Global Mobility

provides children and adults in developing countries with a wheelchair or other appropriate ambulatory aid equipment that addresses each individual’s specific disability and mobility needs.

• Global Mobility offers training and education to the recipients of our wheelchairs and ambulatory aid equipment and their families and caregivers as well as other organizations, NGOs, community or business groups in basic wheelchair functions, maintenance, and care.

• Global Mobility creates partnerships in the countries we serve in order to identify recipients, establish networks of support, create opportunities for continued service, and increase exposure within the disability community.

• Global Mobility offers expertise, support, and advocacy to individuals with disabilities as well as organizations that serve the disability community in support of independence, inclusion, education, and employment of people with disabilities.

• Global Mobility engages in fundraising activities to support its mission. To date, Global Mobility has supported people with disabilities across Mexico and Central America, Vietnam and Southeast Asia, and Somalia, Zimbabwe and throughout Central and Eastern Africa. Statistics

• There are 120 to 150 million children with disabilities under the age of 18 worldwide.

• 1 billion people globally experience disability…15% of the world’s population.

• 70 million people need a wheelchair. …and only 5-15% have access to one.

• People with disabilities face significant barriers to realizing their human rights, including discrimination in education, employment, housing and transport; denial of the right to vote; and being stripped of the right to make decisions about their own lives, including their reproductive choices.

• Individuals with physical and mental disabilities often face increased violence, yet they remain invisible in their communities.

• Disability is part of the human condition. Almost everyone will be temporarily or permanently impaired at some point in life, and those who survive to old age will experience increasing difficulties in functioning.

• Children with disabilities are denied access to school, subjected to corporal punishment
and other forms of physical violence, and face segregation in schools, institutions and places of detention.

• Children with disabilities are typically excluded and abused.

• Women and girls with disabilities experience multiple forms of discrimination – as a result of their disability and gender – and face a heightened risk of physical and sexual violence.

• Many factors contribute to this risk, including limitations in physical mobility, communication barriers, isolation, and common myths that persons with disabilities are weak or asexual.

• In many countries, an alarming number of women with disabilities continue to be denied reproductive and sexual rights through the practice of forced sterilization.

• The number of people with disabilities is growing.

• Lack of provision of services: People with disabilities are particularly vulnerable to deficiencies in services such as health care, rehabilitation, or support and assistance.

• Disability disproportionately affects vulnerable populations. There is higher disability prevalence in lower-income countries than in higher income countries.