Breathe
Disability is an issue that touches me directly, personally and emotionally: I have a 10-year-old son with cerebral palsy and this statistical situation has led me to see first-hand the immense void of opportunities and the injustice in access to basic rights experienced by families with someone with a disability. And I say families, because when a person lives with a condition, he/she does not live it alone: all his/her close environment changes, is modified and most of the times is impoverished. That is what we write about every day in the site we founded with Katia D'Artigues, www.yotambien.mx.
And the same thing always happens to me and we end up making a list of all the things that are missing, that are omitted, that are taken away, that are abused, that are not fulfilled in the name of this silent and invisible minority. People with disabilities are left out of any project, plan, model or public or private initiative.
Then I decided to do an inverse exercise, what would happen if in a utopian world 100% of the people had access to all their rights, were active in the labor market, with the same level of education, health care and freedom of choice in life?
Yesterday the World Bank published a report on Disability in Latin America and the Caribbean and it is a good starting point to imagine and put numbers and money to the matter. And within this huge and super juicy report key the pupil in Mexico.
According to the WB, excluding people with disabilities from the economy of any of the 46 countries in the region is equivalent to losing up to 7% of GDP. Adding them would add the same percentage.
If we adjust for the size of the Mexican economy (with a gross domestic product of $2.463 billion dollars), incorporating people with disabilities represents about $172.41 billion dollars. Is this a little or a lot? Contexts always help.
If all the numbers come out as predicted by the Bank of Mexico, this year remittances will break the 50 billion dollar (mdd) barrier, this means that people with disabilities included 100% in active life is equivalent to multiplying by 3.4 times what is sent from the United States by "the living heroes" that the President never forgets in his speeches. Another reference: people with disabilities (PWD), producing in our economy would be four times the country's agricultural exports.
The domestic market would be much stronger.
According to the World Bank, each Mexican household with a member living with a disability loses 4.3% of its income. If we take into account that the average quarterly income of a household is 50,309 pesos, about 2012 pesos are lost.
According to Inegi, there are 35.7 million households in the country. Applying the percentage of people with disabilities revealed by the last census (16.5%) we can infer that there are 58,905 households with someone with some condition. If we add that 'loss' of 4.3% of their income, that is 119 million Mexican pesos added to the national economy every quarter.
And car manufacturers would be happy to increase their share of the domestic market (which is so hard for them to grow, versus their exports). This World Bank report indicates that 51.3% of households without a disabled person have access to a vehicle, while only 38% of those with a disabled person do.
Banks need more customers in the fintech boom? Here they have a market ready to attack. According to the Center for Financial Inclusion, in all of Latin America 15% live with a disability (85 million people) but only 0.5% are customers of a financial institution.
If we extrapolate the data to Mexico, according to Inegi, there are 9.9 million Mexicans with disabilities within the Economically Active Population (EAP), that is, they would be potential customers and less than 1% have a relationship with a banking entity.
And last but not least (in fact it is the heart of everyone's economic development) it is very revealing to read in this report that it is measured that "education pays".
"An inclusive education system produces long-term benefits: the economic returns to education are almost three times higher for people with disabilities than for the global average for people without disabilities." That is, for each additional year of education, the probability that a person with a disability occupies the lowest income quintiles decreases by almost 5%. In addition, educational inclusion benefits all students, bringing gains that are difficult to quantify, such as building more inclusive and just societies.
People with disabilities think differently: they are more creative and have an enormous capacity for resilience and loyalty to those who give them opportunities both at school and at work.
We need to think of disability in a different way: as a huge talent pool that means millions of dollars that neither government nor business has understood how to address and capture.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of Opinion 51.
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