Limpho Sello
THE visually impaired community of Lesotho will tomorrow be afforded a two-day agricultural training by a South African farm to promote their independence and improve their livelihoods.
The training, which will be facilitated by the Lesotho National League of the Visually Impaired Persons (LNLVIP), will be held at Ha-T?osane in Maseru by personnel from Oja Farm in Cape Town, South Africa.
Personnel from Oja Farm are expected to be in Lesotho tomorrow where they will provide agricultural training to the visually impaired and blind people from all over the country.
LNLVIP Executive Director Thabiso Masenyetse told the Sunday Express that they have partnered Oja Farm for the benefit of their members. He said the project is vital for the LNLVIP which strives to empower people with visual impairment with tools and skills that enable them to provide for their families.
Mr Masenyetse said two representatives from each district will be trained with the expectation that they would eventually transfer the skills they would have acquired to other back in their home districts. He said this will help increase the number of trained people.
“The expectation is that those who will be trained should train others so this is basically this will be a training for trainers as we strive for the independence of people with disability who are in most instances left out,” Mr Masenyetse said.
Mr Masenyetse said the training has been necessitated by the need to demonstrate that visually impaired persons are capable of doing things on their own only that they need to use a different approach due to their disability.
“They be able to plant but they need a different approach to do it. We have people who plant they own vegetables and we also have a success story of a woman who reared chickens last year and her project was a success,” Mr Masenyetse said.
He said they have also invited the ministries of Agriculture and Social Development for the training so that they can buy into the scheme and expand it into a bigger project that can be included in their different initiatives to empower people living with disabilities nationwide.