Disability Inclusion
In the countries where we work, people with disabilities are amongst the poorest of the poor because they are often excluded from school and skills training, and have no access to work.
In many African cultures having a child with a disability means that a family is regarded as sinful, cursed, or involved in witchcraft. As a result parents often keep disabled children hidden away at home; they are anyway seen as a poor investment for education.
Being ostracized in this way means that people with disabilities are often completely dependent on others for their food and mobility. Not taking part in village life means that they virtually “disappear” from their communities. Their low self-esteem makes it hard for them to believe they could ever engage in agricultural activities and become self-reliant.
Doreen Angom, 45, probably contracted polio as a child:
“When I woke up one morning I couldn’t walk.”
“I didn’t go to school alongside my brothers. My parents had the money to pay the fees, but my father said, ‘with her disability, what could she do?’”
She was married at 16 but her husband was abusive so she left him. She now feeds a family of five with training from Ripple Effect.
Henry, 65, says:
“I call myself stupid because I didn’t have the knowledge of doing things that can help me. I couldn’t produce anything due to my physical impairment.
“Now by applying the skills and training I’m able to depend on myself. I have a banana farm, poultry, and other animals. I can grow vegetables even in dry season.”
Mainstreaming disability across our programmes
We ensure that at least 15% of our project participants are people living with disabilities. To find them we collaborate with local disability organisations and youth associations and make house-to-house visits to seek them out.
2 We raise awareness amongst all project partcipants of the issues faced by people with disabilities, their rights to understanding and respect, and their value as members of the community.
3 We create mixed groups in our project work, to promote mutual support. People with disabilities work alongside those without disability: they all take part in our training on sustainable agriculture, nutrition, WASH, disability rights, income generation and savings.
4 We use ACAP – the global framework for working with people with disability which tackles Access, Communication, Attitude and Participation.
The ACAP framework helps us identify barriers that people with disability face in their communities so we can design inclusive, context-tailored projects that will address those barriers.
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