Introduction 

Persons with disabilities (PWD) have been defined as those who are unable to or are restricted in the performance of specific tasks/activities due to loss of function of some part of the body as a result of impairment or malformation (GSS, 2012). As a result, PWDs face a wide range of life challenges because disability, in whatever form or type, can reduce an individual’s ability to function to his/her full potential.

Disability can limit an individual’s full participation in a number of activities in life. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that there were more than 600 million PWDs in the world, out of whom approximately 80 percent live in low-income countries (Ayiku, 2012). Therefore, governments in many parts of the world have realized the need to be able to identify people with disabilities and their characteristics so that policies and programmes can be developed to assist them.

There is international recognition by national statistical agencies and international statistical organizations that disability data needs to be improved, and if possible, collected in a manner that makes data comparable within and across countries.

It is against this backdrop that the GSS decided, for the first time, to include disability in the 2010 PHC. In this chapter, the population with disability, types of disability, literacy, distribution by type of locality, disability and activity, education and literacy, are analyzed.
6.2 Population with Disability As presented in Table 6.1, the population of people with disability was 1,835 (2.2%) of the total population of the district. Out of this 943 (2.3%) were males while females were 892 (2.2%).

Types of Disability 

Figure 6.1 shows the common forms of disability in the district. These include emotional, sight, intellect, physical, speech, hearing, and other forms of disabilities. From the figure, the most common form of disability in Mion District was sight (37.8%) while the least was emotional (19.6%) and intellectual (18.1%). Those with other forms of disability constituted 12.6 percent.

Distribution by Type of Locality

As shown in Table 6.1 above, out of the 7,278 people living in urban areas in Mion, only 108 (1.5%) had some form of disability. The most common form of disability in urban Mion was sight (42.6%), followed by physical (25.0%) while emotional disability and others (3.7%) were the least common.

In the rural areas of Mion, there were 1,727 persons living with some form of disability, representing 2.3 percent. Table 6.1 also shows that the most common type of disability was sight affecting 37.5 percent of the disabled and the least common was intellectual disability affecting 18.9 percent.

Visual or sight impairment was the most common type of disability among PWDs in both urban (42.6%) and rural (37.5%) areas, followed by hearing disability (26.9%) in urban areas and physical (25.0%) in rural areas. However, the percentage of PWDs with hearing impairment was higher in urban areas (13.9%) than in rural (26.9%) localities. The percentage of PWDs with emotional challenges was higher in rural (20.6%) than in urban (3.7%) localities.

Also, the percentage of persons with more than one form of disability was slightly higher in rural areas (13.1%) than in urban centres (3.7%). It means that majority of the persons living with at least one form of disability live in the rural areas of the district. It is also observed that, the disability pattern in Mion was lower than both the regional and national averages. The disability rate for the Northern region was 2.5 percent, while that of Mion was 2.2 percent.

Disability and Activity

Table 6.2 shows persons 15 years and older with disabilities by economic status and sex. The percentage of non PWDs was 97.3 percent while PWDs was 2.7 percent. There exist a wide disparity between employed PWDs (72.2%) and non-PWDs employed (82.7%). In terms of sex distribution, the proportion of males with sight disability was 295, out of whom 73.9 percent were employed, while females with sight disability was 221 representing 62.0 percent.

Among those with hearing disabilities, 84.8 percent of the males were employed, and 15.2 percent were economically not active. For the females with hearing disability, 68.0 percent were employed, 0.7 percent unemployed and 31.3 percent were economically not active. Majority of the employed PWDs were males (75.4%), with those with sight disability having the highest employment rate for both sexes.

Disability, Education and Literacy

In this section, the educational level attained by persons with various forms of disability in the Mion district is discussed. Table 6.3 shows that there were 73,470 people in the district who were three (3) years and older. Out of this number 1,718 were with some form of disability. Furthermore, 1,350 out of the 1,718 persons with disability have never attended school. It is also seen from the Table that there were only 61 PWDs in pre-primary school (Nursery and Kindergarten) compared to 269 in basic school.

This implies that most PWDs start their education from primary school instead of pre-primary (Nursery and Kindergarten). The Table also reveals that the level of enrollment for persons with sight disability was higher than the other PWDs at all levels of education. Consequently, the only PWD with 45 tertiary education in the district was a person with sight disability. Also, three (3) out the five (5) PWDs with Post middle/Post-secondary/Diploma education were persons with sight disability.