President of Latvia, Egils Levits, underlined the need to change the existing social paradigms about everyday lives of the disabled during today’s meeting with Chair of the Latvian Umbrella Body for Disability organisations SUSTENTO, Gunta Anča, and its board member, Iveta Neimane, at the Riga Castle. Sustento is the umbrella body uniting 50 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and representing 50,000 members.
Meeting focused on obstacles preventing Latvian persons with disabilities from fully enjoying the everyday life from birth to death like the rest of the Latvian population. Chair of the Sustento raised organisation’s concerns about the lack of strategic and collective approach to such challenges, underlining that line ministries often struggle to reach consensus accross their respective sectors.
Participants of the meeting stressed the importance of ensuring that the whole society understands that people with disabilities are more than care-receivers and can be full-fledged members of the society. Sustento Chair, Gunta Anča, also emphasised that a change of mindset is required not only among the government bodies responsible for the implementation of relevant legislation, ensuring that the disabled are not treated merely as receivers of pensions and benefits, but also at the social level. Persons with disabilities need to gradually raise the public awareness about their ability to fully contribute to social processes.
President Levits, Ms Anča and Ms Neimane also discussed good practices for labour market integration of the disabled in other EU member states. President suggested that disability employment quotas should be discussed.
Another key focus of the meeting was accessibility. “To enable at least the physical access of disabled persons to education, culture institutions or workplace, these buildings must be fitted with disability access. It is an important precondition for disabled people to be able to fully appreciate all aspects of everyday life,” underlined the Chair of Sustento.
Ms Anča also addressed common challenges faced by all NGOs. Lack of permanent NGO state support mechanisms with clear criteria is a significant impediment to advocacy, which is the main mission of NGOs. She referred to good practices of other countries, which have decided to earmark taxes to fund the needs of the disabled.
President Levits said he is planning to organise a series of broader discussions on solidarity and inclusive policies, and disability will be one of the topics of such discussions.
