Paving the Way to Ensure Employment Opportunities for People with Disabilities in Bangladesh

The Social Innovation

Magnitude of the Problem, and its Root Causes

In Bangladesh, only one-third of people with disabilities (in the employable age) manage to find meaningful employment. 

During their participation in the Dela Program, co-created by Ashoka and IKEA Social Entrepreneurship in 2020, the ABF team identified key factors hindering the inclusion of people with disabilities in government programs and policies:
-    Employment for people with disabilities is not included in the national employment target, and only 2 out of 140 social protection schemes are inclusive of people with disabilities
-    A clause in one of the social protection schemes providing tax incentives for companies for hiring people with disabilities remains underutilized due to a lack of awareness among employers
-    Inaccessible infrastructure and information
-    Limited education and training programs
-    Inconsistent data on the population of people with disabilities amongst the different governmental agencies
-    A prevailing charity mindset towards people with disabilities

Based on their systems change analysis, the ABF team are on a mission to address the inconsistencies in data on the number of people with disabilities which leads to their exclusion from social protection schemes by working on improving the formal data collection processes in Bangladesh.

Strategy to Catalyze a Network of Changemakers towards the Targeted Mission

The strategy includes working with the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics to accurately include people with disabilities in comprehensive disability surveys, labor force surveys, and the National Census. Concurrently, collaborating with key partners across sectors to empower family members of people with disabilities as changemakers who participate accurately in the data generation process.

Some of the tactics they deployed towards the mission as a part of the strategy include:

1) Collaborating with the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics in Improving Data Collection Mechanisms  

Bangladesh’s formal data collection systems have struggled with generating consistent data on people with disabilities. For instance, the 2011 census indicated that 1.41% of Bangladesh’s population had disabilities, while the 2016 household income and expenditure survey indicated 6.94%. These discrepancies have hindered the government's ability to appropriately include people with disabilities in social protection schemes and allocate funds for employment programs that incentivize corporations to hire people with disabilities.

The ABF team started working closely with the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics to

- help them include people with disabilities properly in the comprehensive disability survey, the labor force survey, and the National Census. This has involved supporting the Bureau including 11 types of people with disabilities in the census questionnaire
- create the training modules for the census data enumerators, supervisors and master trainers.

2) Collaborating with Key Partners across Sectors to Involve Families and Organizations that work with People with Disability in the Data Collection Processes

The ABF team combined a systems approach with a human-centred approach to ensure the process was inclusive and accurately captured the problem's magnitude. They did so by:

- launching an awareness campaign with media partners that would be accessible to people with disabilities. To aid the awareness creation, the initiative drew support and endorsement from the Prime Minister of Bangladesh, aiming to generate accurate data that would catalyze the inclusion of people with disabilities in Bangladesh’s employment policies and social protection schemes.   
- partnering with and training more than 127 grassroots organizations that support people with disabilities around Bangladesh, to educate the family members of the people with disabilities they serve on how to respond to the questions of the census officers so that accurate data is captured. 

Despite these efforts, the census still reported only 1.43% of the population as people with disabilities. According to a grassroots survey by ABF, this resulted from data collectors not properly gathering information or asking the questions on disability.

The ABF team continue to work with the government to ensure accurate data collection and inclusion of people with disabilities in national policies, programs, and social protection schemes.