren't counted, do they count. And I think that efforts that are increasing globally and, including through for example IOM and others, to try and improve the ways in which we collect but importantly what I'm going to do today is use the next few minutes to briefly share some findings from a scoping exercise that aim to map key issues relating to disability and migration in South Africa, with the idea being to generate empirical findings on the nature of the collective relationship that we know exists between migration and disability in the context of South Africa.
What I'm going to do is I'm in the chat box at the end or I'll add in the links but you'll see here that on the the front slide here, and my colleague Edward go very is I believe also on the call so thanks Ed Wood for, for being here, and, and James and young.
Our photojournalism team South Africans and South African based, who were commissioned as part of this study to undertake a photo journalism project which I think when we have a chance we're going to look at a few of the images now but I hope you will have the chance to look at this later on line.
And what I wanted to do today was draw on the findings from the report which was undertaken in collaboration with the IOM South African office. And, as well as the ways in which the images and the text have been generated through a different approach to data collection working with James and young. And just to sort of think about this question of doing data differently.
I know that I'm preaching to the converted I know that everyone on this call engages with and understands the importance of different forms of data. But I do think it's important sometimes remind ourselves of the value, and of the importance of these different kinds of data.
This research was undertaken in the context of covert and like many colleagues globally. This obviously changed the way in which are planned research could or couldn't take place.
And as a result, was the original plan was to work with local communities who are working with migrants with disabilities but also migrants with disabilities who run several of these organizations, it wasn't possible because of the context undertake face to face research.
And so this really presented a challenge.
When we have a commitment to ensuring inclusion in our programs and in our research what does it mean when we, as the so called research team struggled to engage and access those spaces.
This was also linked not only to issues around safety of being face to face with an individual, but also on national legislation around lockdown who was allowed to move.
Journalists had permission to move during this period of time. They were allowed to access different spaces and report on different stories. So this became an exciting opportunity to collaborate with people who I've had long standing relationships with young, for example, he's a journalist but he undertook a master's program so he himself brings a very different perspective to the ways in which a journalistic approach can also be used to explore evidence in different forms and formulations.
So, the experiences of migrants with disabilities based on the work that Jaan and James undertook are then woven into the final report and which is now online and obviously I'll add in the link later.
And I want to emphasize that, you know, a key outcome from the report with everyone involved is the need to ensure that cognizant of all ethical considerations research needs to include migrants with disabilities, as is the case for any work that we do.
And we need to ensure that the groups with him we're working, are actually represented and not in tokenistic ways.
So what I want to briefly do is just show you quickly into some of the data, some of the stories some of the images that were collated.
And what's important to acknowledge is this was combined with a more classic desk review a policy review with interviews remotely with key stakeholders and so forth.
And that's absolutely critical is recognizing two key things. One, the South Africa is yet to develop and implement appropriate policies strategies guidelines to support migrants with disabilities.
We know that where there are regional or international policies that focus on migrants with disabilities. These are only partially implemented.
And there is very little to no acknowledgement of the intersection between migration and disability at the level of policy and at the level of programming.
And we clearly identified a lack of reliable data regarding characteristics profile and migration trajectories of migrants with disabilities in South Africa, and key stakeholders who are involved in service provision including NGOs in particular, do not keep data desegregated by my grocery status, or those that are working with individuals with disability.
So they're not they're not just aggregating by migration status, but equally organizations working with migration migrants are not necessarily desegregating by disability status.
So on both hands we struggled to access, access data that could assist with with planning.
So I'm going to briefly just introduce you to a couple of individuals who were part of the project.
So this is hope, who participated in the project with her mother beauty and you can see her with her teacher at the bottom of the screen. So just a few words hope was born from from the the the journey that from the narrative that was collected hope was born without a right hand beauty her mother considers it a miracle that hope survived at all, because her twin was born severely deformed and died shortly after birth beauties life was tough, even before this loss.
She came to Johannesburg in 1996 from Plumstead in Zimbabwe hJ team and already a mother to look for work. She first went to a pizza shop, and then as a domestic worker, until her employer passed away.
This left her unemployed and struggling for several, several years. She also contracted HIV at some point in her life but does not know when baffling to feed her to elders children after falling over tuberculosis and being abandoned by her husband so her doing sex work for a period.
