Background
campaign

TRAC FM & Light for the World Netherlands (LFTW) collaborate in a new
partnership in the Livelihoods Improvement Challenge Project. LFTW is a
disability mainstreaming organization that lobbies for and promotes the rights
of persons with disabilities. Our campaign for the Livelihoods Improvement
Challenge Project looks into challenges that youth with disabilities experience
in accessing vocational training and employment options.

In line with the objectives and practices of LFTW, we include
people with various disabilities in our radio campaign in the following
ways: 

• We include people who have a hearing impairment: their relatives
  or friends are asked to send a message to the TRAC FM system and we send them
  the poll question translated to the local language. This enables them to send
  in their own answer and to speak for themselves!
• We ask participants to indicate whether they are disabled or
  not: this shows the participation rate of people living with a disability.
• We include youth with disabilities in radio talk shows to share
  their experiences regarding access of vocational training and employment.

This program ran for 1 month on Radio Wa in Lira and Mega FM in
Gulu. 

Results
The poll question results are in! 

Our first poll question “What is the main barrier Youth
with Disabilities face in accessing vocational training programs?”
attracted 473 responses. The findings show that:

• Community attitudes towards youth with disabilities – 35.5%
• Financial reasons – 36.4%
• Infrastructures and content of vocational training programs that
  is not accessible for youth with disabilities – 14.7%
• Entry requirements of vocational training programs – 13.3%

When we split the differences between people living with a
disability and people who are not, we see that the first-mentioned voted more
for financial reasons as a main barrier, whereas people not living with a
disability said that the community attitudes were the most important barrier.
These findings help LFTW to shape their program.

Our second poll question “Why is employment important for Youth
with Disabilities?” attracted 555 valid responses. The findings are as follows:

• For their economic independence – 55%
• For their self-esteem – 25%
• For their social status –
  20%

Although participants with and without a disability voted mostly
for the first answer option, people living with a disability were most unanimous
in their answer: 64% of them said that economic independence is most important
for employment.

The third and last question “What are barriers in accessing
employment” led to the following results:

• Attitudes from the community – 46.4%
• Competition with youth without disabilities – 22.3%
• Lack of accessibility of the work place – 18.2%
• Lack of education and work experience of youth with disabilities
  – 13.1%

Again, both people living with a disability and without voted
for the answer option “attitudes from the community”.

Conclusion

These findings show the
perceptions of especially people living with a disability as we are able to
capture their voices through our methodology. These will further shape the
programming of LFTW and shows how the voices of people living with a disability
are heard.