Assistive Technology Research and Disability Studies in the Global South: the Need for Synergy

We highlight the critical need to include voices from disability studies in the Global south in any discourse on Assistive technology design and development. We present the following reasons for this importance: 1) The majority of the global population of people with disabilities live in the global south. 2) The lived realities of people with disabilities (PwDs)in the global south are very different from those of the people with disabilities in the global north, including the capacity of the PwDs to absorb any available benefits. 3) Assistive technology work in the global north works on the premise that independence and access that is equal to the mainstream population is the desired end goal of the people with disabilities. We believe that the design of assistive technology solutions for these populations have to be rethought from the bottom up, taking the social context and the existing networks of support around PwDs.