22 Sep 2013

Chobe District Council and Sweden’s Vanersborg Municipality will embark on a two-year project focusing on social inclusion and equality, with specific emphasis on people living with disabilities.

The two municipalities which partnered in 2011, would explore efficient ways of meeting the needs of this group of people, according to Mr Anders Friden who is the international coordinator of the Vanersborg municipality.

“We conducted a study in 2012 on possible areas of partnership and decided to start this particular project which has already been funded and set to begin,” Mr Friden said at the delegation’s farewell dinner recently.

He said that they would have to pay particular attention to issues of accessibility in town planning. He noted that the Botswana government had good policies and a healthy partnership with non-governmental organisations (NGOs), saying that this was an area they needed to work on back home.

“In Sweden, government shoulders a lot of responsibility with no linkage to NGOs as such this is something we can learn from Botswana,” he added.

Senior public relations officer for Chobe District Council, Mr Mandla Hlabano said the Swedish municipality had specialised skills in-house such as physiotherapy and speech therapy. “In our case we travel 600 km to the nearest physiotherapy centre based in Maun to seek physiotherapy just because we lack these skills and centres in our municipality,” he said adding that this is something they would like to look into.

Mr Hlabano however said that with the introduction of the newly established Chobe District Disability committee and their continuing partnership with NGOs, things are bound to get better. A future area of partnership and cooperation between the two municipalities is urban planning, said Hlabano. This, he added, comes at a time when Kasane is set to go through a face lift to give it an appealing tourist look.

“We want facilities along the river bank to be tourism and leisure focused as such the timing could not be perfect,” he said.  ENDS