International Labor Organization, Cooperatives for the Disabled: Organization
and Development, ILO, Geneva, 1978.
The authors of this book - one a small enterprise development specialist
and the other a rehabilitation professional - have come together to see
what disabled people can achieve as entrepreneurs and to examine the potential
of self-employment as an option for those who want to and are able to earn
their own living. The book is the outcome of a survey of 53 businesses run
by disabled people in several Asian and African countries. At its core are
16 case studies showing in detail how the disabled entrepreneurs succeeded
in self-employment, and highlighting the problems they faced.
Community Based Rehabilitation News, International Newsletter from Appropriate
Health Resources & Technologies Action Group Ltd.
Examples of topics from recent issues: Alternative limbmaking, the Logmobile
(a self-propelled cart), tricycles from India, How to make cutting-shears
for sheet metal, handgrips made from easily available materials for writing
utensils or tools. In the July 1989 issue David Werner, a disabled community
organizer and rehabilitation expert, author of Where there is no doctor
and Disabled Village Children among others, describes several innovative
examples of Third World projects run by disabled people themselves producing
rehabilitation services and assistive devices as income generating projects.
He writes:
"While many exciting and innovative things are happening in programs
for disabled persons in developing countries, my general impression is that
there are only a very few programs in which disabled persons themselves
play a leading role. In most of the programs I visited, whether government,
religious or private, disabled persons tend to become the objects rather
than subjects. Disabled persons are acted upon and not the actors in the
process. Too often emphasis is on 'normalizing' the disabled persons into
an unfair social order rather than on organizing disabled people in a struggle
for a fairer more just society."
"The Organization of Disabled Revolutionaries, ORD, in Nicaragua, is
a group of mostly spinal cord injured young persons who came together over
a common need: wheelchairs. With the increase of disabled persons resulting
from the war against the Somoza dictatorship (and more recently against
the Contras), the lack of a wheelchair factory in Nicaragua, and the difficulties
of importing wheelchairs due to the United States embargo, the shortage
was severe. Two disabled North Americans, Ralf Hotchkiss and Bruce Curtis,
helped ORD set up a small wheelchair factory to design and produce low-cost
high-quality, for use on rough terrain, wheelchairs. Now the so-called 'whirlwind'
steel tube wheelchair is being produced by small collectives of disabled
workers in various countries of Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia.
ORD has also branched out into different fields and is beginning to organize
disabled people throughout Nicaragua."
"The Center for Rehabilitation of the paralyzed (CRP) in Bangladesh.
In the CRP severely disabled persons, mostly from spinal cord injury and
severe polio, play key roles in leadership, administration, designing, teaching,
income generation and other activities of the program. Working from wheelchairs
and gurneys, the disabled workers make a wide variety of rehabilitation
aids and hospital equipment."
"Programs and equipment for disabled persons in developing countries
often suffer from the imposition of Western medical and rehabilitation.
Address: AHRTAG, 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9SG, United Kingdom
The project that David Werner himself helped start is PROJIMO in western
Mexico. PROJIMO can be described as an alternative rural villager run rehabilitation
program. Some of its most important functions is income generation and training
for persons with disabilities. The PROJIMO team consists of former 'clients'
who after having received assistive devices and treatment themselves stayed
on to learn various marketable skills such as brace and limb making, wheelchair
manufacturing and repair, welding, physical therapy and peer counseling.
During the years that PROJIMO has been in existence many of these workers
have left the village to settle in other places of Mexico where they set
up similar projects and activities. Thus, persons who under most other circumstances
would have been doomed to a life as beggars have not only become proud professionals
who can support themselves and their families through their work; they are
also spreading their skills and role models among disabled persons and their
families in other communities.
For more information on PROJIMO and David Werner's work see
Project PROJIMO, A villager-run rehabilitation program for disabled children
in Western Mexico, The Hesperian Foundation, 1983.
Newsletter From the Sierra Nevada, an occasional newsletter.
Address: The Hesperian Foundation, Box 1692, Palo Alto, California 94302,
USA.
For other appropriate assistive devices and their production in developing
countries see
Lagerwall, Tomas, Appropriate Aids and Equipment for Disabled People in
Africa: Ways and Means for Local Production in the Third World, ICTA, Stockholm,
1989.
Lagerwall, Tomas, Appropriate Technical Aids for Disabled People: Ways and
Means for Local Production in the Third World, ICTA, Stockholm, 1989. Address:
Handicap Institute, Box 510, 162 15 Vällingby, Sweden.
Managua Newsletter, editor: Russel Gasser, postal address: Aptdo 5054, Managua,
Nicaragua.
Russel trains disabled Nicas to become wheelchair mechanics and repair shop
managers.