Abdul Hadi al-Marri, Director of the Technical Bureau of the Permanent Population Committee (PPC) at the Ministry of Development Planning and Statistics, has outlined the efforts of Qatar to promote the participation of blind women in the development of society in line with Qatar National Vision 2030.
Addressing the first session of the third International Conference on Blind Women, organised by the Arab Union for the Blind in co-operation with the Ministry of Administrative Development, Labour and Social Affairs, he said that the number of institutions dealing with persons with disabilities in the country had reached 27. These include centres, institutes and societies, serving 11,086 registered persons, including 5,575 Qataris, (50.3% of all disabled persons) and 5,511 non-Qataris (49.7%). The number of Qatari and non-Qatari males in this group was 6,294 (63.1% of all persons with disabilities registered in the relevant centres), compared to 3,648 disabled women, (36.9% of the total), he added.
The latest statistics issued by the Ministry of Development Planning and Statistics in 2016, he said, indicated that the number of people registered in centres related to visual disability was 1,040 male and female, about 9.4% of all persons with disabilities, including 619 Qataris (about 60 %), non-Qataris 421 (about 40 %), while the number of blind females reached 445, of which 285 are Qataris and 160 non-Qataris.
He said that the centres and institutes specialised mainly in managing visual disability – such as Al Noor Institute for the Blind and Qatar Social and Cultural Centre for the Blind – which provided educational, rehabilitation, social, health and vocational programmes and services for people with visual disabilities of both sexes, and also organised awareness programmes, seminars and research focusing on the rights of those persons and the importance of their integration into social life.
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