is a UK charity dedicated to improving the quality of life of disabled people throughout the developing world. POWER achieves this by developing disabled people’s organisations, finding out what disabled people need, and ensuring those needs are met both locally and nationally.
UK registered charity number 1059996
Her and Him. egg tempera on paper. 210 x 297 mm. 2003. Donated / Sold
Donated to Power International - for an auction to help raise money.
ABOUT POWER INTERNATIONAL
Budgets of governments in low-income countries are stretched to meet immediate demands, and disabled people are either not part of the country’s strategy, or so low on the list of priorities as to be overlooked. In any case, legislation is usually neither monitored not enforced.
POWER's vision is of a world in which disabled people are enabled to receive the assistance they need so that they may participate fully in the economic and social life of their communities. We do this by delivering enabling services for people with disabilities in low-income countries, by cooperating with other organisations and the community to improve the quality of life for all disabled and their families, by cooperating with governments and others in building capacity towards a sustainable service through education and training.
POWER became a registered charity in February 1995 and, in September of the same year, took over the International Committee for the Red Cross’s programme in Mozambique. It was also recommended that POWER set up a similar programme in Laos where there was no internationally supported limb programme. (Having never been at war, this much-bombed country had attracted very little attention.) Since 1997, POWER has been invited to establish programmes in Vietnam , Sri Lanka and Zambia, and has explored the possibility of working in Angola and Nicaragua. But POWER’s work now encompasses the needs of all disabled people, not just those with a need for mobility aids.
In partnership with disability organisations in low-income countries, and with their governments' agreement, POWER develops programmes of assistance for people who are disabled from any cause, condition or disease. POWER knows the importance of creating conditions whereby disabled people are enabled to provide services themselves, and are assisted in gaining access to all aspects of civil society enjoyed by the able-bodied. Funding for these programmes is planned from the small UK offices located in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire.
POWER’s programmes are funded by government grants, private donations, corporate sponsorship, and national and international grant-making bodies.
Disabled people in low-income countries are generally unable to access any real help. Countries which have experienced conflict, and this has added to their poverty and that of its citizens, have fewer and poorer medical and other facilities. The disabled community is much greater than in the west, and from a wider range of causes.
POWER originally came into being as a result of the need to care for those disabled by landmines , and started in January 1994 as a direct response to the appalling international human tragedy that surrounds the enormous and indiscriminate use of landmines, especially anti-personnel landmines and other unexploded ordnance around the world. There are millions of landmines still in the ground in poor countries. As a result, a huge number of people have lost their limbs in the most terrible circumstances. Current estimates are that there are in excess of 300,000 amputees in the developing world, and that the number increases by over a thousand a month.
In low-income countries poverty is a way of life. Average cash incomes are computed by the World Bank at about US $250 per annum. Disabled people are usually the poorest people in the country, often living at subsistence levels and may not be involved in the cash economy at all. One disabled person affects the whole family and the community is involved since, without mobility, the disabled person is unable to contribute to the well-being or economic life of family or community. He or she becomes a burden and is faced with a future so empty and bleak as to be beyond the imagination of anyone in a western culture.
The effects of the poverty and disability cycle are often difficult to measure, as disabled people do not come forward to be counted – they are more likely to avoid the outside world, and conceal disabled children. An accurate picture of disability in the developing world is thus hard to create.
A FEW STATISTICS
Over the course of this century, it is said that the level of civilian casualties from warfare has increased from 10% in World War I to 60 or 70% in Bosnia-Herzegovina - where the full extent of the tragedy is still unfolding. Nowhere is this escalation more true than in the case of those afflicted by anti-personnel mines (APMs).
The levels of APM civilian victims has been measured in Afghanistan at 82% of all APM victims, between 64% and 95% in Cambodia, 68 to 74% in Mozambique, 88% in Namibia and 90% in Somalia.
These statistics become the more inevitable as time progresses, since landmines are used indiscriminately, their presence is generally uncharted, and they persist long after hostilities have ceased. Those who have to till the land, tend livestock, fetch water, and gather firewood, are the certain victims. Very often they are women and children.