These challenges have taught her resilience, equality, she hopes to instill in her daughter to enable her to live as normal life as possible.
It's a desirable and from her first protectiveness of hope.
What I don't want with her, is if people see her like this they go, Ah, this child. That's what I don't like I get angry because they have to take her as a normal child beauty said, I don't want anyone to feel sorry for her.
If you come and ask me nicely what happened, I'll tell you, I don't have a problem. She was born like this. It's a normal disability. I'm not shy with her.
I go everywhere with her.
Here we introduced to Kenneth commander, he's 48, he lives with his wife and two of their children in a small room in an inner city building in Johannesburg.
KENNETH operates a small informal tuck shop from his room selling vegetables sweets and other stacks Tibet residents of the building, come and go, lost most of his eyesight as a child after he contracted measles.
I was living with my grandmother and she had no knowledge of my sickness, I ended up being affected. I can only see some light with my right eye, he said, having a disability doesn't mean we don't have ability, the very capable people, even when we are begging I know we shouldn't have to do that. I was well educated, but some people can't even understand life is so tight. You never know, you can end up being a street beggar are lying in the street.
The family of South that is a mash up on a 50 is one such family with blood nationalities and documentation.
His wife Sandra Lima 45 move to South Africa with a relative after both her parents died during the Mozambican Civil War Malema who is deaf has a son civil see So from a previous relationship.
He has a visual impairment and a physical disability. Yet, Masha Bonnie said neither of them ever struggled to access healthcare despite both being undocumented.
Masha Bonnie, who was born with a physical disability in his left leg and suffered a serious injury to his right leg. After falling into a five following an epileptic seizure spends most of his days sitting on a mat under a big tree outside the two rooms with the family of nine lips.
Originally from Mozambique, Uncle Cooley's leg was amputated after he suffered a horrific injury and attack on a train in 1984. After losing a number of family members in the war, there was the murder of his brother that prompted family members already living in the area, bordering South Africa Mozambique, to send a relative across the border and bring him to South Africa.
Only after he arrived in South Africa in 1989, was he able to get a prosthetic leg.
He still uses the same prosthetic. It is old and cracked, but I'm Cooley has been unable to get it replaced.
I'm going to end this simply with the fact that we know we need to generate quality and reliable data, and we need to build a strong evidence base. And I think that projects such as this, provide opportunities for starting to think about the ways that we can collect information in different ways and use it in collaboration with other forms of data, and to improve our responses.
So thanks for the opportunity.
Moderator: Thank you Joe, and well done to you, and the rest of the team working on this project.
Indeed welcome any links, you would like to share with everyone in the chat box. And thank you also for the loud and clear advice in terms of engaging with the Parsons we work with in this instance, speaking of migrants with disabilities, and indeed actively listening to their experiences and perspectives to do to interpret those in the context, as you've said of the other data that is selected.
So thanks again for sharing this, and I'm happy now to give the floor to Diana Hitchcock our humanitarian inclusion advisor with health beach international with specific expertise, working on promoting community based interventions to ensure inclusion of older horses and horses for disabilities.
She provides technical support to help age and partners humanitarian programs. Currently, for inclusive approaches, across reduction wash health livelihoods nutrition, among others, Diane on the floor is yours.
Speaker 4 (Diana Hiscock): And thank you very much. Well, thank you so much for letting me join this very special day.
It's very inspiring and difficult to follow the last two speakers. However, the opportunity for us here is to introduce a very interesting report that came out of the South America, and called a claim to dignity aging on the move and it was prepared by UNHCR and how page. Last year during this covert pandemic.
As a regional assessment to look at the situation of older persons. So people will say what we're talking about disability here. Yes, about 46% of older people have a disability which colleagues have alluded to earlier.
And this was the most amazing findings we've had from from this survey on the complexity that older people living in in this region.
So just to compliment my my seller Felipe Francisco and Flavia who are my colleagues who prepared this material, and I have the privilege of sharing some of the, the issues that they've discovered. So thank you for that.
So, I will just share some little outline of some of the points around this very interesting piece of work, which came out of a sudden sort of lightbulb moment, his colleagues have been saying we don't really know much about this specific population.
