Wrapping up work on a U.S. State Department grant to combat human rights abuses in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), a team led by the Institute on Community Integration recorded an uptick in positive attitudes toward disability in a random survey of 1,000 people in the DRC’s fifth-largest urban area.
Compared with attitudes in the region as the two-year project began, respondents reported more positive behaviors and awareness of the rights of people with disabilities, said ICI’s Lynda Lahti Anderson, who, along with Macdonald Metzger, led several initiatives to connect with local media and to support people with disabilities to tell their stories and learn media skills.
“We were actually quite surprised to see an increase after a relatively short time. It’s important to note that the second survey was a different group of respondents, but we did have a number of areas where there was a positive change in people’s attitudes about disability,” Anderson said.
One manager of a medical center who participated in the survey said he had heard about the advocacy trainings going on in the area, and it prompted him to make some accessibility improvements at the center.
