Belarusian Jan Guardian wins international contest

The project «Ease of Access» is aimed at the creation of an interactive platform for people with disabilities.

One of the winners of the competition, jointly organized by the United Nations Development Programme and the organization Human Rights Laboratory (HuRiLab) which was held in Armenia on 28-29 June was the project «Ease of Access» of a Belarusian Jan Guardian - participant of the project "Bring International Standards Home"

Jan Guardian submitted to the contest a project called «Ease of Access» which aims at the creation of an interactive platform for people with disabilities who wish to visit Belarus.

The competition, held from 28 to 30 June in Yerevan, brought together the participants from 8 countries (Armenia, Belarus, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Iraq, Moldova, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan) who developed projects that affect the most pressing social problems in different fields - education, medicine and ecology.

Jan Guardian presented a project «Ease of Access» and proposed the creation of an interactive platform for people with disabilities who wish to visit Belarus and those who already live there.

"Today in Belarus there are over 500,000 people with disabilities, which makes about 5% of the population. Every twentieth citizen faces extreme difficulties on a daily basis, since in the absence of both the physical accessibility of public places, as well as information about it, he or she cannot live a full life. This, along with discrimination, unemployment, poor access to education leads to social exclusion of people with disabilities and creates one of the most pressing social problems in our country, "- said the author of the project Jan Guardian about the relevance of the problem and the need to find new ways to solve it.

Author of the project said that «Ease of Access» is a platform that will allow anyone who wants to quickly and easily contribute to creating the most accurate, up-to-date online maps with information about places (shops, pharmacies, entertainment centres, etc.) accessible to people with disabilities: "Everything that is necessary is to provide every citizen of our country with the tool which is absolutely free to use, and at least for 10 minutes, he or she will make a huge contribution to the common good deed to provide much-needed information about the availability of public facilities use across the country to people with disabilities".

Jan Guardian has high hopes for Belarusian civil society and has faith in the success of the project through the participation of concerned people, "Civil society in Belarus has already demonstrated its incredible potential in the project HERE Map Creator, which gave chance to the citizens of our country to contribute to the creation of a virtual road map of Belarus for GPS navigation on mobile devices Nokia. More than 400 people involved in editing of the map, have contributed more than 300,000 edits to the map, drawn 25,000 kilometres of roads, thus surpassing any other country in the number of edits from users. Similar functionality provided by the project Ease of Access, along with a large-scale campaign in the Belarusian media, as well as the consciousness of our citizens and their desire to help will ensure the introduction of an extensive, timely and reliable information on the accessibility of public spaces, which in the long run, will make our country more friendly to people with disabilities. "

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The project “Bring International Standards Home. De facto implementation of international obligations of the Republic of Belarus in the field of civil rights and freedoms” is part of the Human Rights House Network's program "International Law in Advocacy".  The overall goal of the project is to strengthen the promotion, protection and enforcement of human rights under the rule of law through professional development of lawyers and human rights defenders, through training, networking and cooperation between them, as well as through building their conviction and practical skills in direct application of international human rights standards at the national level.

According to the Belarusian HRH