Prayatna Nepal had conducted one day Covid dialogue series for 24 visually impaired women in Gorkha. This program was started by Mr. Amrit Rai director of NAB rehabilitation Gorkha. He welcomes all participants and representatives of Gorkha municipality. Chief guest Mr. Bijay Bhakta Tiwari thanks the organizer for bringing such an important program in Gorkha. He expressed that Gorkha municipality is focused on the empowerment of people with disabilities and has taken some efforts, but these efforts are not enough to empower the person with disabilities.
After his speech session was moved on introduction round. During the introduction round participants learn inclusive introduction technique. In order to maintain the comfort of the participants and to maintain confidentiality, the facilitator bound the participants through code of conduct by taking an oath.
In the first phase of the dialogue, the focus was on the good things learned from Covid. According to the participants, Covid made it easy for them to be aware of personal hygiene, to use virtual platforms like zoom, google meet ETC. Along with this got opportunity to received training on legal and computer literacy, and to express their inherent talent through competitions such as reciting songs poem and speech on online platform.
Second phase was focused on negative impact of COVID for women with disabilities. Women with disabilities faced a lot of challenges due to the lockdown. One of the participants narrated the experience of losing her mother during the Covid time due to poor economic condition she was not able to visit her sick mother. She says that “ if I had money, I would have been able to hire the ambulance or private vehicle meet my mother” another participants expressed that “during the pandemic of Covid, people with visual disabilities facing problem to identify the location of their destination sighted people used to run away even when they encountered with visually impaired person which made it difficult for them to walk.”
The last stage was focus on way forward of Prayatna Nepal. During the way forward session most of participants emphasis on importance of inclusive beneficiaries’ selection criteria and
inclusive mechanism of organization and community.
