Disability Federation engages stakeholders on Disability Act
The Ghana Federation of Disability Organizations (GFD), has held a public consultation forum in Kumasi to collate inputs from stakeholders on the draft Legislative Instrument (LI) for the Persons with Disability Act, 2006 (Act 715).
The Act, which was passed 12 years ago, has no LI to back it due to some inconsistencies in the Act with the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disability.
Ghana ratified the UN Convention in 2012, but the harmonization of the domestic law with the convention is a basic prerequisite to pave way for the draft of the LI, this called for the need to revise the Act to be in tune with the international convention.
It is against this background that the GFD has been engaging government on the need to revise the Act and come out with an LI to ensure a stronger legislative framework for Ghana.
The public consultation forum was initiated to offer a common platform for representatives of various disability organizations to make inputs to the revision of the Act.
It was organized by the GFD in collaboration with Mind Freedom, an NGO in mental health, and Media Caucus on Disability with funding from the Disability Rights Advocacy Fund.
About 30 representatives from the northern sector of the country made up of the Ashanti, Brong-Ahafo, Northern, Upper East and Upper West regions attended.
Mr Moses Fordjour, the Monitoring, Evaluation and Knowledge Officer of GFD, said the exercise was to involve all stakeholders as the GFD prepares to meet government over the issue.
He said his outfit had done some analysis of the Act vis-à-vis the UN Convention and has identified some gaps that needed to be addressed in the revised Act.
“We have gone ahead to produce a draft revised Disability Act for Ghana and contracted consultants to work with us to develop an LI based on revision we have done this so that when the time comes for us to sit with government we would have those two documents to move the process faster” he said.
Source: GNA