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NewsDay

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Disabled children shut out

News
PEOPLE living with disability on Tuesday challenged the government to improve their wellbeing by ensuring accessibility to basic rights in the country.

PEOPLE living with disability on Tuesday challenged the government to improve their wellbeing by ensuring accessibility to basic rights in the country as many children living with disabilities were failing to reach their full potential.

STAFF REPORTER

Speaking at the launch of State of the World Children Report 2013 by Unicef on Tuesday activists also expressed concern that children living with disabilities were failing to access basic civil liberties such as education and health.

National Association of Societies for the Care of the Handicapped (Nascoh) director Farai Gasa Mukuta said there was a negative attitude towards disabled children.

“Fifty two percent of children with disability have no access to education,” Mukuta said.

“Hundred percent of the toilets in schools are not accessible for wheelchairs, which simply means that these children with disability are not catered for in schools. So there is need for government to ensure that those living with disabilities are catered for.”

President a Mugabe’s special advisor on disability and the disadvantaged, Retired Brigadier General Felix Muchemwa, said what made the plight of the disabled children worse was the unavailability to statistics.

“We still do not know what the status is and this is because we have not done anything yet. I requested last year in November that we needed to know the disability data. We do not know the number of children living with disability,” he said.

Muchemwa said most of the children living with disability were not attending schools as most parents chose to hide their children from the public.

“Most of the children are not in schools, they are hidden by their parents and most of them are not even registered. They do not have birth certificates, and hence they have no access to education and medical assistance. Things on the ground are different with what we are given,” he added.