Since 2014, National Commission for Persons with Disabilities (NCPD) and Rwanda National Union of the Deaf (RNUD), with support from Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO), embarked on a project of writing a comprehensive sign language dictionary.

The project was expected to give birth to a more improved version, considering that the first one produced in 2009 had about 900 signs only, hence the need for a new edition.

The new dictionary was expected to have 2000 signs.

According to Théophile Binama, the sign language training coordinator at RNUD, the dictionary, if finalized, will be a milestone as far as effective communication between people living with disability and service providers is concerned.

"In reality, there are people living with deaf disability who can’t access essential services because they can’t communicate effectively with providers of these services. If the dictionary is at hand, many service providers will refer to the dictionary and learn how to communicate using sign language,” he told The New Times on Monday, August 31.

Binama gave an example of people living with deaf disability who go to hospitals and have to be accompanied by an interpreter to ease communication between the patient and doctor, which he said, hinders confidentiality.

He also noted that the dictionary will help sign language interpreters to know more words in the language.

Having noted some of the many benefits of the sign language dictionary when finalized, the project has stalled and crossed the deadline of June this year- a period by which the project was expected to be completed as announced by NCPD at the end of last year.

The 2012 population and household census by the National Institute of Statistics Rwanda (NISR) revealed that there were more than 33,000 Rwandans with speaking and hearing impairments.

In Rwanda, there are five special schools that teach children with deaf disability.

Lack of competent consultant

According to NCPD, at the start of the project in 2014, it was being undertaken by a Ugandan consultant whose contract ended without finalizing it.

After that, at the end of 2018, the contract was given to another American national who was supposed to finalize the project by June 2020.

As per Emmanuel Ndayisaba, the Executive Secretary of the National Council of Persons with Disabilities (NCPD), the later consultant also failed to meet the deadline.

"The latest consultant did like 80 percent of the whole project but failed to do the remaining work,” he said, adding that "We are working with different stakeholders including the World Deaf Federation to find a more competent consultant to do the remaining work.”

Phases of the project include doing research across the country to know what sign languages are used for different words, designing signs for those words, writing a word that matches every sign, and interpreting how a sign of that word is done.

Apart from the part of drawn signs, written words will be in both Kinyarwanda and English.

Ndayisaba said that the remaining work is the interpretation of drawn signs.

"Not everyone can do that interpretation, it requires a person who is both highly skilled in sign language and linguistics. Those people are scarce even in neighbouring countries, but we are still looking for one and we expect to find him or her in the near future.”

According to Ndayisaba, so far, over Rwf120 million were spent on the project.

Sign language is a language which principally uses manual communication to convey meaning, as opposed to spoken language.

This can involve simultaneously combining hand shapes, orientation and movement of the hands, arms or body, and facial expressions to express a speaker’s thoughts.