Women and Youths with Disabilities (WYD) in Cameroon face several life challenges such as unsuitable tools (audio, video, images…), low availability of transcribed resources on Sexual Reproductive Health (SRH) in braille for Women and Youth (W&Y) with visual impairments, little or no information for W&Y with intellectual deficiency and auditive impairments (autism, cerebral palsy…) about SRH and GBV.
This leads to societal odds such as increased vulnerability to abuse, negligence, unwanted pregnancies, low access to health care services due to inadequate communication between the personnel and WYD, harmful cultural practices (abandonment, killing and repulsion of children born with disability) and financial precarity.
The insufficiency of multidisciplinary support centers for people with specific needs as WYD does not help brighten this sad representation.
They are several challenges that we identified at vessels for development (V4DEV), varying from disability friendly infrastructures, scarcity of competence in some fields, to unsuitable education to prepare youth with disabilities to the professional world. Have you ever asked yourself how students with visual impairment, using braille do after school to easily integrate themselves in offices after they left school?
How do they communicate with their fellow colleagues without disability when they do not know how to use braille?
Should we mention the cost of school supplies/stationaries of children with disabilities. Showing a major need to adapt the education of persons with different impairment to new technologies, which is cost effective and is the most common and global language.
From our consultations of women with disabilities many feel excluded from medical facilities due to discrimination, poor service delivered once you are a person with disabilities in most hospital they visited, difficulties to speak with medical personnel according to the impairment which creates a need to be assisted by a caregiver and creating a confidentiality problem while consulting.
Therefore pushing them to not ask for some specific services for example related to family planning, or other needs. Though much is ongoing, much is to be done in Cameroon in terms of inclusion, in the second part of this article we will highlight other challenges faced by women and young persons with disabilities and what can be done to tackle them.
