Definition

Publicly financed disability protection benefits (i.e. non-contributory) are complementary to disability benefits provided through social insurance (i.e. contributory) and cover people who do not qualify for benefits under social insurance, including children with disabilities, people in working age without entitlements from contributory disability schemes and older persons with disabilities.

Rationale

Disability benefits are one element in the overall architecture of the social protection system that focuses on guaranteeing income security for people with disabilities. In addition, social protection systems need to ensure coverage of disability-related extra costs, access to affordable, quality health services for people with disabilities, including assistive devices, access to support and care services and other services such as early childhood development and disability-inclusive employment services.

People with disabilities across the life cycle are at particular risk of poverty and social exclusion because they face greater obstacles in generating income while at the same time facing higher living costs due to their disability-specific needs. In addition, family members, overwhelmingly women and girls, of children and adults with high support needs, have less education and employment opportunities due to time dedicated to providing unpaid care and support.

Evidence shows that well-designed disability benefits can contribute significantly to the inclusion and empowerment of people with disabilities to facilitate their ability to live independently in the community. They can be the basis for more extensive support such as care giver/third person support benefits, which can reduce the need for some of the unpaid care services from family members or compensate partially unpaid care. As such, they also have a gender impact since it is still women and girls who provide the vast majority of unpaid care work in most societies.

Key features

Benefit design

According to international standards, disability benefits should be anchored in national laws and regulations and clearly specify the range, qualifying conditions and levels of the benefits. Benefit levels should allow a life in health and decency, and promote the full and effective participation of people with disabilities in the social, economic, cultural and political life. Benefits should be paid throughout the duration of the contingency.

Eligibility

Designing a disability benefit or other services, concessions and support for people with disabilities presupposes the ability of the public administration not only to attribute a “disability status” but also to assess support needs to design a package of support measures that best responds to these needs. These disability identification, assessment and certification processes are a crucial and complex step in providing disability social protection and support. If flawed, they can result in limiting access to existing benefits and exclude some groups of persons with disabilities.

From a disability-rights perspective, it is important to place the emphasis on barriers and support needed rather than focusing only on the medical condition and impairment. The UNCRPD Committee recommends that countries make disability assessment and certification easily accessible for all eligible persons with disabilities, avoid multiple disability assessment and certification processes for different disability-related benefits provided by different entities. Overall, the mechanism should be easily accessible, reliable, accurate, consistent, appropriate, cost-efficient, rapid and user-friendly – an equation that is challenging to resolve, in particular where institutional capacity of the public administration is limited. Disability management information systems at scale in different contexts have proven to be a game changer for mastering this challenge.

In addition to disability status, some disability benefit schemes are also poverty targeted. Poverty targeted disability benefits that are not combined with other categorical disability cash transfers, are often not complying with key principles enshrined in international standards and have been criticised for several reasons, including:

• Often using the household as the unit of analysis, thereby potentially underestimating the vulnerability and socio-economic situation of persons with disabilities themselves and potentially undermining their autonomy.
• Not accounting for the disability-related costs which impact actual standard of living and participation of persons with disabilities and their household.
• The risk to magnify exclusion of people in need by combining potential exclusion from disability certification processes with exclusion errors resulting from poverty targeting methods and processes.
• Limiting the effect of benefits on economic empowerment as poverty targeted benefits would not help cover the disability related cost to seek and keep work that persons with disabilities face.
• The stigmatizing effects of benefits targeted at the poor

Recognizing these limitations, some countries have introduced unique universal categorical benefits or affluence-tests instead of poverty targeted disability benefits or a combination of poverty targeted benefits with universal or affluence tested disability allowance to cover disability costs. Excluding high-income households produces significantly lower targeting errors. For disability benefits in particular, it is important that these schemes recognize that people with disabilities face extra costs. This should be reflected both in setting the eligibility thresholds, as well as when determining benefit levels.

Participation of OPDs

Finally, a key principle enshrined in the Convention on the rights for people with disabilities is the participation of people with disabilities and their representative organizations in any design and planning of policy instruments to support people with disabilities.

For further guidance on the design and implementation of disability-inclusive social protection see:

• IDB 2023 Policies to Promote the Inclusion and Well-being of People with Disabilities: Evidence and Knowledge Gaps
• Towards Inclusive Social Protection Systems: Enabling Participation and Inclusion of Persons with Disabilities