Six hundred school children in the Sissala East District have joined their counterparts in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America in a “Worldwide Campaign for Education for Children with Disability”.
The annual international event, christened: “We Ring the Bell” aimed at drawing attention to the right to education of children with disability.
Mr Dintie Tayiru Sule, Finance and Administrative Manager of SAVE-Ghana, a non-governmental organisation, said many children in the communities were unable or not allowed to go to school.
SAVE-Ghana organised the children with and without disability to march through the principal streets of Tumu to mark the event.
“We Ring the Bell,” is a Dutch Liliane Foundation initiative supporting children with disability through education, in partnership with SAVE-Ghana and SWEB Foundation.
Mr Sule said schools needed to become more accessible to children with disability, literally and figuratively, while teachers and teaching materials were made available to meet their needs and aspirations.
He said: “Everyone needs to become aware that education is a fundamental right of every child, and equally so for every child with disabilities,” he said.
Mr Sule said across the world, about 89 per cent of children went to school but that was not the case for children with disabilities.
“In low and middle income countries, a mere 10 per cent of them go to school and in Ghana, their participation in education is equally low,” he said.
Mr. Sule said the focus of the event was to encourage the children to “ring the bell” and make noise in the schoolyards, using drums, horns and all kinds of instruments to draw the attention of policy makers.
It was also to inspire stakeholders in corridors of power to remove the barriers that prevent children with disability to attend school.
Mr Sule said more than 70 schools and 20,000 children in Africa, Asia and Latin America would join in the event and 720 schools and 180,000 children in the Netherlands would do same.
He said in the year 2000 some 200 member states of the United Nations agreed on eight Millennium Targets; one of those targets was primary education for every child by 2015, which had not been achieved.
Mr Sule said: “These new targets are meant to focus on those who did not benefit from the Millennium Targets, particularly children and adults with disabilities”.
He said the situation of children with disabilities had improved only very slightly since the year 2000, “it is now high time to change this, and the louder the call across the world, the more people will hear it”.
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