The Disability and Development field will be missing these people...

It is just 2 months ago that I wrote about the demise Mike Miles one of the greatest writers of disability history, disability and religion and after all also Community Based Rehabilitation (CBR). He was critical about CBR and so am I. Yet, he knew there were little to no sound alternatives in/for low-and middle-income countries. Just a few weeks ago two other CBR comrades and practitioners died: Daniel Tsengu who worked for many years for CBM in Nigeria and Peter Coleridge who worked in absolutely challenging circumstances in CBR as well: Afghanistan! There are many differences among those 3 people, but all had in common that they worked in practice; they knew what they were talking about and had been standing with their feet in the mud. I am going to miss these old friends and their death seem to reflect to some extent also the end of CBR… However, there are new strategies being promoted to ensure that people with disabilities in low- and middle-income countries will have a better quality of life i.e. Community Based Inclusive Development (CBID). I hope - also in the spirit of the work left by the 3 people who left us in recent weeks - that whatever will be proposed rehabilitation will continually be seen as an important strategy in achieving inclusion. It is so unfortunate that the term rehabilitation is often wrongly seen – especially by the disabled people’s movements - as an approach to disability that labels the person and that is rooted in the medical model. For this reason, organisations of people with disabilities are often resistant to community-based rehabilitation strategies and yet… what is the alternative? A broad philosophy embodied into community development and community mobilisation for the inclusion of all marginalised groups in society, and not just people with disabilities? Mmmm…