ABILITIES Foundation has set out on a mission to empower women with disabilities by training them in furniture making and agricultural skills.

This empowerment comes through the entity’s project, ‘We ‘R’ Different – Empowering Women With Disabilities’, which was awarded US$20,000 through the US Embassy’s 2019 pitch competition.

Susan Hamilton, director of Abilities Foundation, said while writing and delivering the project sounded great, implementing it opened a can of worms which made her organisation aware that the impact of the issues they sought to tackle was far bigger than what they envisioned.

“The vision was to empower these women that have disabilities, change their narrative [and] equip them with skills that are in male-dominated fields,” she said.

To select participants for the programme, Hamilton said her team at ‘Abilities’ looked at girls who were broken, could not leave their homes because they were confined to wheelchairs, or had no access to transportation, and girls who had a history of abuse.

Women in the programme were aged 17 to 38 and had a wide range of disabilities to include both physical and intellectual.

Further, she said these social issues led to attrition at the start of the project.

“We have 20 women but when we were getting them in the programme we had some that got pregnant; we had some that didn’t see the value of it or how it would apply to them. Even when they came to the empowerment sessions there were those few girls that said ‘I have a man at home and they want dinner ready at 3:00 pm and I have to leave’. Those were issues. Some girls practised self-mutilation and some would self-medicate with smoking,” she said.

Hamilton said: “As we delved, more started to come out and we saw our own inherent biases with how we view women with disabilities; it’s a whole new paradigm on things that will affect them. Even though we put the project on paper, what was great about the grant is that it opened up other training opportunities. We saw the gaps and started to look for other opportunities to fill those gaps.”

Subsequently, women in the programme were exposed to sessions that dealt with abuse, other empowerment sessions, and field trips that could further help them.

In relation to skill acquisition, the women were exposed to 20 weeks of training in furniture making and agriculture.

“The training they got in furniture making was zeroed in on finishing, so the girls can finish a dresser, table; they can buff it. In addition, they have made over 25 trays for sale. The girls in agriculture learnt everything in agriculture — from weeding the land, preparing the land and getting the product out to sale. The teachers at Abilities were integrally involved; we used our current staff and a few consultants outside to deliver,” she said, adding that for the furniture making segment, the women were exposed to a three-week work apprenticeship programme, which also provided them with a stipend.

Further, Hamilton said the women in furniture making have now embarked on a marketing campaign to get girls from feeder schools to get in on the trade.

“We have carried some to sensitisation sessions at other schools to encourage girls there. We have been speaking to guidance counsellors to say, look at the girls from grade seven and introduce them to fields that are not female-dominated,” she said.