And we need to do something about it. So they set off to work in in El Salvador and Honduras, and Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, and the aim was to find people, and by telephone right over the code returns with absolutely no way moving know between 6069 70 or 79 or 80, years plus.
And within that group they met people who were older migrants border asylum seekers, out of attorneys, older and Tony displacing over deportees which just capitalized the challenges of this region of multiple types of displacement that many, many people
are facing. So, the results were quite obviously very revealing and the loss of learning. I think what I thought we would just would do is just to start with thinking, like, my colleague previous you mentioned to some some real case studies so if we look at this guy again, first of all, he was a farmer and fruit vendor, and he was came out of Columbia and that's where he was born.
But he, he made himself bread and pan gold. But then he was forced to seek asylum in Ecuador over 20 years ago.
Now he's 65, and he's not so strong, and he's not able to work as you did before, to earn money in the men in the informal economy.
He also because he's a refugee with this status, you can't get to the job market as colleagues, mentioned similar problem before and covert has done him no favors as many during this time.
He has a wife who's 79 years old. Likewise, she's not able to work anymore. And so this thing into destitution. He recorded that they have one meal a day now.
They're on the breadline, they may drink water in the afternoon, and they have no electricity. So this is really a complex picture around people's lives.
In this context, in needs a lot of understanding, and we think this this report has started to unpack some areas that we hadn't really considered enough before.
So what we did find very clearly, was that 43% of the older people in this survey were living with a disability. 47% are women. And 40, or older men, and Simone was saying we use the, the Washington group questions.
And they brought up this very high level of disability, especially around walking climbing stairs mobility and seeing the difficulty, its massive problems we keep finding in this region on the TV.
Some increasing concerns about remembering and concentrating, and we see this more related to the anxiety and stress in their living environments, and also the increased problem of hearing, which comes with age.
So, these are the four main areas have been picked up. And obviously, we need to think about how to better address this in future work, but it's very clear evidence that the, the clear impact of this on people's lives.
of being discriminated in their, in their locations in their communities, even within their families. And this figure, 82% is is far too high for us to ignore. And especially when we know the data that came back recognizes that people see that they're more discriminated due to their disability and more discrimination to because of their age, so we really have to think about how we can deal with that.
So, that within that framework for this data, we have to, to really take a step back to really think through how, how do we address these, these issues.
As we move ahead.
No. Another very complex area, health issues for older people with non communicable diseases, increasing as we age.
We can't move away from the fact that it's very common to have hypertension, mental health issues and older age and gastrointestinal issues, but they were very high here, but the issues of cardiac disease and diabetes and respiratory disease are also high but probably not as high as we had anticipated.
But the issue here is that if they are not treated, effectively, it can lead to disability in later life. So this is always a challenge that we again have to address when we're looking at health provision of health services.
The actual data came back that 42% of the people haven't accessed any health senses.
That's a lot of people, and we can you know understand the reasons no money, no health coverage available because of being in the migration so she's lucky documentation.
People don't know where the services are and they moved to New locations have money to get around on transport and the health services are too far away these are very common concerns of challenge access to health services.
But still, it's very high figures here, that really needs to be addressed to make sure everyone has equal access to some form of appropriate health care.
So, it is a very dismal picture in many ways. Yeah, but it doesn't get any better, because we see that when people are trying to access work. 70% of all the women with disability and 43% of all the men with disability, haven't got any work at all, and very little access to it, and especially now in the informal economy. So this is really a staggering figures that, as, as we need to do it that she has to make sure you look at it across the board, but other age groups to really understand the complexities of this type of data.
So, if they can't get a job.
We also find that most of them needed support and care and caregiving is increasingly challenging for a family, who, who look after their own family members, which means they often can't go to work, conferences school, and that impacts on their level of economy, and their standard of living, which is obviously going to get worse. So, again, these these stories, these these sort of these stories this data is painting a very complex picture that the data has really brought up to the top of the top of the tree to say we have a little bit of a wake up call here to better address.
Older people and their families, to make sure that they are given more access to appropriate services. So that was the main findings that I wanted to highlight for today, because there are many more so very large before, so please do have a look and lots of videos which really embrace thing and interesting to look at the you know the whole point is what do we do with all this data apart from obviously looking programmatically.
