By Morkporkpor Anku
Accra, Sept.16, GNA – For decades, society’s response to persons with disabilities has often been shaped by charity, sympathy and medical interventions.
But Mr Alexander Bankole Williams, a Disability Inclusion Consultant, says Ghana must move beyond those approaches and embrace a human rights model that recognises persons with disabilities as rights holders.
Speaking at a capacity-building training organised by the Mental Health Society of Ghana (MEHSOG), Mr Mankwade-Williams said the human rights model placed persons with disabilities at the centre of decisions affecting their lives.
He said unlike the charity model, where institutions or individuals often decided what persons with disabilities needed and provided what they considered appropriate, the human rights model recognised their entitlement to receive services on an equal and dignified basis.
“The human rights model starts with the person. It says you have rights, choices and agency,” he said.
He said the approach emphasised equality, non-discrimination, participation, accessibility, inclusion and respect for the inherent dignity of persons with disabilities.
Mr Williams said duty-bearers were required to respect, protect and fulfil the rights of persons with disabilities, adding that their participation in decision-making was essential to achieving meaningful inclusion.
He said the principle of “nothing about us without us” required policymakers and service providers to engage persons with disabilities before designing interventions intended to benefit them.
According to him, policymakers could not sit in their offices and assume they knew what persons with disabilities needed without consulting them.
He illustrated the point with an example involving the donation of a wheelchair to a wheelchair user.
He said although the wheelchair appeared new and attractive, the intended beneficiary rejected it because it was designed mainly for hospital use and was less portable than the older wheelchair he was already using.
The beneficiary’s wheelchair, he explained, enabled him to navigate narrower doors and other spaces more easily, demonstrating why interventions must be based on the actual needs of the people they were intended to serve.
Mr Williams said the example showed the limitations of charity when it was provided without proper consultation.
He said charity could lead institutions to satisfy themselves that they had helped someone without necessarily addressing the person’s broader needs.
“For charity, there are no big rules around charity. It is based on your kindness, based on what you think you have and what you think you can do,” he said.
He said giving a wheelchair to a person living in a community where gutters, steps and inaccessible infrastructure prevented its effective use would not constitute meaningful inclusion.
The consultant said the medical model also had limitations because it focused largely on the impairment and how the individual could be treated or rehabilitated.
While medical intervention remained important, he said, excessive focus on the individual could divert attention from the environmental and institutional barriers that created exclusion.
The social model, he said, shifted attention to those barriers and sought to remove them by making environments and services accessible.
The human rights model went further by asking what rights were being denied and what changes were required to guarantee equality, participation and empowerment.
Mr Williams said the progression from charity to the human rights model therefore represented a shift from dependency to agency and from segregation to inclusion.
He explained that segregation occurred when persons with disabilities were placed in separate spaces or provided with facilities exclusively for them, rather than ensuring that mainstream services and environments were accessible to everyone.
He said a facility designed exclusively for persons with disabilities might appear beneficial but could still reinforce separation if it confined them to a particular location.
Integration, he explained, represented an intermediate stage, while true inclusion required society to redesign systems so that persons with disabilities could participate fully alongside everyone else.
He urged institutions to apply universal design principles when developing policies, programmes, projects and infrastructure.
Policies, he said, should be reviewed to identify unintended discrimination, while transportation, toilets, elevators, healthcare facilities and communication platforms should be designed to be accessible and usable by persons with disabilities.
He also called for employees to be trained to interact appropriately with persons with disabilities and to adopt disability-inclusive practices.
Mr Williams said Ghana had a legal basis for protecting the rights of persons with disabilities, citing the Persons with Disability Act, 2006 (Act 715), and the country’s ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2012.
He said the legal framework reinforced principles of equality, non-discrimination, accessibility, participation, inclusion and respect for inherent dignity.
He, however, identified lack of knowledge and technical competence among policymakers and duty-bearers as a major missing link in effective disability inclusion.
He said many policymakers assumed they understood disability and knew what was required, but inadequate knowledge often resulted in interventions that produced poor outcomes.
Mr Williams said capacity-building was therefore necessary to equip policymakers and duty-bearers with the knowledge and technical skills needed to identify, target and effectively include persons with disabilities.
He said knowledge alone, however, was not enough, stressing the need for implementation, budgetary allocations and actual disbursement of funds to translate disability-inclusive policies into reality.
He said where duty-bearers failed to implement their obligations, persons with disabilities should be able to seek redress through competent courts because exclusion, whether intentional or unintended, could amount to a violation of their rights.
The consultant said the ultimate goal was to ensure that persons with disabilities were not treated as passive recipients of assistance but as active participants in shaping policies and services.
He said adopting the human rights model would compel institutions to consult persons with disabilities, understand their needs and ensure that interventions connected effectively with other services and systems.
He urged policymakers, development partners and service providers to make disability inclusion an integral part of planning rather than an issue considered after policies and projects had already been designed.
Mr Williams said Ghana could achieve meaningful inclusion when institutions moved from asking “What can we give them?” to asking “What rights are being denied, and what must change?”
He said the shift would help build a society in which persons with disabilities could exercise their rights, make choices and participate fully and equally in national development.
GNA
Edited by Kenneth Odeng Adade
Reporter: Morkporkpor Anku
[email protected]