The Washington Group Questions are an approach to measure disability in a certain population (Madans 2017). A UN city group under the UN Statistical Commission, the Washington Group has designed a number of data collection tools to measure disability, including the Extended Question Set on Functioning and the Short Set of Questions on Disability. Lepra decided to use the Washington Group Short Set (WG-SS), a list of six questions looking at core functional domains that should be integrated into existing surveys. It is important to emphasise that the WG-SS is not designed as a tool for diagnosing an individual’s ‘disability level’. Instead, it gives us an indication of the possible impact of an individual’s conditions on functional abilities (Washington Group on Disability Statistics 2016), and can be used to estimate the prevalence of these impacts within a population.
Inclusion, in physical, social and economic terms, of people with neglected diseases is at the heart of Lepra’s work. With disability inclusion increasingly recognised as a cross-cutting theme in international development and with the revision of Lepra’s monitoring and evaluation strategy, the organisation asked itself: how inclusive are Lepra’s projects? The projects focus primarily on people with leprosy and lymphatic filariasis. This gave the organisation a strong sense of disability levels and the impact of disability among people affected by these diseases. The WG-SS allowed Lepra to look
1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Do you have difficulty seeing, even if wearing glasses? Do you have difficulty hearing, even if using a hearing aid? Do you have difficulty walking or climbing steps? Do you have difficulty remembering or concentrating? Do you have difficulty (with self-care such as) washing all over or dressing? 6. Using your usual (customary) language, do you have difficulty communicating, for example understanding or being understood?
a. b. c. d.
No – no difficulty Yes – some difficulty Yes – a lot of difficulty Cannot do at all
beyond the diseases of leprosy and lymphatic filariasis and see how people with all sorts of functional abilities were represented in their projects. The WG-SS further strengthened Lepra’s data collection because the WG-SS self -assessment of disability compliments conventional medicalbased assessment of disability in leprosy and LF cases. Disability is defined differently in all three countries in which Lepra currently operates. Consequently, India, Bangladesh and Mozambique also have different estimations of disability prevalence in their countries.