Disability and social protection programmes in low- and middle-income countries: a systematic review

Persons with disabilities face significant challenges across the lifecycle, as they are more likely to live in poverty and experience lower standards of living than persons without disabilities. However, as this study highlights, access to social protection falls far below the needs of persons with disabilities across low- and middle-income countries.
This paper offers a systematic review of the evidence available on the inclusion of persons with disabilities in social protection programmes across low- and middle-income countries while assessing the financial and non-financial impacts of participation. The review includes only peer-reviewed articles and identifies only 15 articles of a sufficiently high quality, highlighting the limited evidence available on social protection and disability across the global south. Therefore, this paper offers a useful consolidation of the limited amount of evidence to date.