Unlocking Potential Job Opportunities For People With Disability In Lebanon
In the year 2004, the Lebanese Physical Handicapped Union (LPHU) started a new awareness campaign aiming at opening job opportunities for people with disability (PWD). The campaign is framed within a multi-component program, tackling the following issues: misconceptions and prejudice among civil society mainly in the private sector through wide awareness activities; low level of education; dropping out of school and exclusion from the educational sector; institutional capacity building; capacity building for PWD and their families; and skills enhancement for pwd.
The core part of the campaign is the creation of a job center to act as a facilitator for job seekers with disability, aiming at creating a real and concrete help-desk for matching job offers with demands from the private sector. The job center was opened at the end of 2004 in Bar Elias, situated in the middle of the Bekaa, close to Zahl̩; from this location, the job center serves Mid and West Bekaa.
The job center has started to respond to the urgent needs highlighted by a survey conducted among PWD and employers of the targeted areas. The result of the survey showed that the majority of those interviewed are unemployed and many of those had never been employed before; the study confirmed a picture of an overworked, underpaid workforce, with no job security and low income.
The first year