Africa-Press – Ghana. The Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) says 39.4 per cent (824,797) of persons aged 5 years and older with difficulty in performing activities have never attended school compared to 18.7 per cent for that of persons without difficulty.
The Service said among persons with difficulty in performing activities who have never attended school, 40,838 are of school-going age (5 to 17 years), with an additional 10,668 children aged 5 to 17 with difficulty in performing activities attending school in the past.
This was in a statement from the GSS to the Ghana News Agency on persons with difficulty in performing activities to mark the International Day of Persons with Disabilities which falls on December 3.
The figures were from the 2021 Population and Housing Census General Report Volume 3F on Difficulty in Performing Activities.
Difficulty in performing activities refers to having some level of difficulty or a lot of difficulty in performing the activity, or cannot perform the activity at all in at least one of the following domains: in at least one of the following domains: sight, hearing, physical (walking or climbing stairs), intellectual (remembering or concentrating), self-care, and speech.
Furthermore, almost a million (929,501) persons 6 years and older with difficulty in performing activities are illiterate, that is, cannot read or write with understanding in any language.
The figure represents almost (44.8 per cent) of that population group compared to a quarter (25.3 per cent) for persons without difficulty.
Nationally, there are 29,593 children aged 5-17 years with difficulty in performing activities who are orphans.
The percentage of orphans with difficulty in performing activities who have never attended school (16.7 per cent) is almost twice the percentage of children without difficulty (8.9 per cent) while 28.8 per cent of orphans with difficulty are illiterate relative to 20.8 per cent of those without difficulty.
It said more than one-third (33.1per cent) of persons with difficulty in performing activities are multidimensionally poor relative to 29.1 per cent of persons without difficulty.
Three-quarters (76.4 per cent) of multidimensionally poor persons with difficulty in performing activities are in rural areas.
Among persons 15 years and older with difficulty in performing activities that are employed, seven in every ten (70.9 per cent) are self-employed without employees compared to five in every 10 (55.6 per cent) of those without difficulty.
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