A project called Tuchape Kazi “Let's Work” is running with the goal of accelerating the employment of youth with disabilities by building a movement that supports this ambitious goal through strategic partnerships with learning institutions, business associations, media, Disabled Persons Organizations (DPOs) and the government through its various agencies.
I will be a focal person to help in forging partnerships between our Organization and potential employers to ensure by the end of the year we place as many persons with disabilities to jobs. We are an organization that facilitates employment of persons with disabilities in Kenya to job opportunities by use of technology namely through a mobile application.
2022 was a successful year for us because some of the interventions we did as an organization created a good number of job opportunities and Internships for Persons with Disabilities (PWD’s). However, we also had some negative interventions which I will now detail.
First, we trained 130 people as Human Resource Managers (HRM) from different companies on the best practices when recruiting PWDs, this included disability etiquette, the concept of disability and accessibility audit. A good number of these HRM made commitments to employ PWD’s and out of these 15 PWD’s secured contracts to work with them. Secondly, we could not train HRM alone without building the capacity of job seekers with disabilities, hence we conducted Soft Skills Training, which focused on resume and cover letter writing, interview preparations and emotional intelligence; basically this training was informed by the feedback we got from the HR training. Lastly, we faced a lot of challenges in the course of these, financial constraints and attitudinal barriers amongst employers had a huge toll on us hence we did not meet our target of placing 100 PWDs, where just 15 were employed and there were 26 internships for graduates with disabilities. In 2024 we are targeting 300 employers and projecting 50 job placements. 15% is a big achievement, however, ironically, even most organizations that work for or of PWD’s aren't even employing 25% to achieve the 5% envisioned by our constitution.