Government through the ministry of gender, has revealed that it will
embark on identifying the special needs for each category of People With
Disabilities (PWDs) in a bid to properly plan for them.
The state
minister for Gender and Cultural Affairs, Peace Mutuuzo; explained that
her ministry is already in touch with the finance ministry to include
funds in the next financial year for purposes of purchasing motorbikes
that will be used to collect data about PWDs.
“As government, we
are going to procure motorcycles and send them to leaders of PWDs to
facilitate their movement in their areas of jurisdiction so as to take
stalk of the categories of the PWDs that we have,” the minister said at a
workshop of PWDs last week in Kampala.
She continued: “This is
because if you don’t know the exact disability a people have, you may
not be able to plan properly for them. As government, we may be planning
to buy wheel chairs and yet the type of disability in question is
blindness.
“The ministry is together working with the finance
ministry to ensure that the budget for procurement of motorcycles for
the male and female councilors at the district is included in the medium
term expenditure framework.”
Some of the categories of disability
include; mobility and physical impairments, vision disability, hearing
disability and psychological disorders.
Ms Mutuuzo also also revealed
that her ministry was working with the education ministry to have
special needs and inclusive education policy finalized to address
concerns of access, equality and equity in education.
According to the National Housing and Population Census of 2014, PWDs form 12.4 percent of the entire population.
This translates to over 4.6 million people out of the over 40 million people.
According
to the Uganda Functional Difficulties survey 2017, it established that
17 percent of adults (aged 18 years and above), seven percent of
children aged 2 to 4 years had a disability.
The data further shows that every type of disability increases with age.
