The victims including both male and female passed through serious difficulty in ascending and descending the staircase of the two-storey-building structure of the Assembly due to its disability unfriendly nature to PWDs.

This happened when the Community Development Alliance (CDA) invited some identifiable groups including the PWDs within the Jirapa District to its district level engagement meeting on improving public service delivery last Friday.

Narrating his personal ordeal to the Ghana News Agency (GNA) after the meeting, Mr. Tahiru Bomure, a physically challenged person, said on each occasion he was invited for a meeting at the Assembly conference hall, he starts to worry about the difficulty in ascending and descending the staircase.

He said on several occasions he together with some of his colleagues complained to the Assembly authorities to do something about the situation to ameliorate their plight but that such complaints had fell on deaf ears.

Meanwhile, Sections Six and Seven of the Persons with Disability Act, 2006 (Act 715) provides for physically challenged persons the right to have access to public places and other public services easily without any difficulty.

Section Six of the Act says that “The owner or occupier of a place to which the public has access shall provide appropriate facilities that make the place accessible to and available for use by a person with disability”.

Also Section Seven has it that “A person who provides service to the public shall put in place the necessary facilities that make the service available and accessible to a person with disability”.

The penalty for contravention according to Section Eight of the Act says that “A person who contravenes Section 1, 2, 4, 6, or 7 commits an offence and is liable on summary conviction to a fine not exceeding fifty penalty units or to a term of imprisonment not exceeding three months or to both”.

Mr. Issifu Salifu Kanton, the Executive Director of CDA explained that the “I am aware project” is the Centre for Democratic Development (CDD) non-partisan citizen empowerment campaign tool.

He said it collected, analyzed, archived and disseminated user friendly socio-economic data on the state of public goods and service delivery in the 216 districts across the country.

Mr. Kanton said the project was aimed to empower citizens particularly the poor and vulnerable to improve awareness and engagement with duty bearers in order to make them more accountable and responsive to the development needs of the people.

The CDA Executive Director encouraged the people to access the data and use it to influence service delivery at the local level.