The most of people with disability (PWD) lack of sufficient support from family and society and those lead them to lack of adequate care, access to social services, opportunity contribution to socio-economic development of family and community.
PWD is unable to fully participate in social-economic development and community development (CD) and/or has found problems in improving their social and economic conditions. Absent PWD participation in social activities has been increasing risks and continuing the poverty cycle and they become discriminated from their different aspects. In addition, there are some misconceptions about PWD-double stigma for poor PWD instead of the society should provide the social and spiritual supports as they should be and/or like the Lao government’s policies try to address the issues.
However, it looks challenging due to the inadequate government’s financial and social supports. Though, some PWD can stay with healthy, work in families and join social and community activity, they have still been ignored from community and society for the reason that they are very easily said than done to communicate and work with others and then lead them to exclude from social welfare, limited participation in social activities and social services as such education, health, vocational skills for socio-economic development to enable PWDs live on their capacity without assistance from others. Those led them to lack of access to basic needs/social services and unable to socio economic contribution and then lead to risk and/or continue to poverty cycle of PWD and not being involved in the community, discrimination on different aspects.
Therefore, project has proposed and addressed the issues mentioned above by providing specific vocational skills trainings on such as animal husbandry and animal raising, small engine repair and mechanic fixing, handicraft activities (Lao wind instrument or Khen Lao). Also the project has increased empowerment and participation of PWDs in awareness raising intervention on rights of disabled people and human rights in order to improve their participation in socio-economic development within families and communities.
To ensure sustainability and continuation of activities beyond the project duration, the PWD’ capacity building project has been provided with potential cooperation and support from relevant partners as well as to scale up PWDs’ career development approach to others, lessons learned and best practices have been collected as part of M&E and share with other PWDs and relevant organization and those mentioned above related to all LDPA’s strategy, government, and SDG already since the project respond to the needs and requirement for human right principle as such protection, promotion and fulfill for PWDs.
Some activities, however, Lao Disabled People Association of Xiengkhouang (LDPA.XKH) had employed the experiences and skills of project management and implementation through previous projects to this project to ensure the achievement of project’s goal.
In addition, the project has employed the experiences and skills of project management and implementation through previous projects, the expertise, knowledge, and skills of LDPA.XKH’s staff through working in different project with PWDs in terms of vocational trainings, Income Generation Activities (IGAs), Health services accessibility, and Policy Dialogue. Those are the value experiences and lesson learnt for LDPA.XKH to apply for this project in order to achieve the mission and commitment in Xiengkhouang province.
The project has provided the trainings the vocational skills for targeted farmers as of 20 PWDs in Lathbouak village cluster, Peak district, Xiengkhouang province.
Before the project implementation, the needs assessment of PWDs was conducted and identified the needs of PWDs and the problems were addressed on what the PWDs needs were identified by target group, and then the community changed their attitude, behavior and PWDs better social situation, and increased participation and got more support from local authorities.
Income generation activity (IGA) is identified and undertaken by PWD group and IGA is increased among PWDs and families. The needs and issues were identified and responded in community/village meeting, activities and participants from relevant organizations were reported such as People’s Provincial Assemblies (PPA), district and village authorities.
The targeted as of 20 PWDs has received and increased the knowledge, skills, and experiences on vocational skills such as animal husbandry (poultry and pig production) and the law concerned with PWD. The PWDs deeply understand on human rights, involved in social activities as well as village authority is increased; they exchanged lessons learned and helped each other to change of lives, innovative experience, knowledge and skills on legislations and promote the rights for PWDs and most of PWDs have developed their professional skills in terms of animal husbandry in terms of poultry and pig production and handicraft production.
The groups of PWDs have a formal stage and shared and exchanged their lessons learned and experienced through their meeting and their workshop activities to help each other of them.
The project for Strengthening and Equality of People with Disability and Community Development (SEPCoD) has much been paid attention because these PWD groups has many problems they are facing based on the needs assessment has been conducted. The project staff have been facilitators and led them in seeing their problems, needs and solution by themselves and all problems they found were agreed and addressed by their opinions because most of the people with disabilities have much participatory shared their feelings, plan and almost everything together.
The target group of the project for Strengthening and Equality of People with Disability and Community Development (SEPCoD) has a little bit difficulty in project implementation because some beneficiaries of target groups are ethnic group such as Hmong (Lao Sung) that they cannot speak Lao and cannot understand Lao language well. So, all activities had implemented have to implement slowly and elaborate enough.
If other projects or the LDPA.XKh wanted to expand the project more, the project has to properly focus on conducting the needs assessment, target groups and planning. In addition, the project coordinator should negotiate with local people especially the persons who can speak local language such as Hmong.
