About ECDD

Who We Are

The Ethiopian Center for Disability and Development (ECDD) Association is a local, non-profit, non-governmental organization founded in 2005 and newly registered as an Ethiopian Resident Charity on 3 November 2009 by the Agency for the Registration of Charities and Societies in Ethiopia. ECDD works in collaboration with other organizations to promote inclusive development in Ethiopia –the inclusion of disability issues and people with disabilities in mainstream government and NGO development projects, programs and services.

The ECDD Association now includes 66 individual members who serve the organization in an individual, voluntary capacity – women and men from the academic world, government, the private sector, NGOs, disabled persons’ organizations – Parliamentarians, lawyers, teachers and trainers, statisticians and accountants, interpreters and translators, journalists, IT professionals, managers and project coordinators and others. Half of the Association members are women and one third of the members have a disability or are a parent or sibling of a family member with a disability.

ECDD has 17 staff persons working full-time and 15 persons working part-time, 32 in all, of whom 18 are women and 24 are persons with a disability. This reflects an important policy of ECDD – to employ whenever possible, as a priority and commitment, individuals with disabilities.

Vision

ECDD envisions an inclusive Ethiopia, where children, youth and adults with disabilities, regardless of gender or kind of disability, as well as their parents and families, enjoy the same rights and have access to the same medical, educational and social services, training and work opportunities enjoyed by other citizens. In such an inclusive society, people with disabilities are accepted, have a voice and participate actively in the life and development of their communities.

Objectives

Who We Are Vision Strategies Program Activities

1. Create awareness

Collect and disseminate, through an information service center, a website, and the media, information on disability and on persons with disabilities in Ethiopia, in order to increase awareness of disability issues, organizations and the availability of disability services among policy makers, program planners and implementers, students and researchers, persons with disabilities and the general public.

2. Promote and facilitate inclusive development

Organize training courses, in collaboration with disabled persons’ organizations DPOs), for personnel of government departments/bureaus and development NGOs, on poverty and disability in Ethiopia, and on practical methods for the effective integration of disability issues and persons with disabilities in development programs, particularly the Government’s Plan for Accelerated and Sustained Development to End Poverty (PASDEP).

3. Increase economic self-reliance

Offer technical guidance and facilitation services to local groups of persons with disabilities, and organizations of parents of disabled children, on how to design projects and prepare project proposals for donor funding, in order to increase the skills and economic self-reliance of persons with disabilities, their families and their organizations.

4. Increase educational opportunities

Work with universities to increase accessibility and the recruitment of and services for students with disabilities, to introduce disability issues in courses of faculties of education, economics, law, social sciences and others, to undertake research on disability and development issues and to support associations of students with disabilities.

5. Promote and facilitate research

Work in collaboration with partner organizations to promote and undertake research on the situation of children, youth and adults with disabilities and their families in Ethiopia, with a view to proposing and designing ways to meet needs and increase opportunities.

6. Provide supports

Arrange for sign language interpretation services, transcription of materials into Braille, translation services Amharic-English, wheelchair accessible transportation, accessible meeting rooms, and media contacts, among other services for persons with disabilities and the public.

Strategies

Who We Are Vision Objectives Program Activities

1. Networking

ECDD works in partnership with other local as well as international organizations, particularly organizations of persons with disabilities, in order to achieve its objectives. ECDD intentionally belongs to networks of organizations as a means to promote inclusive development policies and practices, and to work with other organizations.

2. Capacity-building

ECDD works to build the capacity of other organizations, particularly organizations of persons with disabilities and selected development NGOs and government departments/bureaus, in order to enable them to better promote, facilitate or practice inclusive development.

3. Participation

ECDD tries to practice what it advocates, namely the employment of persons with disabilities as trainers, facilitators and researchers. ECDD has a policy of intentionally employing whenever possible equal numbers of women and men with disabilities and individuals from families with a disabled family member.

4. Knowledge sharing

ECDD believes that a greater sharing of already available information about disability and persons with disabilities in Ethiopia would reduce duplication of efforts and increase synergies to more effectively promote the rights of, and improve the lives of persons with disabilities and their families.

Program Activities

Who We Are Vision Objectives

1. Economic Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities:

ECDD trained Assistant Facilitators – 9 university graduates with disabilities – are assisting self-help groups of persons with disabilities in Addis Ababa and in 4 Regions of the country to plan income generating, skills training and capacity-building projects, and to prepare applications for grant funding from the Abilis Foundation in Finland. ECDD is the official representative of the Abilis Foundation in Ethiopia.

2. Access to Higher Education for Students with Disabilities:

with support from the Threshold Association of Finland, ECDD is providing technical and financial support to the Addis Ababa University (AAU) Disability and Career Development Center (DCDC) in order to increase services, material resources, and equal educational opportunities for students with disabilities attending the University. It is also supporting activities of three student associations at AAU: the Physically-impaired Students Association (PISA), the Visually-impaired Students Association (VISA) and the Hearing-impaired Students Association (HISA).

3. Training for Inclusive Development:

ECDD is providing disability awareness training for personnel of government bureaus and development NGOs on how to include persons with disabilities in development programs and projects. This project is funded by the Abilis Foundation.

4. Guide to Accessible Addis Ababa:

made possible by a grant from Light for the World, an Austrian international NGO, ECDD is undertaking a survey of major hotels, guest houses, restaurants/cafes, shopping centers, essential services, transport, sports, recreation, culture and religious facilities in Addis Ababa, and will prepare a guidebook indicating which facilities and services are accessible to persons with disabilities.

5. Inclusive Family Planning and Reproductive Health Services:

this project is funded by the Lucile and David Packard Foundation in USA and is being implemented by the Nia Foundation in Ethiopia. The ECDD role in the project is to promote and facilitate the inclusion of women and girls with disabilities in government and NGO mainstream family planning and reproductive health services and facilities in the country through disability awareness-raising training.

6. Disability Inclusion Support Service:

funded by the ILO this project enables ECDD to provide disability awareness training to personnel of small enterprise development organizations and micro finance institutions. The project also promotes the employment of persons with disabilities in formal sector employment through the organization of annual Job Fairs and the provision of career counseling services to job-seekers with disabilities.

7. Improving the Employability of People with Disabilities:

this project is being implemented in cooperation with the NGO International Orthodox Christian Charities (IOCC) with funding from USAID. Through this project ECDD is supporting a number of mainstreaming initiatives in the areas of training, employment and self-employment as well as sports.

8. Children with Disabilities:

ECDD is presently conducting a survey on the situation of children with disabilities in Ethiopia, in collaboration with the African Child Policy Forum, in order to document the reality and make policy recommendations.

Who We Are Vision Strategies Program Activities

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