Spatial Disparities in Disability Prevalence at the District Level in Sub-Saharan African Countries

Arlette Simo Fotso, INED
Florian Bonnet, Institut National d'Études Démographiques (INED)

The World Health Organization estimates that 80% of the global population living with some form of disability resides in developing countries, with the highest prevalence of disability among individuals under 60 years old observed in sub-Saharan Africa. However, knowledge of disability in the region remains limited, partly due to the lack of robust and comparable measurements. To address this gap, the Washington Group on Disability Statistics developed a culturally neutral disability screening tool, which has been recently included in several Demographic Health Surveys (DHS). This paper aims to utilize these comparable data sources to estimate disability prevalence rates at the second and third levels of sub-national administrative units. The study will include eight countries with available DHS data: Malawi (2016), Mali (2018), Mauritania (2019), Nigeria (2018), Rwanda (2019), Senegal (2018–2019), South Africa (2016), and Uganda (2016). Traditional design-based and nearest-neighbor Small Area Estimation techniques will be used to estimate and spatially represent disability. We expect to find significant heterogeneity in disability prevalence at both national and subnational levels across the countries. The results of this study can provide policymakers with critical information to effectively target administrative areas with urgent needs for prevention and inclusion actions for people with disabilities.

Keywords: Health and Morbidity, Small area estimation, Spatial Demography, Data and Methods

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