On March 22nd 2021, The National Union od Disability Organisations in Rwanda NUDOR, under its project of “promotion of Anti-discrimination practices for Persons with Disabilities in Rwanda” conducted a quarterly national Dialogue on concluding observations and recommendations of the UN committee on the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disability CRPD. The meeting was attended by NUDOR member organisations, some Government institutions, Rwanda National Human rights Commission and other actors on the Human rights.
During this meeting, NUDOR reminded participants that Rwanda signed this convention in October 2008. in 2015 Rwanda provided the first initial report presented the report in from of the UN committee on Human rights in Geneva in 2019. Then, the concluding observation and recommendations were given to the Government of Rwanda for more implementation.
After going throughout all recommendations, Participants appreciated the effort made by the government on some recommendations and recommended for others to be emphasized on. Among others, participants appreciated the Government effort on recommendation article 9 of Accessibility, where the government made effort for Buildings offering different services to be accessible, but insisted that nothing was done in terms of Roads and other infrastructures where big holes and bridges are found around the roads without any protection from persons with vision impairment. They also highlighted that only the national TV in Rwanda tries to translate into sign language the content of only news, while other programs are not translated. For private media all of the content is never translated into sign languages to be accessible to the deaf people.
Participants of the meeting also reviewed the recommendation on article 27 on Employment. They said that no specific measures were adopted to significantly increase the employment rate of persons with disabilities. Some of these people lost even their jobs than they received new ones. However, Participants appreciated the Government effort on more other recommendations like in Education where many teachers were trained on inclusive education and special needs education, training of justice institutions on sign language and calling for sign language interpreters to support deaf people and allowing Health insurance “mituelle de santé” to cover some special products and materials for persons with disabilities although the most expensive ones are personally paid. Today on the support from the National Council of Persons with Disability and their partners the braille dictionary is being done and once finished the sign language will be admitted among official languages in the country.
