Home based intervention of the Disability Program Impact Evaluation Study (DPIES)
An impact evaluation study of the home based intervention of the Disability Programme (DP) of Swedish Committee for Afghanistan (SCA) was carried out in collaboration with the George Warren Brown School Social Work, Washington University in St. Louis between January 2013 and June 2016.
The study conducted in 13 provinces of Afghanistan where the program is implemented through four Regional Management Offices in Ghazni, Jalalabad, Mazar-e-Sharif and Taloqan. The research team led by Dr. Jean-Francois Trani with support from Parul Bakhshi, Juanita Vasquez-Escallon and Ellis Ballard from Global Research on Inclusion and Disabilities (a research unit of Brown School) carried out the study with support of Disability Programme staff of SCA.
The Community Based Rehabilitation programme of SCA Disability Programme has five programme components such as Social integration of people with disabilities; employment support and vocational training; special and inclusive education; physiotherapy and orthopaedic services and institutional capacity development addressing diverse groups of persons with disabilities. The study aimed to measure the impact of the home based interventions of the Community Based Rehabilitation(CBR) programme of SCA.
The evaluation used a quasi-experiment fieldwork study and used propensity score matching analysis to measure the impact of the programme. The findings of the study are encouraging for SCA. The results indicate that mobility; activities of daily living, communication, participation in social and community life, and emotional well-being of persons with disabilities covered under the study have been improved by 12.4%, 8.4%, 9.1%, 17.8% and 102% respectively after two years of intervention. The CBR programme has also improved access of adults with disabilities to employment by 12%, writing skills (24.9%) and reading skills (25.2%).
The study recommends that CBR programs is a cost effective approach to address the needs of persons with disabilities in low re-source settings, including crisis contexts. A lot can be learned from the SCA CBR programme which can be replicated elsewhere in similar low resources settings and also can be scaled up in Afghanistan itself.
The complete final report of the SCA CBR evaluation study that includes detailed methodology findings and recommendations, as well as an appendix with tables for all findings, can reach on below link: