Disabled Woman Fights to Remove Barriers in Ukraine
For seven years now, Anna Harchenko has used a wheelchair to get around in her native town of Cherkasy. At the age of 15, Anna fell and injured her spine while riding a horse. Yet the wheelchair she has used since the accident has neither isolated her from the world, nor broken her spirit. Anna graduated from secondary school, entered Cherkasy National University, and now is actively involved in community life.
There are 77,000 people with disabilities living in Cherkasy Oblast. Just like the other 700 wheelchair-bound people in Cherkasy, Anna finds it difficult to get around her community. Since the oblast capital, like nearly all communities in Ukraine, lacks ramps, these people are deprived of the freedom to travel the city streets, or of access to public facilities, including theaters, universities, libraries and stores. Attention to the problems of the disabled is generally given by local government in Cherkasy and the national government in Kyiv just one day a year—December 3, the International Day of the Disabled.
Young mothers walking their babies in strollers and people with temporary injuries or permanent movement disorders also feel the effects of a dearth of ramps across the country. But the lack of ramps isn’t the only accessibility issue in the region. Many of the high staircases in public buildings do not have banisters, making difficult and dangerous for many, particularly senior citizens, to get around. Uncut curbs at pedestrian crossings also cause problems.
In 2005, while attending a training seminar for people with special needs, Anna met Victoria Feofilova from Moloda Cherkaschyna, a Cherkasy youth coalition NGO. Guided by the desire to help wheelchair-bound people like herself, Anna decided she would work for change and became involved in the NGO’s activities.
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| The “Mobility for Everybody” project works to create a socially accepting and physically accessible environment for Ukrainians with special needs |
Afterwards, when she saw a USAID/UCAN announcement for a grant competition, Anna decided it was time to fulfill a dream and implement a project that would allow people like her to move about town unhindered. The project, Moloda Cherkaschyna (Mobility for Everybody), is designed to advocate for the interests of people in wheelchairs, to solve the problem of introducing obstacle-free architectural designs and facilities through legislation, and to develop a system for attracting donations from community residents and businesses to install ramps and banisters. The project also aims to foster tolerance towards people with special needs by conducting various events, such as school-based tolerance trainings; developing public service announcements; and, generating media coverage for these issues.
The project’s kick-off activity was a press conference during which a brochure, “Overcoming Barriers,” was introduced. Three thousand copies of the brochure were printed; 2,000 have already been distributed to people in wheelchairs, journalists and various NGO members. They have also produced an informational video and conducted a survey of people in wheelchairs and people who use baby carriages to identify priority locations for ramp installation.
To date, the NGO has conducted 20 training seminars in local high schools and universities to educate youth about the problems of the disabled and promote tolerance. In a poll conducted after each seminar, 62 percent of the respondents said their attitude to people with special needs changed for the better; 37 percent stated they already had tolerant attitude, and 1 percent continued to harbor negative feelings towards the disabled.
As a result of Mobility for Everybody’s work, two ramps have been installed in the city – one near a McDonald’s and another at a local pizza parlor. Two more ramps have been designated for installation, one at a local department store and another at the entrance to the National University. Local residents have donated 3,500 UAH for the ramp installations.
Most importantly, the city council has recently approved the Environment without Barriers program, which calls for installing more ramps, lowering curbs and developing public transportation to better meet the needs of the disabled. The city has allocated 300,000 UAH from its budget to implement the program and, for the first time in the Cherkasy’s history, the government is responding to the needs of its disabled citizens.
All this thanks to Anna, a young woman in a wheelchair, for whom this initial success is a hopeful sign that more people like her will venture out into the world and become more independent.
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