To ensure that persons with disabilities are protected and assisted during humanitarian emergencies, reliable and up-to-date information is needed on the number of individuals with a disability in the affected population and the barriers they face. The fact that disability-disaggregated data are scarce – especially in humanitarian situations – has garnered considerable political commitment to further improve data availability. The slow progress towards improving disability-disaggregated data in humanitarian situations is partly a result of the wide diversity of the crises themselves. Different types of emergency contexts pose varying challenges for data collectors and impact persons with disabilities in different ways.
This publication presents four humanitarian case studies: the 2015 Nepal earthquake, the ongoing humanitarian response in Somalia, the Rohingya refugee operation in Bangladesh, and the European migrant and refugee crisis. Each example provides perspectives on the importance of disability-disaggregated data in shaping humanitarian actors’ planning and implementation processes.
The publication also briefly documents progress in policies and guidelines related to disability data in the humanitarian sector and reviews the existing tools and mechanisms for gathering data on persons with disabilities.