Parents of children with disabilities present resolution to Parliamentary Committee

Parents of children living with disabilities have presented a resolution to the Parliamentary Committee on Disability to highlight the challenges they faced in their daily lives.

The resolution, which was presented at a photo exhibition in Accra yesterday, highlighted the problems that parents and their children living with disabilities faced in their day-to-day activities and called for pragmatic steps to address them.

Resolution 

Presenting the resolution, a mother with a child living with disability, Mrs Faustina Asare, mentioned that even though the children fell within the category of persons with disabilities who qualified to receive part of the two per cent of the District Assembly Common Fund allocated to disabled persons, parents of children living with disabilities were excluded from the fund.

She said since children with disabilities needed specialised care and most of the parents were single-handedly taking care of their disabled children, benefitting from the fund would help mitigate their financial burden. 

She appealed to the government to provide adequate education and rehabilitation services for such children, pointing out that only about five per cent of children with disabilities had access to these services due to lack of infrastructure. 

Photo exhibition 

The photo exhibition was organised by the Samuel Wellington Botwey (SWEB) Foundation as part of a six-month research work which began in December 2014 and expected to end in May 2015.

The organisation is being partnered by Enablement, a Netherlands-based research institute which is providing technical support, and Liliane Foundation, which is funding the study.

The Member of Parliament for Krachi Nchimuru Constituency, who was the Chairman of the exhibition, said the burden of caring for children with disabilities should not be left solely to parents; the society in general should assist them.

Formation of Parent Support Groups

He underscored the importance of forming Parent Support Groups (PSG) to enable parents and the society in general to work together to improve the lives of children with disabilities.

He expressed gratitude to the parents who participated in the photo exhibition for taking pictures of their day-to-day activities to vividly portray the challenges they and their children faced. 

Challenges of a parent 

Ms Malwine Amoako, a mother of a six-year-old boy who suffers from Cerebral Palsy, recounted how her husband divorced her for having a child with that condition marked by impaired muscle co-ordination and other disabilities, typically caused by damage to the brain before or at birth which does not allow the patient to perform any activity on his or her own. 

She said taking care of a child with disability could be very difficult and she did not even get the chance to work because there was no one to take care of him. 

She appealed to the government to establish more rehabilitation centres for such children to give their parents the chance to work and take better care of the children.