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Daisy Jeremani Gender Editor
WOMEN and girls who are visually impaired have been left behind in getting information on reproductive health. Most of them are unaware of the proper use of condoms, putting many of them at risk of contracting sexually transmitted diseases including HIV.

In an interview yesterday, head of operations at Disability, HIV and Aids Trust (Dhat), Hamid Ismail-Mauto said 2015 was a year the world and indeed Zimbabwe will agree on a new international development framework.

Her organisation aims to bring to light the structural inequalities and human rights violations faced by all women and girls.

She said disabled women who were visually and hearing impaired had challenges peculiar to them, as a result they needed to be treated differently in the rolling out of information on reproductive health. For the hearing impaired there are no trained personnel at either clinics or hospitals to help them fully understand issues to do with HIV/Aids, cervical cancer or family planning.

“As a country we’re now speaking of living positively and anti-retroviral therapy, but people with disabilities have been left behind. Some are yet to understand the proper use of condoms,” she said.

Ismail-Mauto said as much as condoms were readily available information on their proper use was not friendly to the visually impaired, as it was not written in Braille.

According to a recent report done by the Ministry of Health and Child Care there are 900,000 people with disabilities in Zimbabwe and many of these according to Dhat are living with HIV/Aids. However, Dhat does not have the statistics on how many out of these people are living with the condition and hope that the data gathered by the ministry will be disaggregated, so that they can come up with a figure.

As gloomy as the information may sound all hope is not lost, as Ismail-Mauto said there has been some progress. She said government has put the issues of the disabled on the agenda and the research is proof that it wanted to understand issues to do with disability.

She was quick to point out that “there was an ongoing need to educate service providers and policy makers on the sexual reproduction health among people with disabilities.”

There have been calls over the years to make sure that women and girls with disabilities are included in each discussion and in every measure taken to address their situations and challenges. As a result, they coined the term “nothing for us without us.”

This need is provided for in the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons which Zimbabwe is a signatory to which says “. . . considering that persons with disabilities should have the opportunity to be actively involved in decision making processes about policies and programmes, including those directly concerning them.”