Functional difficulties and disability
Functional-difficulty and disability prevalence across all districts.
- Records
- 780
- Vintage
- Census 2024, final report; table years vary
- Last checked
- 16 October 2026
- Published by
- GovernmentDepartment of Census and Statistics, Sri Lanka
What this dataset contains
The 2024 census reports counts and rates per 1,000 people aged five and over for seeing, hearing, walking or climbing steps, remembering or concentrating, self-care and communicating. Each district has two separate thresholds: any reported difficulty, and the Washington Group disability threshold of a lot of difficulty or cannot do at all. The tables also provide people with at least one affected domain and their age-eligible population denominators.
How it is used here
Compare district prevalence using one threshold at a time, inspect the functional domains relevant to service accessibility, or compare counts with the published age-eligible population. Retain the stricter disability threshold when that is the population of interest.
What it cannot tell you
Any difficulty includes some difficulty and is broader than the disability threshold. The two populations overlap and must not be added. A person can report several affected domains; domain counts and rates are not additive. Rates use people aged five and over and are per 1,000, not percentages. Published rates are rounded whole numbers and are not replaced by rates recalculated from the counts. These are census functional-ability responses, not clinical diagnoses, measures of environmental accessibility or counts of people needing a particular service. National totals overlap district counts.