By Adeola Tukuru
Disability Rights Advocacy Centre (DRAC) has expressed concern that there were no plans and inclusion for Persons With Disability (PWDs) due to lack of aggregated data on disability from Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) across the country .
The Executive Director, DRAC, Dr Irene Patrick-Ogbogu made this known at the ongoing organization’s Annual Media Retreat on Disabilty Inclusion in Abuja.
She explained that there were a lot of data from the National Population Commission (NPC),National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) and others but zero of them were disaggregated for disability inclusion.
In her words; “We don’t know how many PWDs are in service, you don’t know how many are in certain locations, you don’t know where they live or whether they have access to employment.
“If you do not know these things, you cannot plan, because you cannot say you are planning when you don’t know how many women with disability would need to access health care and others .
Patrick-Ogbogu said DRAC is focusing on three issues for the media retreat to address issues bothering PWDs adding that the first issue was on strengthening the implementation of the disability Act.
She further called on the need for the media to beam the searchlight on the issue of disability disaggregation data.
Patrick-Ogbogu said that there was need to strengthen the implementation of the disability Act signed into law with the establishment of a commission but still so many stakeholders were not aware of it.
She said that there was need to make MDAs to know the roles they need to play to strengthen and implement the disability Act and DRAC was doing this through the media that could help in popularizing the disability Act.
Patrick-Ogbogu said that the media retreat was also aimed at improving public awareness on issues of disability inclusion and the media was specifically targeted because they were like the bridge between people and all aspects of the society.
