The ongoing programme of categorising people living with disabilities (PLWDs) is intended to enable government planning based on accurate statistics.

This was announced by Vincent Munyeshyaka, the Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Local Government and Social Affairs, while addressing a meeting between National Council of Persons with Disabilities (NCPD) and its stakeholders, yesterday in Kigali.

"The challenge of disabilities is cross-cutting and is taken into account while planning in every institution in this country. Categorising persons with disabilities will help us to identify how many people with disabilities we have and document the kind of disability for every one which will enable us make statistical data based planning,” PS Munyeshyaka said.

"For instance, once we have known the exact number of those with vision impairment, we will get to know how many Braille machines are needed or how many wheelchairs are needed after knowing the number of those whose disabilities require such tools,”he added.

Romalis Niyomugabo, the president of the National Council of Persons with Disabilities, said the categorisation is meant to clarify and fix loopholes in the current categories.

"The new categories will differentiate between disabilities and illnesses unlike the current categories which do not differentiate the two. For example, you can find someone who has a chronic disease registered as a person with disabilities which is wrong,” he said.

He explained that the anomaly was done in the 2012 health and demographic survey which led to registration of over 446,000 persons as living with disabilities because those who conducted the survey were not able to differentiate disability from chronic illnesses.

"But I hope the ongoing exercise will fix such loopholes as we have a group of 176 qualified health workers to conduct the registration,” Niyomugabo said.

"Every person with disabilities will get a card indicating the category. This will help in identifying those with high degree of disabilities to be supported through various programmes like Ubudehe and VUP (Uision 2020 Umurenge Programme).”

Some categories of disabilities cited are physical impairment, hearing and speech impairment, vision impairment, mental disabilities, multiple disabilities, and other disabilities such as albinism.

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