The Zulu Tech Inclusive

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Years of Existence

Welcome to The Zulu Tech Inclusive (ZTI)

Make your goals to help people

The Zulu Tech Inclusive {ZTI} was established in April, 2014, for the sole purpose of integrating, educating visually impaired students in the Republic of Liberia, who are high school graduates and above, specifically in to computer science and technology. Motto: Preparing the visually impaired for the job market. Changing the dark corner of blindness in to a brighter world. Since our existence under the period of nine years, we’ve graduated up to eighty-two students ( fifty-eight males and twenty-four females). 50% of our graduates are currently employed in to government and private sectors, 5% absorbed in to our staffs while 3% are self employed.

Our Vision

The word without technological barriers for persons living with Disabilities

Our Mission

Selecting Persons with Disabilities, [THE VISUALLY IMPAIRED/BLIND, DEAF/HARD OF HEARING AND THE MOBILITY IMPAIRED,] for the technological skills based training program in Liberia:

And connecting them to the main strea of the technology sector through intensive awareness and advocacies, thereby, giving them an opportunity to create for themselves a technological space that is barrier free, in other to work and school with non-disabled persons in the same space, hereby breaking the chain of discrimination and dehumanization.

More About Us

What needs to be solved

The problem

Access to computer training for the blind in Liberia is still a serious challenge, especially when it comes to higher computer science, to programming and HTML-based web design. The government is of the opinion that the Disabilities sector is not contributing economically and is therefore hesitant to invest in special education. To prove the government wrong and to demonstrate that we can contribute to economic growth, we need both, basic and advanced computer skills. The limitation of higher computer skills among blind persons in Liberia, computer programming, networking, software development and several others can be attributed to the following factors:

Education Awareness

No or low awareness of available advanced technology, accessible software and the latest developments that are beneficial for the blind

Empowering Accessibility

Financial inability to purchase accessible technology and train team members and the latest developments

Changing Perceptions

Lack of awareness of employers who cannot imagine a blind person as a software developer or a web designer etc.

Website Accessibility

Inaccessible websites. We have to join the global movement of implementing governmental policies that websites have to be accessible.

Shifting Paradigms

The mind-set of the educational sector has to be changed. There needs to be more trust in the abilities of the blind to accommodate visually impaired students.

Economic Barriers

If parents are economically weak, they would prefer to first send their sighted children to school rather than wasting money on the blind. Many believe that a blind person, whether educated or not, won't still be able to contribute to getting food on the table.

Inclusive Virtual Reality

Virtual reality. While sliding over into a parallel universe, into virtual reality which is mainly visual, we have to make sure that the visually impaired are not left behind. This includes stimulating our senses whether touch, smell or hearing To be part of the digital age, we need to inform ourselves and make our voices heard. But to get that far, we even need to overcome the following basic barriers:

Inclusive Employment

Inability to believe that a blind programmer could be profitable for the company (some employers won't trust blind persons to use a computer to fulfill the simplest tasks) etc. All these factors could be compensated by a mutual effort to ourselves into the digital age, of the 21st century. The following factors, however, remain a barrier that needs to be dealt with globally:

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A number of technologies had been designed because of the blind. The scanner, the Keyboard, speech synthesisers or voiceovers. Looking at these innovations that are in daily use by the sighted as well as the blind, shouldn’t we believe that the twenty-first century, the digital age is made to close the gap between the blind and the sighted? Isn’t the fact that the first person who hacked the telephone system by imitating the tonal codes, was blind, proof enough that the digital age is an age for us to thrive? Unfortunately, the gap has never been wider!

Although coding is still mainly text-based, talented blind computer users, especially those from the global south, are still rejected to enroll in higher IT science and programming.

According to the census done by the United State Agency for International Development, 2019, persons with disabilities in Liberia cover about 16 % of the total population of 5.5 million. 24 % of all persons with disabilities are visually impaired and only around 10 % of them have basic computer skills.

Unlike several developed countries in the world, Germany, the United States of America, Australia, the United Kingdom, etc, blind persons in Liberia and neighboring countries, are more or less limited in accessing computer knowledge. Many of us, living in the global south, don’t have enough knowledge about the range of technology that is out there and, technology that could be made accessible to us. And if we don’t know, we won’t explore.

Reading articles from or about visually impaired computer scientists surprise me and open a completely new world for me! Especially the analysis of technological, social, and organizational opportunities and challenges of knowledge workers with vision impairment, written by a German Professor, Johannis Kiossis (2019), gives a good insight into how visually impaired employees in the field of administration, education, IT, management and workers in public affairs, are able to work with the help of digital technologies on equal footing with the sighted. In his analysis, he also examines which assistive technologies are usually useful and available to people with visual impairments.

Z. Wilfred Gewon | From Liberia

The Founder

Becoming blind at the age of ten, wasn't easy. I felt and wanted to end my life. But due to the love of my parents and a good education in a special school, I learned how to use challenges as a stepping stone for higher goals. In 2014, I started a school to empower the blind in basic computer skills which will now become a centre for computer sciences.

MY JOURNEY TO A BRIGHTER WORLD!

It was on a fateful bright Saturday morning, I was ten years old, and I decided to retaliate against my new life full of depression. What others told me later, the time was about 5 o’clock, early in the morning, when I quietly opened the wooden door of the boy's bedroom that I had shared with my brothers. I crawled through the hallway of our house, reaching the front door. Carefully, always in the fear of making a noise, I opened it and walked along the wall of the house, feeling my way forward with my right hand stretched out. Once I reached the end of the wall, I turned to the left and slowly moved forward, step by step. Finally, I touched the edge of the open well, I climbed over and jumped. While falling, I hoped that my life, that was filled with so much sadness and isolation, was finally over!

Well, no, it was not over yet! Luckily, I survived!