Economic Empowerment

Since 2009 CREATE has had a project to empower youth with disabilities and parents of children with disabilities which has been funded by Kindernothilfe e. V. Most of our efforts have focused on the economic empowerment of youth with disabilities who are from rural areas and townships of uMgungundlovu and uThukela districts. We have also had one group for youth from Nkandla who have attended the training. The aim of this project has been improve the livelihoods of rural and other disadvantaged young people with disabilities. CREATE has developed training courses that incorporate life skills, basic business management and disability rights for young people who have the capacity to enter employment or set up an income generation project. For those with a more severe intellectual disability, CREATE has incorporated craft work and food gardening as well as empowerment CREATE has run workshops for youth with disabilities on the UN Convention on the Rights of Person with Disabilities. We have also produced a comic and a puppet show on this  topic for children.

Achievements

• 36 youth with disabilities have been trained in life skills and income generation since 2011. Of these, several have gone on to enter mainstream learner-ship in Pietermaritzburg. Some have gone back to school to obtain a matric and improve their chances of employment and a few are generating their own income through self-employment.
• Over 50 youth with disabilities and parents of children with disabilities have attended literacy and numeracy training provided through links with the Kha Ri Gude literacy campaign.
• 50 children with disabilities and their caregivers have attended a puppet show on disability rights.
• The national Department of Social Development has made 110 000 copies of CREATE’s comic on disability which has been translated into at least 7 languages.
• 48 youth with disabilities have attended workshops on the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in Mooi River, Mphophomeni, Loskop and Pietermaritzburg.

Future plans

CREATE plans to develop a course for youth with disabilities based on two unit standard. We hope to get SETA accreditation and thus offer accredited training to more youth with disabilities. In addition we intend to run workshops on the employment of people with disabilities for business and government departments in the near future.

Youth attending economic empowerment training

DPO capacity building

Learning to do a transect walk