The Role of Community-Based Rehabilitation in Poverty Reduction

Over the last thirty years Community-based Rehabilitation (CBR) has emerged as an effective method of providing rehabilitation services to the population with disabilities in developing countries. Although CBR programmes have been recognised as a strategy for poverty reduction by the World Health Organisation (WHO, 2003), CBR workers and their managers face the challenge of understanding the causes and effects of poverty, and contributing towards poverty alleviation. The purpose of this paper is to describe the role of community-based rehabilitation in poverty reduction. A brief review on Community-Based Rehabilitation and Poverty Reduction is followed by an assessment of different models of disability, to find which one provides the best framework to understand the overall picture of disability and poverty. The Capabilities Approach, developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, seems to offer a sound basis to understand the relationship between poverty and disability. This paper concludes that CBR can play a crucial role in poverty reduction programmes by expanding the capabilities of people with disabilities. Key words: Community-based rehabilitation, poverty reduction, capabilities approach