Grants not helpful to empower people with disabilities-Report

Kampala, Uganda | THE INDEPENDENT | Research findings released by Makerere University show that people living with disabilities (PWDs) encounter major challenges when it comes to access to services like health, education and later on employment.

The survey done by the departments of Social Sciences and Statistics of Makerere University involved 10,000 households selected from regions across the country.

Speaking to the media at the launch of the report on Monday, Prof. Julius Omona who was the lead investigator said that they set out to establish the living conditions of people living with various disabilities and how they are involved in the development process.

He notes that while government came up with a programme of offering a disability grant for PWDs at sub-county level, many of their respondents said they had never accessed the money and yet even those that had accessed it, had not gotten economically empowered.

With the grant, the disabled are supposed to be organized in groups and 5 million shillings is allocated to them to engage in a specified project but the researcher says these never take off partly because the start-up capital is small yet others are limited by other hurdles to do with exposure and lack of education.

Among school-going PWDs, they found that many drop out especially in secondary school when they start discovering that they are actually challenged on what they can do. The school dropout rate was lower among students who attend special needs schools.

Commenting on the findings, Hellen Grace Asamo, the PWD MP for Eastern Uganda said that the biggest challenge they are facing is to do with access to information. She said while many government programmes have recently started to cater for PWDs many don’t know about their existence and how to benefit from them.

Asamo, says that this financial year, government added Shs2.1billion to the disability grant and now they are now pushing that this money is accessed depending on a person’s specific disability after realizing that so many people who may not qualify were using the money at the expense of the rightful beneficiaries.

According to the researcher, this new data should help in increasing advocacy for PWDs and to find employable fixes that can offer meaningful gains and change their living conditions.

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