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Paper short abstract:

This paper considers how entrepreneurship-focused government and NGO programmes targeting disabled people in Uganda interact with residential patterns to facilitate urban liveability, or alternatively create exclusion, for different groups of disabled people.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is based on long-term fieldwork in a town in western Uganda, where government and NGO programmes targeting disabled people focus overwhelmingly on small-scale entrepreneurship, through providing micro-grants or loans for businesses and ‘skills development’ initiatives. Focusing on the members of a disabled women’s organisation based in a market on the edge of the town, I consider how these programmes interact with residential patterns to facilitate urban liveability, or alternatively create exclusion, for different groups of disabled people. I show that the focus on small-scale entrepreneurship has (without intending to) fostered an urban ‘care collective’ through concentrating disabled people in a co-resident group next to the market. This arrangement enables members and their families to provide each other with mutual support, including physical care (especially for members who use wheelchairs) and linguistic support (for Deaf members). This mitigates some of the inaccessibility of the urban environment for disabled people. However, the programmes available through government and NGOs fail to cater to the needs of members of the group who live with impairments considered to make communication or learning particularly difficult (including deaf people who do not use sign language). As a result, these members are unable to sustain urban residence, and feel isolated from disabled community and ‘development’ initiatives targeting disabled people. The fragile agrarian livelihoods of these excluded disabled people remain unaddressed by disability and development initiatives in the area.