ABSTRACT
Economic participation can play a crucial role in lifting people out of poverty, as well as boosting self-esteem and creating a sense of fulfilment and purpose in life. Due to the existence of a wide range of barriers to training and employment, however, disabled people are far less likely to be economically active than the general working-age population (WHO and World Bank, 2011). The removal of these barriers is vital to reducing the dependence of many disabled people on welfare benefits and their extended families, and to facilitating their participation in the economic mainstream, thus helping to foster more just and inclusive societies. In the words of the late Paul Abberley (1999), a highly influential disability activist and academic, the social exclusion of disabled people is ‘intimately related to our exclusion from the world of work’ (p. 5).