We have a call to action, which is obviously, we want to really raise the voice of older people with disabilities here to make sure they are moved to a priority group, not left behind, which they often are, and make sure the funding is available to be available for all.
And this report has been very very useful to raise the voice, especially in Latin America, about a person's disabilities. And it goes into our ongoing global movement to better recognize that if one thing we can do with our data collection is make sure that not only use the Washington group questions, but make sure that age cohorts, go above 60 plus 6069 7079 80 plus. And it gives you a very revealing information on multiple disabilities, which older people live with.
So on that point as a whole and the thank you very much for letting me join you. Thank you.
Moderator: Thank you very much, Diana, also for sharing the information about this, this report, and indeed flagging some very very relevant issues around the prevalence of disabilities, the challenges faced by older migrants in many different situations, and also making that link with the caregivers and the support provided to them so thanks indeed, and having the beta.
Sure forces us to think also about solutions in these contexts. Forces us to think also about solutions in these contexts. So with that, we move on to the fourth, speaker for our webinar today. Javier that I'm based in Geneva, Switzerland, Javier is statistician with you when otter, and part of the Center for Humanitarian data.
He has almost 20 years of experience working with the UN, as a statistician in New York when he worked on system monitoring for me. Geez. He has also worked with the UN Office on Drugs and Crime in Austria, and most recently currently.
He also has worked, developing business intelligence models to evaluate UN Human Resource reforms in co2 emissions hobby after, the floor is yours.
Speaker 5 (Javier Teran): Thank you for them for the, for the introduction and thank you to the panelists and to the audience for joining us today is always hard to come at the end of their listening such a great and compelling stories.
I try to do my best and take the last minute just to share with you a little bit about the work that the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian efforts center for humanitarian data is doing on data sharing.
And in particular, our efforts to make data about people with disabilities, available on xdx, so I will share with you some examples of very interesting data that have been shared on X the X and also some of the work that we have been doing on this topic.
So maybe very briefly you're introducing the humanitarian the patients, which is an open platform for sharing data across humanitarian crisis, and an organization's launch in July, 2014, they go away X the X is to make the easy to find a useful for analysis.
Today there are approximately 18,000 data sets on xdx many with some sort of of information about people with disability, but it's very interesting line number of datasets.
So the platform is very easy to find you can just type in Google somebody during the day change and you will find us otherwise you can go to data.com data.org.
Maybe very brief briefly I just want to mention what is the type of data set that you can find on xx. So we call humanitarian they do all those data sets related to to any information about the context of a crisis that means the boundaries of our country the some national boundaries for the different, let's say provinces in Afghanistan are available now on eggs the eggs also population figures data says our own eggs the eggs the network on a country the road network, the health facilities education facilities,
the people that need assistance as well, is on xdx or all the data about the people affected and the needs are, in the form of a, of data sets on x dx. come with gender and age desegregation, and in some instances, also you can find the breakdown of people with disabilities on those data sets. There are also several datasets related to what organizations are doing to help those around those, those people that need support. So you can find the typical Tw that are job producers who is doing what where, for all, most all the active crisis around the world.
So, those are around 18,000 data sets from about 296 organizations so many un organizations are already sharing data, actively sharing data on the platform so you can find data from our great partners from IOM also from your new car from uni said from, from, you know, aside from NGOs like reach like ABC, like jeeps like a caps, all these organizations are great partners of X the X and they are constantly sharing data on the platform.
Last year, this is that this is from last year, we had a bit more than 1.3 million users coming to xdx looking for data looking for data that they can use for their for their search for their analysis to write their stories.
So 1.3 came. Also as should say that last year and like we all believe in on with this pandemic was especially, many people, last year and this year have been coming to xex looking for data about Corbett.
What is the number of cases what are the number of that, the callbacks vaccination program has been distributed also looking for the people in, Ed, Luke and also for gender and age and disability desegregation are on the, on the search of these uses.
We are focusing on X the X on a set of 27 countries, and those are the countries for which there is an interagency response plan. So country like Afghanistan Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, and many others are in our focus so we want to increase the availability of data for those countries and also create awareness of the data that that exists but also where are those data gaps. And another statistic that is giving us like very positive.
Like incentive is that last year in 2020 we saw a huge number of downloads, so people were coming to their platform looking for data, and they downloaded to point to millions of data set.
So we have a rate of, like, every one every five visitors on xex finds some sort of data set that is useful for them, and they download it so that is quite promising.
Now let me you'll move to to our efforts, Nikki data about people with disabilities, available next week so I seem on and Professor Joe and and Diana very distracting.
and what are their needs, but from the data point of view, maybe to highlight that. When we have access to people with disability data we can better understand where they are, what are they will net abilities and what are their needs.
We can in the humanitarian sector we can also target their systems in a bed in a better way more efficiently. And also we can. Once we know, once we know the profiling we know the vulnerability and we know the needs, we can integrate this into a more comprehensive response plan. So, I thought would be nice to include that. Also we've been saying that you know when we we all know that there is an estimation from the region that approximately 15% of the world's population may have a disability but we shouldn't forget that. That's just an average.
So, All my life I've been a statistician I can tell you that the average is one of the statistics that I dislike the most you know because he's not really include you know the disparity that exists, or this of distributions, and so on but to give a number is fine, but we should keep in mind that also one in five women is likely to experience disability their entire life. About half of the people that are 16 years and plus.
They have week have a disability and also Frank was mentioned in that the his opening statement and wanting then children have a disability. So those are also statistics that we should keep, keep in mind, and then looking for the humanitarian response view, we know that we all suffer the impacts of our of our house our, we want we want escape from from an earthquake from a flood, we want escape we will all be impacted, we have to recognize that people with disability they experienced this phenomena,
these are starting in a different way. So we should just keep in mind that if these people with disability are not integrated in our statistics and not well counted in our analysis, we, they have they should that they cannot be included in that, you know, you know would way.
Just to give you how many data sets we have on the platform, as we have been mentioning, we doing, everybody's doing a good fit, hasn't been enough. We don't have that many data sets with disability right down there was the last count that we have an is that they are approximately less than 500 data set with some type of disability data. They, the type of data says that we have these either some data sets, they indeed collect primary collection primary data, so they when they conducted a survey they
select a sample, they use the Washington group set of questions to collect the data and they share it on xx all those they use secondary data, which is also as valid as the first case, you know, collecting data is very expensive accessibility is not so easy, especially in our, in our settings. So, using reliable secondary data is also important. And then some others data set that we have on xdx they basically use the standard, so they apply the 50% rate to the different groups that they were studying. So that is kind of like the general type of data set that we cover next, the very few but really counting with my with my two hands.
They do show people with disability plus breakdown by gender breakdown by age, but I haven't seen a good data center in addition of that shows that diversity among the person with disability so it's an area where we should work harder, some good examples that we have is data that the rich colleagues Sharon XZX is about the multi cluster needs assessment. Fantastic data said I will share my slides later you want to go deeper on this, this is a fantastic data set that they that reach have put together in
Iraq, they conducted a survey, looking at 11,000, households, and they provide the, the, the number of people with with disability. Another example of a data set is the work that my colleagues in Afghanistan are doing when they put together the, the data set about people with needs for for next year so they use data from the Asia Report.
And they estimated with a channels, and then our colleagues in Sudan, they also account for the people you need, and they use the 15% expected so good data sets for you to look.
Also, that lead more than a year ago we have a data fellow and the Center for humanitarian data in The Hague, that he was looking at the stability data in in a multi sector needs assessment, he was using so many statistical tools used to see if there is some correlation some relations between the Washington set of questions, and some of the vulnerabilities of the people and just to to close.
I just want to say that one of the most significant challenge with x dx is to ensure that sensitive and personal information is not exposed on x dx. So, as the as the saying goes through it starts to gain, but easy to lose.
So we have made a concerted effort to maintain and build trust on our community by using data responsibility. So, I think I have to say on this group everybody knows that we have to protect the identity of the people that we, we tried to help by not exposing name last names he may have other it says location, but also we should keep in mind that there may be other variables that when we combine them, we could distill it a device somebody put that person on risk.
So on that note, I just want to stop and think the organizers for this opportunity. Back to you put them.
