Moving from the margins: Mainstreaming persons with disabilities in Pakistan examines the challenges, opportunities and policy issues affecting persons with disabilities in Pakistan. For a country that could have as many as 27m persons with disabilities, only one trained psychologist or psychiatrist for every 230,000 people and a possible cost to the economy of between 4.9% and 6.3% of GDP each year, the cost of inaction is prohibitive.
Persons with disabilities are often overlooked in discussions about Pakistan’s future. This is by no means peculiar to Pakistan: discrimination, exclusion and neglect of persons with disabilities are commonplace the world over. Professor Michael Stein from Harvard Law School has been heavily involved in this research and argues that most countries still have a long way to go to fulfi l the promise of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD).