A voice for disability in Kpando

Welcome to our fundraiser! Through this page we would like to draw your attention to disability rights. According to the World Health Organization, there are more than one billion people estimated to live with some kind of disability across the globe. This is about 15 % of the world's population. The disability prevalence is higher in lower income countries than in higher income countries. The United Nations estimated that 80 % of people with disabilities live in developing countries.

This fundraiser wants to draw your attention to the Kpando Municipal in the Volta Region of Ghana. In this region People Living with a Disability (PLwD) have no strong representation in the civil society. According to a community based research which was conducted in 2012 in the municipal, disability is still perceived as a curse. People believe that disability is a consequence of a past action that was done wrongly and for which the parents were cursed to have a disabled child. PLwD often live their entire life in their house, abandoned and neglected.

On a wider scale PLwD are perceived as unproductive and incapable of contributing to the community, and are therefore excluded. They are often neglected, discriminated against, excluded from the mainstream development initiatives, and find it difficult to access education, adequate health care, housing and livelihood opportunities. Though, it has been found that exclusion is more costly for local governments than inclusion, strong disability movements that fight for the rights and well-being of PLwD are still not common especially in rural Ghana.

Our organization, UNiTED that has been working in and around Kpando since 2009 envisions a world in which health, education, and social support systems meet the needs of the most vulnerable members of society. We continually strive for improvement and ensure that even the most vulnerable members are empowered and heard. We strongly believe disability is not inability. It is rather a difference that can be built on. Not only through our research but also through our work on the ground we know that this is not the perception of the local community. People Living with a Disability face many problems within the wider community. Thus, we believe it is time to open the eyes of every community member even more and visualize these daily challenges. We would like to do this through the use of Photo Voice.

Since 2016 UNiTED and ResultsinHealth (an international public health advisory agency from the Netherlands) are designing a plan to realize a training in Photo Voice in Kpando. ResultsinHealth has an in-depth understanding of major global health issues and is an expert in research tools like Photo Voice and capacity building. Photo Voice is a great tool to visualize disability rights challenges and to open the discussion with various stakeholders. At present, none of the UNiTED staff members and local partners are trained in the use of this tool.

By joining hands, the two organizations can continue to support People Living with a Disability in the Kpando Municipal. The training will help us to learn in a visual way how to bring the attention of the wider community to the challenges PLwD face. The outcome of the training will be a local exhibition. This photo  exhibition will help to communicate to different stakeholders what problems PLwD face. By communicating the problems we are hoping to give PLwD a voice and trigger different stakeholders to  work on the problems together. In the future we would like to use this tool for other vulnerable groups and projects as well. 

This fundraiser aims to raise sufficient money to realize a training in Photo Voice. The training will be implemented early December. Together with ResultsinHealth and some local partners we are ready to take the challenge! We hope we can count on your support.

Best regards,

On behalf of the teams of
ResultsinHealth and UNiTED Projects