The World Bank’s IDA stands for the International Development Association. It is one of the five institutions that make up the World Bank Group and was established in 1960. The IDA focuses on providing concessional loans and grants to the world’s poorest countries to support projects and initiatives aimed at reducing poverty, improving living conditions, and promoting sustainable economic development.

The IDA specifically targets low-income countries that have limited access to financial markets and other sources of financing. Its assistance is designed to help these countries achieve economic stability and long-term growth by funding projects in areas such as infrastructure, education, healthcare, agriculture, and governance.

Although the activities of the IDA seem quite distant from the theme of autism, we wanted to attempt to introduce autism into their considerations, by reminding them that the autistic population constitutes approximately 1% of the world population, and that disabled individuals are generally very poor, with autistic individuals being even poorer.

We prepared and read a text focused on employment issues for autistic individuals, explaining that public authorities do not even know how to address these issues, and paradoxically, they do not seem interested in our advice (even though it is supported by evidence of effectiveness).

A representative of the Autistan Diplomatic Organization reading a brief statement of about 3 minutes.

Audio of our statement

Text of our statement

“Hello, thank you very much.

I’m Eric L. from the Autistan Diplomatic Organization, which is an organization of autistic people.
So I have prepared something, it’s not very long.
Talking about autism here, maybe it’s a bit unusual, but precisely I think that it is probably needed, because autistic people are one percent of the world.

The problem of poverty among autistic individuals is severe and often stemming from significant barriers in employment.
High unemployment rates, workplace discrimination, and a lack of appropriate accommodations contribute to this issue.

Many autistic people are wrongly perceived as sick or unable to do anything, which further exacerbates their economic marginalisation.

In the broader context of disability, it’s important to recognise that whatever the wealth or poverty of a community, its disabled members are often the poorest, and autistic individuals are frequently poorer than most of other disabled people.

For many disabilities, the challenge is a lack of accommodations and accessibility, but society at least knows what to do for them.
But for autistic people, however, people often don’t even understand what steps to take, what to do.
The discussions about accessibility for autistic people are frequently ignored by governments and even by the United Nations.

The biggest problem is the confusion and misinformation surrounding autism.
This leads to a biased, medical and defectological, defect-orientated approach, which is as misguided as trying to treat homosexuality, for example, as a medical issue to reduce this type of discrimination.

Efforts are often focused on trying to make autistic people non-autistic, which is not respectful, and as pointless as trying to have cats wear socks.
It’s against our nature, it’s unnecessary, and it is harmful.

To address these issues effectively, we need to focus on educating autistics on how to adapt in a non-autistic world without trying to make them non-autistic, and educating their families and society as a whole.
And also, we need to focus on making society accessible for autistics, we know how to do that, and it’s not expensive – this is important, it’s not expensive, and on the contrary, it can save money and energy.

But when we try to approach public authorities to inform or advise them, prejudices hinder meaningful engagement.
Similarly, when we turn to the philanthropic sector, they often redirect us to medical entities, missing the point entirely.

Thank you very much.”

Conclusion

The event organizer told us that our short speech was “perfect”.

We don’t know what is possible to achieve with the IDA and the World Bank, but we made sure that autistic individuals (who are almost all very poor, often the poorest of the poor) were not left behind in this event.