Disability Inclusion on GBV Programing

When an occupational therapist ends up working in a Gender-Based Violence program...what happens? 

Well has I shared in previous posts since this was not my expertise area, I read a lot about GBV, informed about community participatory approaches and successful methods to implement with the Ambassadors Project.

But despite not being an OT practitioner for many years, the love and respect for persons with disabilities are always with me, and the need to improve the accessibility of the services I work on, it comes naturally.  

So after the capacity building training for the GBV Ambassadors (GBVA) on gender topics, and noticing that the participants in their community awareness sessions were mainly persons without disabilities (we were able to understand this thanks to the use of the new age and gender-sensitive attendance sheet that I developed at the beginning of the deployment, to support Wefoco to get differentiated data on the reach of their actions), it was definitely time to raise awareness within the ambassadors for the need to make their sessions more inclusive and accessible. 

Training materials for the session. 

GBV can happen to anyone, information should be given to all, and persons with disabilities, especially women and girls,  due to the intersection of gender and disability, are more vulnerable to GBV, due to: 

• discrimination and stigma; 
• negative perceptions of society about their capacity;
• lack of access to information;
• isolation; 
• poverty; 
• environmental barriers and lack of transport.     

Together with Catherine from the Network of Persons with Disabilities of Mumias East, I facilitated a 2-day capacity building training for the ambassadors, covering the following topics: 

• Personal attitudes towards disabilities.
• Understanding disability: a rights-based approach
• Gender, disability and inequality
• Root causes of GBV against women and girls with disabilities
• Vulnerabilities of women and girls with disabilities
• Barriers to access participation and strategies to inclusion
• Paths for inclusive programs:
• Respectful language and Accessible Communication
• Support networks for persons with disabilities.
• Planning inclusive actions

Catherine facilitating a training session. 

The training was filled with participatory activities and the ambassadors were very engaged. They were able to be more conscious of their own negative attitudes towards persons with disabilities and to feel somehow in the skin of someone that has a lifelong history of discrimination, subordination and disempowerment. A lot of moments during the training made the ambassadors get emotional when realizing the amount of barriers persons with disabilities might face in society.  The ambassadors also understood that not only the person with a disability might be more vulnerable to violence but also the caretaker or spouse. 

Participatory activities during the training: how to adapt sessions to persons with different needs and reflection on who has more opportunities/power and who has less. 

After understanding the factors leading to increased vulnerability to violence, we reflected on what we can do as ambassadors to reduce that vulnerability in our communities. So we defined what we need to do to make sure persons with disabilities are invited for our awareness sessions, how we can adapt our venues so that they can more easily participate. How can we communicate in a manner that is more accessible for all and respectfully when addressing persons with different disabilities. 

Andreia facilitating the recap on how to plan inclusive sessions. 

From the ambassadors' feedback of the training, the most useful learning was related to the perception and attitudes towards persons with disabilities. “It has helped me change my attitude towards persons with disability... to be positive” “they are all same like other people, should be involved in activities”. In general, they felt that the training increased their knowledge on GBV and Disabilities on a Great and Moderate level. 

Activity on Respectful Language: reflection on how we address persons with disabilities with negative and positive statements in our daily lives. 

The average confidence level of the ambassadors, to work with persons with disabilities and improve the accessibility of their actions after the training was 4 on a scale of 1 to 5 (1 is not confident and 5 very confident). 

Let us hope the results will be shown in the next participants' attendance lists :)