Moderator: Thank you very much, Javier. I'd like to invite any of the attendees to either raise their hand, or give us any questions in the chat. We will take an extra five to 10 minutes if there are any, but wanted to mention Javier excellent examples and thank you for flagging the existing availability of some good data, especially from, you know, key humanitarian contexts. And indeed We hope that our amongst our attendees.
Also, future program and research colleagues who might be interested in doing more with such a valuable data, and also the importance of both data sharing. And then also looking at the data to identify both the needs and wonder abilities and also the capacities and features of resilience amongst the populations we serve.
And I'm just going to see if any participants have their hands raised, or any questions in the chat.
Okay, so we do have one question from Eliana Moroccan who raises. I believe the plant. IFMS, the forum on migration statistics in 2022, and indeed. Important to note if and how this will be addressed the topic of disabilities there and Esther, please go ahead and maybe also share in a sentence or two. What I found this will be without attendees.
IOM staff (Esther): As far as I know, I'm not sure that I'm the right person to address this question. Since I'm not working on that. Elisa I think can answer there.
IOM staff (Elisa): Thank you so much Esther, and. Thanks. Thanks for the question Eliana, and indeed the international forum on migration statistics will be held for the third time in October, 2022 This is the third edition of the largest migration data conference, and indeed was still I believe with the CO organizers, you Endesa And though we CD discussing the final themes that will be included for the, for the conference, and that we will look with the organizers to see how we can include a disability topics in these going forward.
Moderator: Thanks about, Elisa, and I have one more question that I will read out, and in the meantime I'll request the attention of everyone to a brief survey from Carla Rojas in the chat box if you can kindly click on that link and take a few minutes to complete it. We have a question from our Asha Manohar and what can governments through national statistical offices do to improve data on this topic. We've heard the benefits of combining different approaches and collecting data on migrants with disabilities.
How can governments harness this type of activity?
And really, the floor is open, I wonder if you're from the South African perspective, or even Javier from the UN, or cha experiences, wish to reflect on this How can be get national governments, more engaged and how can they do more in this area.
Speaker 2 (Jo Vearey): Thanks for now, I mean just quickly I think, you know, I think that one of the opportunities and we're seeing this at the moment is actually, you know the ways in which national statistics agencies are currently looking to improve the ways in which they're collecting information on migration. And then that's providing an opportunity to push for intersecting issues, someone who works on migration and health it's provided important opportunities for pushing conversations around what information we need.
That looks at the intersections between migration and health within that disability can become a become also an issue that we push for. And I think that that's part of why this combining of different approaches becomes so important.
We know that the quantitative statistics is needed and necessary, but we know translating that into uptake by some colleagues in some sectors and some government colleagues can be quite difficult.
And so there is a question about with a combination of mixed approaches for example using, you know photography or other visual methods, can we use that as a way as a different form of evidence that when combined with the statistical data can allow for engagement in different ways.
And that's something our center and I know many others have been working on which is exploring how through the production of knowledge and data. We can also be communicating that and targeting particular groups and constituencies and involving them also in that so not only working for example migrants with disabilities. But how do we bring in departments and social development, or other you know ministries that are responsible for improving approaches responses programs into the research process itself and ensuring that there is that collective agenda developed. Thanks.
Speaker 5 (Javier Teran): Just, just to echo echo, echo that and also maybe to, to encourage organizations and governments to open the data you know sometimes one of the main challenges that we face is to access this information so we could make this data more available, and then combine these data with some narratives like the Sunday has been working a lot on producing data stories and that data story means, combining evidence and an actual facts, with some narrative so people can access that we are not expecting that everybody will be a statistician I will understand that what charts or graphs. But, providing a story a compelling story like the one that Professor go was shared in and put in some data behind that I think that is always very powerful.
That increases also the awareness for both availability of data but also for the data gaps that exist in many countries over clients IBM and also echoing you know the the point that came up about engaging with the communities themselves so engaging with Persons and migrants with disabilities in, in getting their own feedback and, and having them as co designers of how this data is collected and analyzed have them taken up So indeed, all very valid points.
Moderator: I'm getting some good nods from Simone. Any last remarks Simone, and before we. So I'd like to time again everyone from wherever you are, for joining the session of big time so again to the panelists and a very big time to the organizers, I see Carla on the screen there are many behind the scenes.