Data being collected on disabilities in Pakistan

Islamabad
Efforts are underway for collection of comprehensive data on all aspects of disabilities in Pakistan, ranging from impairments, activity limitations, participation restrictions, related-health conditions and environmental factors.
The vacuum that has existed due to lack of such detailed information will be bridged through the Model Disability Survey (MDS), a joint project of the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Canadian High Commission. The MDS is a pilot study to provide nuanced information on the lives of people with disability in the Attock district.
Evidence resulting from the MDS will help policy-makers identify the interventions required to maximize the inclusion and functioning of Pakistani citizens suffering from disabilities and to promote and protect their human rights, as endorsed in Pakistani legislation.
The MDS will provide complete understanding of the life experience of people with disabilities and provide better approximation of the true size and potential of the most unheard and uncounted population with disability. It will also offer estimates for tracking federal/provincial trends and making international comparisons, facilitating developing disability inclusive development policies/strategies resulting in mainstreaming of Persons with Disabilities in an inclusive society.
The survey will facilitate the monitoring of the situation of people with disabilities to make sure they are not left behind in the wake of development progress, and to identify ways to include disability in national/provincial post-2015 development agenda.
The initiative is being funded by the High Commission of Canada through the Canada Fund for Local Initiatives (CFLI). A two-day training on the questionnaire for data collection, which has been developed by WHO and the World Bank in collaboration with the Washington Group on Disability Statistics, Statistics Norway, and a diverse range of other stakeholders, including the International Disability Alliance, was organized at the WHO office in Islamabad on February 5-6, 2015. Disability experts from WHO Headquarters, Geneva and Country office conducted the training session.
According to WHO, over a billion people or around 15% of the world's population have some sort of disability, whereas the prevalence of disability in Pakistan is estimated by the Population Census 1998 at 2.49%. Effective policy-making requires reliable, valid and detailed data on all aspects of disability, which the survey is expected to provide. There is currently no standardized instrument for data collection on disability that provides comprehensive and systematic documentation of all aspects of functioning in a population.
Pakistan ratified the UN Convention for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in July 2011 which requires governments to collect statistical and research data to identify and address barriers faced by people with disability under the Convention (CRPD, Article 31).