DOHA: Abdul Hadi Al Marri, Director of the Technical Bureau of the Permanent Population Committee (PPC) at the Ministry of Development Planning and Statistics has said that the number of institutions dealing with persons with disabilities in the country reached 27 centers, institutes and societies, serving 11,086 registered persons, including 5,575 Qataris, (50.3 percent of all disabled persons) and 5,511 non-Qataris (49.7 percent).
The number of Qatari and non-Qatari males in this group was 6,294 (63.1 percent of all persons with disabilities registered in the relevant centers), compared to 3,648 disabled women, (36.9 percent of the total), he added.
Abdul Hadi Al Marri outlined the efforts of the State of Qatar to promote the participation of blind women in line with Qatar National Vision 2030, during his participation in the first session of the third International Conference on Blind Women as partners in building and development of society, organized by the Arab Union for the Blind in cooperation with the Ministry of Administrative Development, Labor and Social Affairs.
The latest statistics issued by the Ministry of Development Planning and Statistics in 2016, he said, indicated that the number of people registered in centers related to visual disability was 1040 male and female, about 9.4 per cent of all persons with disabilities, including 619 Qataris (about 60 percent), non-Qataris 421 (about 40 percent), while the number of blind females reached 445, of which 285 are Qataris and 160 non-Qataris.
He said that the centers and institutes specialized mainly in visual disability such as Al Noor Institute for the Blind and Qatar Social and Cultural Center for the Blind provided educational, rehabilitation, social, health and vocational programs and services for people with visual disabilities of both sexes, and also organized awareness-raising activities, seminars and research focusing on the rights of those persons and the importance of their integration into social life.
Al Marri pointed out that the economic empowerment of blind women means supporting their economic rights and developing these rights by helping them to invest and develop their abilities to improve their living standard and to qualify them scientifically and healthily, as well as improve their efficiency in performing various jobs.
The Director of the PPC’s Technical Bureau said that the State of Qatar has made great efforts to enable blind women to manage programs and activities in community institutions professionally, and enabled them to manage the activities of the community institutions concerned with the blind group.
