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Women group canvasses support for visually-impaired persons

By Eniola Daniel
24 December 2015   |   3:30 am
Nigerwives, an association of foreign women married to Nigerians, has marked 20 years of existence with a special day out at Terra Kulture, Victoria Island, Lagos,. It ended with a renewed promise to continue helping people with disabilities, especially the visually-impaired. The flagship of the association’s project, which is the Nigerwives Braille book production centre,…

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Nigerwives, an association of foreign women married to Nigerians, has marked 20 years of existence with a special day out at Terra Kulture, Victoria Island, Lagos,. It ended with a renewed promise to continue helping people with disabilities, especially the visually-impaired.

The flagship of the association’s project, which is the Nigerwives Braille book production centre, opened in 1995, in a portakabin on the NNPC compound in Falomo, with the aim of improving the quality of life of the visually-impaired community in Nigeria.

The Coordinator of the centre, 80-year-old Jean Elsie Obi, said the major challenge of the association “is how to raise funds to pay workers and secure a permanent site to teach the students.

“We have 12 members of staff, five are blind, while seven are sighted. It is not easy to pay salaries because we are not a profit-making organisation. Our own is to provide services that will enable blind people to obtain education and have an independent life.”

A computer tutor at the centre, Babatunde Mohammed, who is visually-impaired, urged the Federal Government to pass the Disability Bill into law and punish anyone discriminating against disabled persons in society.

“Since I started working with Braille centre, I have discovered that I can touch lives. I couldn’t secure a job with NNPC after my NYSC and I started working with a school for the blind, but my work wasn’t appreciated until Nigerwives came up with computer training programme,” he said.

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