Voices of People with Disabilities

In 2012, Cambodia ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and it had already adopted a law on the protection and promotion of these rights back in 2009. Ever since, the country also elaborates strategic plans directed towards the fulfilment of its obligations under this legal framework.

In practice, however, much more needs to be done in order to make sure the rights of persons with disabilities are actually respected, that this group is not subjected to systematic discrimination or exclusion, and that its members enjoy equal opportunities.

Thus, according to recent surveys, less than 60 percent of the persons with disabilities living in Cambodia are literate, and the figure is much worse if we specifically look at women with disabilities. Given that the literacy rate among the general population is currently at almost 90 percent, it is quite obvious that here, we are dealing with a structural problem that urgently needs to be addressed.

While at least 1 in 10 Cambodians is thought to be a person with disabilities, the available data are often incomplete and scarce on details. We don’t know, for example, how many visually impaired people live in every province, county or village. Yet having a full, accurate and up-to-date picture of the situation on the ground is of course essential, if we want to design and implement successful policies.

For API, these issues have always been a primary concern, and recently we’ve been striving to show that sustained efforts at the community level can really make a difference by improving the participation of persons with disabilities in the local decision making, as well as by offering them enabling spaces where they can articulate their voices and demands.

Furthermore, we find it crucial that people with disabilities have full access to the public services offered by the communes and districts. Only if we find practical ways allowing everybody to take part in education, receive healthcare or be issued various documents by the local administration can we meaningfully talk about inclusion in Cambodia. And only if we have reliable and detailed figures at the community level can we hope that no one will be left behind.

The implementation of the Social Accountability Framework (I-SAF) is a broad, internationally probed reform process Cambodia has also joined over the past decade in order to achieve some of its development goals by making authorities and service providers more responsive to the actual rights, needs and demands of citizens. This has been a common effort of both government institutions and the civil society sector, benefiting from substantial support by various international partners.

As an organisation with a long history of involvement in issues of local democratic participation, API has been assuming a leading role in many initiatives and projects belonging to the I-SAF process. However, reflecting on our experience during the first years of work on promoting and implementing these reforms, we’ve come to the conclusion that disadvantaged groups, and especially persons with disabilities are still widely underrepresented and their voices are not really heard.

Therefore, with the support of Voice, a Dutch grant facility operated in Cambodia by Oxfam, and in cooperation with our partners from Epic Arts, API has decided to undertake an innovative approach aiming at substantially increasing the inclusion and participation of persons with disabilities in some of the most important aspects of social life in their communities, as well as in the I-SAF reform process itself, since it is here that decisions are being made as to how essential public services will be offered in the future.

Currently, we are running this project in seven communes in the Takeo province, based on a budget of 150,000 US dollars. Yet we believe the results we will achieve and the lessons learnt can easily be generalised and applied in similar areas all over the country.

Our approach is mainly based on amplifying the voices of people with disabilities living in these seven communities by means of offering them the opportunity to express how they feel in an open, free and enabling environment. We especially encourage people with different disabilities – such as visual, hearing, mobility or learning impairments – to give feedback on education, health or administrative services, in an effort to identify the main barriers they are confronted with. The diversity of our project participants, many of whom also belong to otherwise disadvantaged groups – women, youth, low income population – is key to a proper representation of the complex reality in the field, as well as to the validity of the results our research is hoping to deliver.

Starting from their own assessment of the current situation, and at the same time using some standard tools of statistics, quantitative and qualitative analysis, we are hoping not only to come up with a much clearer and more refined picture of the reality on the ground, thus identifying key issues which need to be addressed by the reforms, but also to initiate an inclusive and participatory dialogue which, in our opinion, should become part of local tradition, forming the basis for any future decision making.

For this to happen, though, we first need to make sure persons with various disabilities are offered the appropriate preconditions for them to meaningfully articulate their views, and that accessibility really becomes part of everyday life. This means, among many other things, that we need long term, systematic solutions for an inclusive mobility, for broadly accessible public services, for widely readable and understandable documents and media, for a more inclusive education and a more efficient health care.

These are, of course, very ambitious goals, which cannot be reached in just a couple of years. However, building on the experience of this project, API hopes that what has proved to work in Takeo can be later implemented elsewhere too. Therefore, we believe that sharing the stories of our project participants, the data we managed to gather and the conclusions we drew is a very important part of what we are doing.

This enables a collective learning process which we would like to keep as open and interactive as possible, and that is why we chose to make full use of various digital media, and the video documentary format in particular.

The stories our protagonists tell mean a lot to us, not only because they stem from personal experience, but also because, in spite of the differences between their perspectives, they do sketch the broad outline of just how much more needs to be done if we want Cambodia to be a country where every voice matters.

Decent and accessible infrastructure is of course essential, if persons with disabilities are to enjoy equal access to public services. But this means much more than good, smooth roads or ramps for wheelchair users, although these elements are obviously both vital, and also useful for much broader categories of citizens. Digital infrastructure, including mobile internet coverage, as well as accessible public websites and apps, are equally important.

We would like to open this dialogue and invite you to share your own thoughts and experience with these issues, regardless of whether you happen to be a person with disabilities or not.

One way to do this is to join the conversation on our Facebook page, where you can also exchange views with our project participants and team members in charge. You can also use your mobile phone or camera to take a short video and tell us your story.

We are more than happy to listen to your perspective on disability and public services, and we will publish the most relevant and interesting videos on our YouTube channel.