The Role of Community-Based Rehabilitation in Poverty Reduction
Abstract
Over the last thirty years Community-based Rehabilitation (CBR) has emerged as an effective method of providing rehabilitation services to the population with disabilities in developing countries. Although CBR programmes have been recognised as a strategy for poverty reduction by the World Health Organisation (WHO, 2003), CBR workers and their managers face the challenge of understanding the causes and effects of poverty, and contributing towards poverty alleviation.
The purpose of this paper is to describe the role of community-based rehabilitation in poverty reduction. A brief review on Community-Based Rehabilitation and Poverty Reduction is followed by an assessment of different models of disability, to find which one provides the best framework to understand the overall picture of disability and poverty.
The Capabilities Approach, developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, seems to offer a sound basis to understand the relationship between poverty and disability.
This paper concludes that CBR can play a crucial role in poverty reduction programmes by expanding the capabilities of people with disabilities.
Authors
Copyright (c) 2015 The Author(s)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License By-NC-ND 4.0 that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
