Skills Development through Community Based Rehabilitation (CBR)

1. Introduction
to 40 per cent of the region’s GDP and to have accounted for 70 per cent
of the jobs created over the past 15 years (Tokman 2004).
Informal economy: Tips for CBR programme practitioners
Recognize the importance of the informal economy as a source of work
and economic empowerment for disabled people.
Ensure as much as possible that the principles of “decent work”are
embedded into community-based initiatives so that disabled people can
achieve dignity of work in the informal economy.
Call for government policies and programmes to better address the
needs of workers and businesses in the informal economy by eliminating
the negative aspects of informality, while preserving its significant job
creation and income-generation potential.
Urban and rural areas
Rural and urban contexts offer very different opportunities for work and
employment. Most jobs in the formal economy are in urban areas, and
most work in rural areas is linked to agriculture. The opportunities for
employment either in the formal or informal economies are very much
greater in urban areas than in rural areas, a factor which leads to ruralurban
drift and the growth of shanty-towns. This especially applies to disabled
people, who may migrate to the town or city to seek services and
work.
The majority of people who are materially poor live in rural areas. But rural
areas are just as diverse as any other locus of development, and generalization
is dangerous. One of the former homelands in South Africa, where
people live in very low-grade housing settlements with little or no access
to agricultural land, will present different opportunities to Uganda, where
rural families tend to have fertile land which they can farm.
In rural areas where the economy is based on small-scale farming, there
are practically no jobs or formal employment as there are in the urban
environment. ‘Livelihoods’ is a more useful concept in this case than
‘jobs’ or ‘employment’. People often have survival strategies involving a
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