PM says all citizens should have possibility to assert themselves in Moldova

Chisinau, 23 October /MOLDPRES/ - Prime Minister Pavel Filip encourages  persons with special needs to get actively involved in the working out and implementation of state policies and programmes. He stressed that the cabinet was open for dialogue and would take into account all proposals received to this end. The PM make the urge at a National Forum of Disabled Women titled, We Have Abilities – We Want Possibilities, the government’s communication and protocol department has reported.    

The prime minister also said that the participation in the event of cabinet and parliament representatives proved the wish and need of a constructive partnership between the authorities and the civil society, in order to identify present constraints and to jointly come up with solutions to overcome them. In the context, Pavel Filip referred to the actions already undertaken by the government to this end, among which also the approval by the cabinet of the concept on reform of the system of establishing the disability.      

”We want very much to switch from that obsolete system, which was preponderantly based on a medical model, to a modern one, due to be based on the bio-psycho-social model. In Moldova, all citizens should have possibility to assert themselves,” Pavel Filip said.   

Also, the PM referred to the importance of providing disabled people with jobs, noting that a legislative initiative was to be promoted to stimulate the companies which employ persons with special needs. Pavel Filip specified that, during this year, 535 jobless people among disabled persons had been recorded at the Employment Office this year, of whom 225 have been already employed and 118 of them are women.     

At the same time, referring to the access of persons with special needs to education, the prime minister said that he had personally got involved in creating necessary conditions for a young person from the northern Riscani district to continue his education at college. Yet, he highlighted that a systemic approach was needed to solve this problem. “I do not want that we intervene each time in particular cases. The government must have an approach, so as to systemically settle these problems. The solutions to these problems are not simple and the approach should be according to this,” the prime minister underlined.    

In the end of his speech, Pavel Filip gave an example described by the Swedish writer Kjell Nordstrom in his book Funky Business, which tells about the case of an international company which got the grand prize for providing equal chances for women, even if a record of employees according to the gender criteria was not kept. “I want that, in Moldova as well, we get to the situation when there is no problem in providing equality of chances, when we will have discussions only on the professional dimension,” Pavel Filip added.      

Presently, over 180,000 disabled people are registered in Moldova, of whom about  a half are women.