The Ghanaian Advocate Raising Her Voice for Disabled Women and Girls
Gertrude Oforiwa Fefoame is a disability advocate and activist from Ghana. She started losing her sight at the age of ten. Since 1975, she has dedicated her life to advancing disability inclusion worldwide and supporting the human rights of both disabled and non-disabled women. She was the first woman with a visual disability to earn a master’s degree at the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA) and at the Akrofi-Christaller Institute of Theology, Mission and Culture.
Adaptation to sight loss as a child
Gertrude Oforiwa Fefoame was born in Ghana and grew up in a town in the Eastern Region, outside Accra. Her journey with sight loss began when, at age ten, when her class teacher asked her to inform home that she couldn’t read the blackboard. When Fefoame told her parents, they immediately took her to the nearest hospital which referred her to a specialist who gave her glasses, and for a few months, it worked well. But every few months her sight would worsen and eventually, she was blind.
Her main concern was finishing school, and some of the teachers in her school did their best to help. Even during her O-level exam, when promised large-print tasks did not arrive, her teachers tried to find a solution. “The school never told me to leave. They just tried to assist to the best of their abilities. My parents and the rest of close family members also did the best they could,” Fefoame shares. As exams neared and she struggled, her biology teacher brought her a magnifying lens to help her read, making the process challenging but possible.
The closer she got to fifth form, the harder the increasing sight loss affected her education. She was close to quitting, but her family convinced her not to.
After finishing her exams, Fefoame’s uncle brought her results home: two passes, two fails, and two credits. Though he was enthusiastic, Fefoame was disappointed, thinking the results would not get her to any further classes.
One of her relatives saw an advert for a program training teachers for learners who have visual disabilities enquired from the School for the Blind, Akropong. Before she could enter the teaching program, she needed to learn braille, typing and life skills first.
Fefoame was surprised about the disappointment by some extended family members she met a few days after admission who told her, “We had such high hopes for you!” Their reaction made her question her future. She spent days in her dorm feeling that her life had lost meaning.
The turning point came when she met Grace, a student with a vision disability, radiating confidence and warmth, who had spent her life proving that blindness was not a barrier. She had heard of Fefoame and sought her out, eager to encourage her. Grace’s words pierced through Gertrude’s doubt, filling her with hope that her life had purpose beyond her challenges. She began to imagine herself as a strong teacher if she persevered.
Finding a new path in life motivated Fefoame to help other blind people gain the same confidence. “If I hadn’t met Grace at that time, I don’t know how my life would have turned out,“ she says. She was able to meet many more blind people, realizing that even at school, women and girls with disabilities had to fight much harder than their male fellow students.
Women and girls
Her countless volunteering work, for instance, with the Association of the Blind led to Fefoame meeting various disability activist groups such as in Kenya and South Africa. Fefoame was eager to learn as much as she could about disability rights and to find ways to empower others in her situation. “One of the things I noticed really early on was that disabled women and girls had far more disadvantages,“ she says. “They had so much stigma to live with. At that time, the number of women attending school was low. Even at the school for the blind, we had only two halls and dorms for girls, but far more for boys. It wasn’t normal for a girl to go to school, let alone a blind girl,“ she says. She found confidence and solidarity in other groups of blind women and girls.
She recalls first asking simple questions: “How shall I cook our traditional soup if I cannot see the vegetables?” Other women suggested practical solutions, teaching her that empowerment comes from asking questions and finding answers. This approach became one of her life mottos—not only in cooking, but in education and activism. She focused on finishing her education to better face challenges.
Finishing education and finding her path
Fefoame learned Braille and enrolled at the teachers’ college. After graduating, she decided she didn’t want to work at a school for children with disabilities. Through family contacts, she found a job at a regular school as a teacher
Many years later, after graduating from university for the first degree, “I felt my path was not to continue teaching at the School for the Blind. I wanted to give blind children who, like me, went to a mainstream school, the chance to get a good education and later employment. I knew that if I did a good job teaching those who would one day be teaching children or young adults and being in positions of policy makers, they would remember that a blind person can succeed in life.”
Many teachers in Ghana become parliamentarians or high-profile politicians. This might be beneficial in the future, Fefoame thought. The more she got into disability rights, the more she became aware that political structures were the key to some aspects of discrimination. So she took what she learned over the last decade and decided to engage on a global level.
Global advocacy
After joining and being in elected positions for different organizations while teaching, Fefoame’s interest in global advocacy grew stronger and decided to move into development. She first worked for a partner of Sightsavers, a UK-based organization focused on preventing sight loss in developing countries and advocating for disability rights. In 2006, she joined Sightsavers as a Regional Programme Officer for West Africa and into different positions in Sightsavers.
She also ended up on the UN-CRPD committee in 2018 and was elected the first African chairwoman from 2022 to 2024. Her focus was networking with other human rights organizations within and outside the UN, as she thought that intersectionality was key to true change. “Nowadays, a lot of women and girls come and ask me for advice. Not just those with a disability. What a lot of people don’t understand is that a lot of times, you are not just one or the other. Sometimes you belong to several minority groups, and you need allies with similar or different challenges and solutions, and we can all help each other. There are women and girls who are disabled and refugees, or poor, or have marital problems, or all of the above. But sometimes the disability factor is forgotten, and I felt I had to raise my voice in all of these groups and tell people, we are part of your groups too,“ she says.
Current work
Fefoame continues to work with Sightsavers and serves on the UN CRPD Committee. She also works on promoting the ratification and implementation of the African Disability Protocol advises the Ghanaian government on reforming its disability law. “I will just never stop! There are so many different organizations I volunteer for, and my focus lies in disability inclusion and observance of human rights of persons with disabilities, and fighting for our rights.”
Gertrude Oforiwa Fefoame has found and shaped her identity. She has proved to her young, depressed self that she can have a bright future as a proud, blind woman. Her ambition is for every disabled person to do the same.
Feature image: Flag poles with Ghana’s flag (a red, yellow, and green striped flag with a black star in the middle) in Black Star Square in Accra, Ghana. Photo Credit: WyteShot.
