Implementing Partner: Handicap International Belgium

Funding Period: January 2009– December 2010

Amount: $280,000

Purpose: In partnership with people with disabilities (PWD), their families, and community, employ medical, educational, socioeconomic, and advocacy interventions that improve the quality of life of PWDs, their families, and communities.

Objectives

• Build the capacity of the Lao Disabled People Association to design, implement, and monitor interventions that support employment and economic opportunities for people with disabilities
• Provide people with disabiltiies with better chances to access formal employment opportunities in Vientiane Capital and Savannakhet City
• Improve access of people with disabilities to credit and increase their participation in income generating activities
• Educate employers and the general public on PWD’s right to work and the skills they can bring to the workplace

In Vientiane Capital, Vientiane Province, and Savannakhet Province, USAID works with Handicap International Belgium to break down barriers that prevent people with disabilities from accessing employment opportunities within their communities.

The project is working to bolster the capacity of its local partner DPO, the Lao Disabled People Association (LDPA), to design, implement, and monitor interventions that will increase employment and economic opportunities for people with disabilities. The association will also be tasked with advocating for people with disabilities' right to work.

During the life of the project, Handicap International Belguim will continue to work with LDPA, and with people with disabilties themselves to (a) facilitate self-employment opportunities for people with disabilities; (b) eliminate barriers—physical, procedural, social— that prevent people with disabilities from working in more formal employment settings; and (c) foster a greater awareness among employers and the general public of the right of people with disabilities to work, as well as their ability to do so.

Implementing Partner: Catholic Relief Services

Funding Period: September 2006 - September 2009

Amount: $992,927

Purpose: Work in three districts in Laos to improve and expand education and community support systems to assist in providing educational opportunities for disabled children.

Objectives

• Identify young children with disabilities who have not entered the school system and get them into school
• Train teachers to use inclusive education training materials to teach children with disabilities

In the Lao district of Thoulakhom, Catholic Relief Services' goal is quite simple. It works to identify children with disabilities who are not in school and to get them into school. To do so, the project trained a thirty-five-member working group comprising representatives from the Ministry of Education, the National Rehabilitation Center, and the National Research Institute for Educational Sciences in the implementation of inclusive education training materials. This working group, in turn, trained teachers and managers in thirty-three schools in three districts to use those materials and monitors their progress in the classroom.

CRS and the working group also oversee a series of community-based initiatives to provide rehabilitation services to children with disabilities. Those initiatives operate in up to twenty communities in the Thoulakhom District.

Supporting War Victims and People with Disabilities in Lao PDR

Implementing Partner: World Education

Fundin thirty-three schools in three distrng Period: September 2004 - July 2010

Amount: 1,380,000

Purpose: Work at the local, regional, and national level to strengthen acute medical care, physical rehabilitation services, and opportunities for socio-economic integration for people with disabilities, especially those injured as a result of conflict.

Objectives

• Implement a model assistance project for UXO survivors and people with disabilties that can inform provinical and national disability-related policies
• Improve the quality of emergency services, orthopedic, rehabilitation, and referral services in the aftermath of UXO accidents and other trauma

Since the mid-1990s, USAID has worked with World Education to provide assistance to regions of Laos that have been heavily contaminated with UXO.

In 1995, USAID's War Victims Fund began funding World Education to upgrade the medical, surgical, and emergency facilities and to promote mine/UXO awareness efforts in the northern Lao provinces of Xieng Khouang and Houaphan. In 2004, USAID renewed its support for World Educaton's efforts to expand medical assistance in Laos, this time directing aid toward Lao's southern provinces of Saravane and Champasak, near the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

There, the project and the Ministry of Health work to (1) inform national policy on UXO survivor assistance and disability and (2) improve the quality of emergency, orthopedic, surgical, and medical management care for survivors of trauma and people with disabilities.