Social protection for people with disabilities: Cash benefits are not enough

Social protection systems can tackle this problem by comprehensively covering the extra costs that arise from a disability. The goal should be to make mainstream services and benefits accessible to all, as well as developing disability-specific schemes. 

Cash alone is not sufficient. Like everyone else, people with disabilities have different needs at various stages of life. These changing needs must be met by different services and institutions.

To give three examples, social protection systems can play a key role in facilitating access to early childhood education and schools, to rehabilitation and to economic empowerment programs such as job coaching and counselling. 

When people with disabilities are employed, the disability extra costs they face can become even higher given specific needs they may have for commuting, performing their work, and so forth. For the effective inclusion of working-age populations, it is crucial to design social protection benefits in ways that make them compatible with work. 

Nonetheless, most social protection schemes still require proof of at least partial incapacity to work from persons with disabilities as a precondition to qualify for a benefit. In practice, this can compel persons with disabilities to choose between either receiving disability support benefits or entering the labour market and having to assume all the costs themselves. 

Segregating people with disabilities into those who are “able” or “unable” to work, and making disability benefits conditional upon the incapacity to work, locks them in a vicious cycle of dependency and exclusion, thereby perpetuating existing stereotypes and prejudices.