WG Country Disability Reports

About

In 2020, the Washington Group on Disability Statistics (WG) membership endorsed the development of a standardized series of reports on disability. Produced by member countries, the series highlights member countries’ progress in advancing disability statistics, showcases the availability and utility of high-quality disability data, and documents best practices for reporting prevalence and disaggregating key indicators of participation in society.

Purpose

The main purpose of the country disability reports is to disseminate basic, comparable disability statistics for as many countries as possible. The template, content, and analytic approaches for the reports were developed and endorsed by WG membership. 

The analyses presented in the reports are based on the data collection and analysis methodologies developed by the WG, including data collected using the Washington Group Short Set on Functioning (WG-SS) and the use of WG guidance for creating a dichotomous disability status indicator.

The country disability reports follow a standard format for text and charts, but there is flexibility for presenting additional results depending on regional or country-specific interests and data availability, and for substituting other topics if data on the standard indicators are not available from the data source used.

Estimates presented in the reports may differ from related estimates reported by countries’ national statistical offices or other government agencies. Differences can arise due to several factors, including the use of different definitions of disability or age groupings, use of different terminology, and changes introduced during the process of standardizing the text and figures used in the final reports. In addition, the estimates reported in this report series are age-adjusted, using the 2020 world population as a standard, to allow for cross-country comparisons. Unadjusted estimates or age-adjusted estimates that use a different standard will differ from those presented here.

Report Characteristics

The country reports are intended to be short so that burden on statistical offices is minimized. As a result, they provide a high-level summary of key disability data. The shortest reports may include only one example of a disaggregated outcome. Most reports include several outcomes disaggregated by disability. Reports can be longer, or expanded even further, to provide additional detail to meet regional or country-specific needs. There are minimum standards for content, but the decision to include additional information is made by each country and depends, in part, on availability of data.

All reports include standard language that describes:

• the importance of disability,
• how disability is defined and conceptualized,
• the Washington Group on Disability Statistics, and
• how the Washington Group Short Set on Functioning (WG-SS) is used to identify the population with disabilities.

All reports contain a set of standard data figures covering:

• the prevalence of disability by age,
• the prevalence of disability by domain and sex,
• outcome measures disaggregated by disability status (including, if available, educational attainment, employment, family income or other economic measure(s)), and
• country-specific data charts, if desired and data are available.