National Awareness Creation Workshop on Mainstreaming Disability Access in SDG 6 and 11
14th December 2023, Colombo, Sri Lanka
On the 14th of December 2023, the UN-Habitat Sri Lanka Office hosted a workshop for Capacity Building and awareness creation on Mainstreaming Disability Access in SDG 6 & 11 for National level stakeholders from all sectors. The workshop is part of “Mainstreaming “Leaving No One Behind in national urban policies and programmes (SDG 11 & 6) in South Asia” implemented in India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. The Workshop was organized to raise awareness on the Regional E-learning tools developed under the project.
Monitoring and Reporting Manager of UN-Habitat Sri Lanka, Ms. Aziza Usoof, convened the workshop welcoming all participants and emphasizing the objective of the workshop in order to enhance safety, inclusiveness, and access for the disabled and the importance of having the right MRV mechanisms and mainstreaming LNOB in the urban policies of regional countries.
Acting Director of the National Secretariat for Persons with Disabilities, Mrs. Jayamali Wickramaarachchi addressed the gathering on the importance of sensitization of persons with disabilities, and the need to strengthen the legislations to protect rights of persons with disabilities. She went on to speak of the initiatives of the Secretariat for the year including the program on World Disability Day 2023, themed ‘Accessible Tourism’.
The awareness and training workshop comprised of 4 main sessions each covering the regional e-learning toolkits categorized as Understanding Disability, its challenges, barriers, and concepts of discrimination, non-discrimination and ableism, Global and Regional Frameworks and Agreements for Disability Inclusion, Understanding SDGs: Principles, Targets and Addressing Inclusion and Disability Inclusive Policy and is Importance. The toolkits were presented by Ms. Aziza Usoof, Monitoring and Reporting Manager of UN-Habitat, Sri Lanka, and Ms. Tameez Bohoran, Program Management Intern, UN-Habitat (ROAP).
Each of the four toolkits had trivia sessions integrated into them to assess the participant’s understanding and enhance interaction. This was carried out by randomly dividing the participants into 4 groups in order to encourage teamwork. A scoreboard was maintained to encourage competition and active participation and the winning team was rewarded with small tokens of appreciation.
Following this, the Acting Director of the Department of Social Services, Ms. Dharshini Karunaratne addressed the participants on their contributions towards Persons with Disabilities and the need for proper MRV Frameworks.
The workshop concluded with a brainstorming session among all sectors to identity the drawbacks, challenges and gaps that Sri Lanka currently faces as a nation in mainstreaming disability access and what measures we can take to further strengthen the capacities and better equip each sector. The Department of Census and Statistics enlightened the forum on the methodology of the new census to be conducted in the coming year and what measures they will take to gather data on PwDs, the National Secretariat of Persons with Disabilities further contributed to this discussion to address their concerns, the challenges they currently face and what support they may need from other stakeholders as well. Other contributors to this session included a cross sectoral discussion among the representatives from the Urban Development Authority, Department of Buildings, Sri Lanka Institute of Architects and the Institute of Town and Country Planners Sri Lanka, which focused on the need for stronger enforcement of regulations that protect the rights of persons with disabilities in the built environment and the need for better monitoring project implementation in areas undeclared by the Urban Development Authority and the importance of the Certificate of Conformity when catering to accessibility. The workshop had useful takeaways and each stakeholder understood their obligations towards mainstreaming accessibility. The Deputy Director of Planning for the Ministry of Justice, Ms. DMK Dissanayake also stated that they were convening a departmental meeting to discuss accessibility in courts complexes nationwide.
Stakeholders from the Road Development Authority (RDA), Ministry of Transport and Highways, Ministry of Housing and Construction, National Housing and Development Authority (NHDA), Vocational Training Authorities (VTA and NAITA), Ministry of Water Supply, Ministry of Health, National Building Research Organization (NBRO), Ministry of Railways were also among the participants that attended the workshop.
