In wrapping up Youth Month, a group of young people have arrived in Cape Town by foot from Durban ending an epic walk aimed at raising funds for educating disabled youth. The group forms part of the NGO, Enabling Disability Education Nationally (EDEN).
In 2017, they donated proceedings raised during a similar walk to two schools for hearing impaired and disabled youth.
The group says it is dedicated to changing the lives of young people living with disabilities and they are prepared to go the distance to make this happen. They left Durban on 15 June, covering some 100 kilometers a day.
The group says it is hoping to raise awareness, but also much needed funds to make educational programmes available to those in need. EDEN co-founder Samuel Modise says the 2019 march’s key focus is intellectual disability.
“The key focus for this year was intellectual disability and how we managed to bring a solution to them is an educational programme called, Edutech Master Learner. Basically, what the programme does is to make information more accessible to the students since reciprocation of information for them is actually their greatest challenge. So the programme would then teach you methods which you could use as an individual. So it’s tailor-made for you as an individual and what it does is it teaches you the techniques to receive that information and learn better since the key focus for us was to make them participate in the mainstream society then again.”
Though it has received some funding, the NGO is still struggling to obtain the amounts needed to roll out the educational programme as a pilot project in Hammanskraal. Cape Town walker, Lulama Bala, says the walk is to raise funds for those that cannot help themselves.
“As they told me they are raising funds for people who can’t help themselves, but through this initiative, we can raise money so they can be able to gain the knowledge from the people who have the equipment for them. So basically it’s a God-given gift.”
The country will commemorate National Disability Rights Awareness month from 3 November – 3 December.
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