The Centre for Information Technology and Development (CITAD) has organized a one day training workshop on digital skills and use of social media for advocacy for people with hearing impairment and speech difficulties training in Kano.
Making remarks at the training, the Executive Director of CITAD, Dr. Yunusa Zakari Ya’u who was represented by Senior Programmes Officer, Isah Garba said the training is one of CITAD’s initiatives rolled to address exclusion of people with special needs on access to digital skills and use of social media for advocacy and by extension engage let them have voice in governance issues.
“We consider the training as a way to bridge the digital gap affecting particularly people with special needs and we want to ensure inclusion and representation of the deaf community in the digital spectrum”
“People with special needs have suffered exclusion in many respects and that has denied them many opportunities, this training is aimed to at bringing them on board and equipping them with digital skills and use of social media for advocacy”
“When they learn to use social media effectively they can be able to echo their own issues and contribute in demanding accountability which will in the long run help in societal growth”
Mr. Ya’u ended his remarks with advice to the participants to feel free, learn and engage the facilitators on any issue that is not clear to them.
Speaking on the objectives and the background of the training, Sagiru Ado Abubakar, CITAD’s Coordinator for Persons with Disabilities Programmes stated that CITAD has designed series to trainings for various groups of persons living with disability and will implement them in order to address the digital skills gap present within people with special needs.
According to Sagiru people with hearing impairment and speech difficulties will be the first set to benefit from the training.
He added “we will also train other categories of people with special needs on digital skills and use of social media for advocacy”.
“we have made plans to ensure that they are trained in a manner and condition they will best grasp what they will be taught, as you can see today we are targeting the deaf community and we have made provision for sign language experts to ensure effective communication between them and the facilitators”.
Also commenting at the training, Mustapha Hashim Bichi, the Chairman, Kano State Association of Deaf People said the training is very vital to their entire members and it will ease their various activities as well as allow them voice the concerns they have while being the drivers of their critical issues.
The participants’ capacity was built around several areas by different facilitators, the areas included: Introduction to Social Media, Social Media for Accountability, Digital Marketing, Social Media Tools, Social Media Content Development, etc. The training ended with a group picture.
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