Fifth meeting of the IAEG-SDG’s, Ottawa, March 2017
This joint statement has been endorsed by: the UK Department for International Development (DFID, UK); the Department for Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT, Australia); United Nations Development Program; the International Labour Organisation; the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities; United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women); the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner; United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF); the International Disability Alliance (IDA, with eight global and six regional Members); and the International Disability and Development Consortium (IDDC, with 26 full members).
Statement:
Persons with disabilities are among those furthest behind and accordingly the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and their indicators clearly state that disaggregated data are needed and should be collected for the purpose of monitoring advancement in the implementation of the goals for this segment of the population.
We - UN Member States, UN Agencies, organizations of persons with disabilities, civil society and independent experts - would like to call the attention of the IAEG-SDGs and the UN Statistics Division to the need for taking immediate action and clearly recommend national statistical offices to move forward with the disaggregation of data by disability.
To that end, we would like to state our unanimous position that there are appropriate and broadly tested methodologies in place to disaggregate data by disability. In order to ensure international comparability and comparability over time for the purposes of SDG data disaggregation for adults, we recommend the use of the short set of questions developed by the Washington Group. For disaggregation by disability among children the recommended tool is the UNICEF/Washington Group module on Child Functioning. Both instruments can be easily and cost effectively inserted in all national data collection efforts.
