Saudi Gazette report

NEW YORK — Deputy Minister of Labor and Social Development Dr. Tamadur Bint Yousef Al-Rammah said on Tuesday that Saudi Arabia is working on a national strategy for people with special needs, including 23 initiatives designed to serve and take care of them.

“The Kingdom also forges a national program to diagnose and classify the phenomenon of disability in addition to setting up a national registry including uniform data base and statistics,” she said.

Al-Rammah made the remarks while addressing the 11th Conference of States Parties to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities at the UN headquarters. She said the Kingdom has put an initiative to enhance early intervention and expansion in the merger program of public education schools, provision of vocational training and applying the comprehensive access program.

“This year, Saudi Arabia has established a special commission to take care of the affairs of the people with special needs as an umbrella and reference body to put the regulations, legislations and special policies pertaining to them. The Kingdom also started implementing working plans for their empowerment as well as for enhancing awareness about their causes and providing support and consultancy for them,” Al-Rammah said.

The minister also explained about a raft of measures taken by the government to promote welfare of this segment of the society and ensure their full integration into the society. The Kingdom’s Vision 2030 states that the people with special needs would be enabled to obtain appropriate jobs, while being given special education and facilitating ways to help them achieve success, she pointed out.

Dr. Tamadur said the ministry supervises as many as 38 rehabilitation shelters for people with special needs across the Kingdom. “There are 44 specialized associations, and 347 day care centers for this segment of the society. The National Transformation Program 2020 has set a special goal to enable the people with special needs merge into the labor market,” she added.

Dr. Tamadur was recently elected as member of the UN committee on elimination of discrimination against women in New York.