The Washington Group Blog

This blog presents five criteria developed to help humanitarian workers make the best decisions regarding the use of the WG tools for the collection of disability data and data disaggregation by disability in their work.

When a disability starts affects how that disability influences someone's life. How can we add to the Washington Group questions to collect this information?

Surveys are not always delivered face to face, and especially in times like the current Covid-19 pandemic situation, the option of delivering a survey over the phone can be attractive – both in terms of not having interviewers be a vector of disease transmission and for improving the response rate from people reticent to speak face to face with someone they do not know in the middle of a health-related lockdown.

The World Disability Report is often cited as estimating that 15% of the population has a disability, but most surveys using the Washington Group Questions get a lower rate. This blog explores the reasons behind this difference, and how it should be interpreted.

In some countries, people with albinism are automatically considered to have a disability and are also the victims of multiple forms of discrimination some very extreme. This blog addresses the three key questions: Can the WG-SS identify people with albinism? Are people with albinism included among those identified as having a disability by the WG-SS? If the WG-SS can’t identify people with albinism, can they be modified to do so?

This post discusses issues in collecting disability data in humanitarian situations, and the experience of using the Washington Group Questions in those settings.

Girls Education Challenge (GEC) is a flagship DFID programme aiming to help up to a million of the world’s poorest girls across 18 countries to improve their lives through education.

Administrative data have been suggested as a means to analyze the prevalence of disability as well as for disaggregating outcomes, such as employment or poverty, by disability status. This blog discusses the problems with taking this approach, and the conditions necessary for using such data for these purposes.

Asking people on surveys if they have a disability leads to underestimates of disability prevalence. As this blog explains, the preferred strategy is to ask about difficulties in functioning. This is the approach of the Washington Group questions.

Persons with disabilities have remained largely invisible in data collection efforts. Therefore, commitments to adopt questions developed by the Washington Group on Disability Statistics at the Global Disability Summit are noteworthy. Numbers alone, however, cannot tell the whole story. We need to harness the potential of integrating quantitative and qualitative evidence in order to effectively respond to the lived realities of persons with disabilities and their families.