The second advocacy meeting between the National Human Rights Commission and the NGO, Sightsavers held in Yaounde on February 19, 2016.
Persons living with disabilities are often sidelined in official statistics hence their needs are not taken into consideration in development planning and even industrial production. To correct this misfit, the National Commission on Human Rights and Freedoms (NCHRF) met with officials of the non-governmental organization, Sightsavers, on February 19, 2016 in Yaounde for a second time to examine ways of advocating for the inclusion of the disability approach modeled on the “Washington Group Questionnaire” as one of the documents for the preparation of the upcoming 4th General Population and Housing Census.
“The Washington Group Questionnaire aims at ensuring that the various aspects of disability are highlighted in our statistics so that attention should be paid to the needs of various categories of disabled persons,” noted the Chairperson of the Human Rights Commission, Divine Chemuta Banda. He said the “Washington Group Questionnaire” which was submitted for participants’ scrutiny even segregates the various forms of disability into categories such as sight, hearing, speech and mobility, amongst others. This, he hoped, will fill the vacuum in official statistics that have no clear figures on persons with disabilities.
To the Country Director of Sightsavers, Dr Joseph Oye, the meeting also dwelled around the need to sensitise that persons with disabilities must be included in population census. “Some census agents enter households and mention every member except those with disabilities,” he explained. Recommendations were expected at the end of the meeting for inclusion of the document in the census exercise.
