 Hello everyone. Today we explore how COVID-19 has affected disabled people across the globe. Vera Kubens from the University of Birmingham in the UK will let us know more about the impact of COVID-19 on disabled people in low and middle income countries. What kind of exclusion were disabled people subjected to? And in what sectors? And what can we learn for the future? Again, our speaker is Vera Kubens. I am Rodrigo Silva from Quercita2Press. And this is Let's Talk About Social Inclusion. Hi Vera, welcome to our episode. Hello, thank you very much for inviting me. So an obvious question perhaps. Why is this topic important? So this topic is important because the majority of disabled people live in the global south but usually academia focuses on disabled people in the global north and is very much led by scholars in the global north. So our research focuses particularly on the impact of COVID-19 on the global south and we highlight that disabled people have been actively and systematically de-prioritised during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic and disabled people in the global south are disproportionately affected by poverty and that is well documented. And we also show that that has been compounded by the impact of the pandemic. And also what was very important for us is to show that while that sort of disadvantage is often used to justify that disabled people are inherently vulnerable and reinforcing medical ideas about disabled people as weaker or inherently vulnerable, we want to show that that vulnerability is actually socially created and is the result of being actively and systematically de-prioritised by decisions that were made during the pandemic. And we've also found that there was very little evidence that anything has really changed after previous disasters or pandemics so for us it is about documenting the impact that the pandemic has had so that there is that evidence and there is that accountability. Of course before we jump to to explore more about the findings of your study and you touched upon that a bit what were you hoping to find so what was the research gap? So as I said there isn't really a lot of evidence that anything has changed from previous emergencies. So really looking at disability from a social point of view is a gap in itself so really we wanted to take that approach to show how disabled people have or have not been included during pandemic management decisions and our research is based on a literature review so it was secondary evidence we were looking at and we wanted to identify how disabled people have been affected in health, economy, education, community and highlight how they've been marginalised not just in one sector but across really the whole of society and that focus kind of beyond just an individual sector was really important to us to show that issues cannot be addressed in isolations and collect evidence that can inform both future research into disabled people's experience as well as campaigning on policy and we very much looked not just summarise the evidence but looked at kind of what kind of evidence there was and what there wasn't as well so particularly one of our findings is that most of the research came from mostly NGOs and so disabled people's voices weren't represented and there also wasn't a lot of peer-reviewed academic research so that in itself is kind of a key finding so we highlight critically what was and wasn't documented and who is telling disabled people's stories absolutely you have started a bit what would you highlight about the findings we found four themes that really went across all of the sectors across health education employment and community and these were that firstly disabled people have been actively prioritised in emergency planning for the pandemic and despite the fact that there are many countries that have now signed up to the UN conventions for the rights of persons with disability as soon as the pandemic hit that sort of went out of the window and disabled people were at worst excluded and at best they were an afterthought kind of try to shoehorn in after the policies had already been made or policies just weren't implemented and then I think the second finding I've already touched upon is really the medicalisation of disability that it's still very much seen as the medical problem or deficit problem that is something wrong with the person so that there were many countries had protocols around who it was eligible for emergency care and that involved making judgments around disabled people's quality of life that they have that their lives are less worth living and like I mentioned labelling disabled people vulnerable without questioning why they are vulnerable and who makes them vulnerable then the third theme is really that all the issues that disabled people have faced during the pandemic were interconnected so you can't just look at health or education or the economy in isolation or you can you can't resolve them in isolation and that's something that we kind of really highlight in terms of development initiatives which look at very much quick fixes with limited funding and that's not how you resolve issues but really for example the issue of food poverty highlighted that it's not it's an economic issue but it was also an issue in terms of access to places where food was distributed and it's also an issue that again impacted health because people were having nutritional deficiencies and so it's really kind of an issue that spans across the sectors and it's really important to kind of consider the interconnection between these issues to achieve sustainable change and then for us the final probably most important theme that came out was the involvement of disabled people in decision-making in everything that affects them and how important that is so as I said there was a lot of evidence that didn't come from disabled people but from other people talking about about disabled people and the global disability rights motto is nothing about us without us so it's about talking to disabled people to understand their concerns involved them in the planning process so they are not excluded and we've also particularly found that in many cases where governments were failing to provide food for example it was disabled people's organizations who stepped up and kind of organized things locally to get food to the members so really the role of disabled people's organizations is extremely crucial of course and can these findings impact somehow in terms of public or social policies or has something been already impacted so I think there's a strong message from us for policymakers to engage with disabled people and consider them in all policy-making and then follow that through to implementations so not just make the policy but make sure that they are implemented so there's more engagement needed with disabled people and their organizations for NGOs but also for researchers to work together to co-produce research and work actually with disabled people and work with them to amplify their voices rather than speak for them and we our work is now included but we're still working with the UN partnership for the rights of persons with disabilities who initially kind of asked us to produce this work and to inform their programming in terms of disability and development so based on our findings we developed a framework to carry out situational analysis in countries to assess the situation for disabled people in countries and ensure that the work that UNRPD commission is targeted effectively rather than focusing on quick fixes of course we have touched upon some of the findings that your article revealed the so what of your research let's now focus on now what which you also did a bit in the previous questions how can we further close this gap in the literature that you mentioned because your article touched upon several areas as you said mental health economics also not only disabled people so how to address this topic more in the future so I think as I said our research was focusing particularly on secondary data but there's a lot more evidence needed in terms of original evidence that is generated and particularly beyond the first wave of the academics so we focus on the first wave of the pandemic so really there needs to be more research around kind of how things will manage further on particularly around equitable access to vaccination which is something that's sort of beyond the scope of really what we were looking at in terms of the time frame of our research so there's a re-identified a number of gaps around around that and particularly education as well there's very little around access to education for disabled children and not just during lockdowns but also the impact on returning to school and attainment gaps and generally there doesn't seem to be a lot of numerical evidence emerging particularly around impact on death rates of disabled people compared to the general population the impact on poverty which is very difficult to quantify and then the impact particularly on people who live in institutions and even where that data has been gathered there isn't really any baseline data to compare it to so I think there's a wider effort required to kind of collect that data routinely so there is a baseline to measure any new data against and that's something that's a really key recommendation for my research and again there's definitely more work to be done about developing ways in which disabled people's voices and can be better included in research and particularly disabled voices from the global south and disabled researchers and how disabled people can be more involved in research to co-produce knowledge very you have studied these topics before so can you provide some additional resources and materials for our listeners about the topic discussed today so we have a full literature review report available on a project website which is disabilityandeseach.org under current projects and we've also hosted a number of webinars where we've spoken to disabled people from the global south about the experiences they're available on our project youtube channel as well as a workshop that we ran with a number of other case studies into COVID-19 on how to use creative methods and how to build research partnerships with the global south we've also published some articles in the conversation blog about the impact and about off COVID-19 on people in the global south and about learning points for disability inclusive recovery and I think one of the main really useful resources for our literature review was the international disability alliances voice of people with disabilities campaign which shares dozens of stories from disabled people of what it was actually like for them in different countries during the pandemic and it's a really really powerful kind of statement of firsthand experiences and the challenges people faced as well as the resilience and the incredible activism that people displayed better to close our episode if there is anything you want our audience to remember about this talk a punchline of today's discussion what would it be I think it's about talking to disabled people working with us and collaborating with disabled people listen to disabled people about the experiences rather than talking about us and make sure that we are involved in everything that affects us straight to the point Vera it was a pleasure thank you very much this podcast is powered by quasi tattoo press you can listen to this episode on the let's talk about social inclusion websites on quasi tattoo press youtube channel and whatever you get your podcast