Gertrude Oforiwa Fefoame is a Ghanaian gender and disability rights advocate and the first person with a disability to have received the Excellence Grand Medal Award in 2007 from President John Kufuor. [1] [2] [3] [4]
Gertrude Oforiwa Fefoame is a Ghanaian gender and disability rights advocate and the first person with a disability to have received the Excellence Grand Medal Award in 2007 from President John Kufuor. [1] [2] [3] [4]
She was born in 1957, at Akropong-Akuapem in the Eastern Region of Ghana and by age 10, she had started experiencing problems with her sight. [2] [5] She has three children with her husband. [1]
As at 2018, she had worked extensively for 28 years in both local and international front to better the lives of persons with disabilities. In 2018, she was appointed through election to the United Nations committee on the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). [1] [6]
The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is an international human rights treaty of the United Nations intended to protect the rights and dignity of persons with disabilities. Parties to the convention are required to promote, protect, and ensure the full enjoyment of human rights by persons with disabilities and ensure that persons with disabilities enjoy full equality under the law. The Convention serves as a major catalyst in the global disability rights movement enabling a shift from viewing persons with disabilities as objects of charity, medical treatment and social protection towards viewing them as full and equal members of society, with human rights. The convention was the first U.N. human rights treaty of the twenty-first century.
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