Good Governance, Civil Society and Rise of the Disability Rights Movement in Ghana

For many countries in Africa, the political reforms of the 1990s mark the onset of an enabling environment for civil society organizations to participate in the development process. These reforms were partly induced through the initiatives of international development agencies, particularly the World Bank which “linked the idea of civil society to its promotion of accountability, legitimacy and transparency of government” (Whitefield 2003: 382). The objective of this article is to examine the extent to which Ghana’s disability rights movement appropriated the good governance dispensation and the medium of civil society to promote the rights of persons with disabilities (PWDs) in the country. The article is based on the outcome of a fieldwork conducted in Ghana between 2014 and 2015 as part of a doctoral research at the Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies. While it has been noted that internal and external factors account for the rise of the disability movement (Downing, 2011), the emphasis in this paper is on domestic factors. I identify the democratization of the Ghanaian state and the opening of political spaces for civil society organizations as a major domestic factor that created an enabling environment for the rise of the movement. Three cases that show the extent to which the movement has been able to influence national development policies will be discussed as evidence of its progress. The current status of the movement regarding its relations to the state and the unprecedented social mobility of prominent individual PWDs in politics, the media, and sports have also been emphasized. The terms movement and federation are used interchangeably in this article.