Guayaquil, Ecuador – “I was just locked up, that was my whole life.”

Marlene Baker, 59, was born in Manabí but has lived her entire life in Guayaquil, Ecuador. She contracted polio at age two and consequently has a physical disability. As a child, her family's lack of resources delayed the acquisition of a wheelchair for years, and her home, surrounded by mangrove and water, was not accessible.

In Ecuador, the population reaches 18 million people, of whom 1.1 million have some type of permanent functional difficulty in performing daily activities such as walking, seeing, hearing, remembering, bathing, or speaking. Fifty-three percent of them are women (Census, 2022).

Marlene managed to finish primary school, but stopped her studies because her mother was overprotective. She recalls:

“My mommy would tell me: Why are you going to study? You won't be able to manage the chair, they will make you fall, people are bad, and so I couldn't finish high school.”

One barrier faced by persons with disabilities is exclusion from the education system. Only 48 percent finished basic general education and just 23.5 percent graduated from high school (Census, 2022).

Even as an adult, Marlene could not leave the house without her mother, nor have friends, much less a partner. When her mother died two years ago, Marlene had a traumatic experience, feeling completely dependent on her and unsure of what the future held.

The Situation Analysis of Persons with Disabilities, conducted within the framework of the "For the Right to Decide of Persons with Disabilities" project, highlights experiences of discrimination that women with disabilities face in their family relationships, where they are excluded, infantilized, and overprotected, which limits their ability to be, do, and decide.

“One day I said: I can't take it anymore, I have to go out,” Marlene remembers.

“I called a taxi and went to the shopping mall. I felt free and I wanted to cry so badly. I cried and cried and people looked at me. My life passed by like a movie and I asked myself: Is this life normal? I was just locked up, that was my whole life.”

Marlene is one of 600 people who participated in the project's workshops, implemented by UNFPA, the United Nations sexual and reproductive health agency, and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), with support from the Global Disability Fund. The courses allowed persons with disabilities to learn more about the exercise of their human rights, accessibility, leadership, empowerment, sexual and reproductive health, democracy, and inclusive political participation, among other relevant topics, so that they can make autonomous and informed decisions.

“This workshop has helped me a lot, because listening to the presenters and analyzing my life, I say: It can't be like this, I have lived as if locked in a crystal ball, thinking that everyone was bad,” Marlene notes. “Believe me, this workshop has helped me a lot. I am an older person now and I want to experience more, I want to know what is happening on the street.”