By PAMELA WANGO
LUSAKA — Access reforms succeed or fail in rooms the public rarely enters: a hospital board setting next quarter’s staffing, a broadcaster’s rundown before the 19:00 news, a One Stop Centre case conference deciding the next step in a survivor’s file.
Put Deaf women at the head of those tables and the room changes. Budgets move toward what holds a service together, rosters match the hours people actually show up, and standards leave the policy folder and appear on the wall.
That is the ground where the Federation of Deaf Women Empowerment Network (FEDWEN), a Kenyan-based civil society organization has built its craft. The lesson is blunt: language access and disability inclusion stop being “projects” when people who live the stakes hold the pen.
In Zambia that pen signs procurement lists, approves duty schedules, and decides whether access is treated like equipment or goodwill. A hospital that treats Zambian Sign Language (ZSL) like oxygen keeps interpreters on the rota, pairs spoken explanations with bilingual consent and discharge, and keeps a video remote line open when the in person interpreter is on another ward. A newsroom that treats access as craft lights and frames the interpreter, rehearses the inset like the anchor, and fixes captions with the care it gives to graphics.
The need is not theoretical. Zambia’s adolescent fertility rate was 115.9 births per 1,000 girls aged 15–19 in 2023. The latest Demographic and Health Survey found 29% of girls 15–19 had begun childbearing, with 37% in rural areas and 19% in urban. Facility delivery stood at 83%, and skilled attendance at 84%. Those numbers mean thousands of adolescent consultations each month in which comprehension determines safety. When a Deaf woman chairs the hospital board that sets interpreter hours and stocks bilingual forms, the statistics start to look less like fate and more like logistics.
Justice and protection tell the same story. Zambia’s One Stop Centres bring health workers, police, social welfare and legal officers under one roof so a survivor’s account is not scattered across town.
The model works best when language is built in from the start, not patched in at the end. If interpretation is present at intake and clinical exam, timelines shorten and files stop returning for repair.
Broadcast policy sets the tone. The Persons with Disabilities Act, 2012 requires television stations to provide a sign language inset or subtitles for news, educational programmes and national events. A Deaf woman with a producer’s headset reads that as craft, not minimum: keep the interpreter lit and in frame, treat captions as editorial, and fold access checks into the same pre show routine that already tests audio and graphics. Viewers learn to expect comprehension; administrators elsewhere take their cue from the screen.
Education governance is another hinge. School boards decide whether resource rooms are staffed by people who can sign, whether sign literacy appears in in service training, and whether learners can answer in sign and writing without penalty. When teachers sign the first key terms of a lesson, a pupil once labelled “disengaged” begins to be counted as present; across a term, attendance and comprehension follow.
Proof sits in familiar reports. Hospitals that plan interpreter hours around peak outpatient traffic resolve more issues on the first visit. Courts that wait until interpretation is ready at call over avoid adjournments that spill costs into the next month. Newsrooms that keep interpreters reliably in frame receive fewer access complaints and retain the trust of Deaf viewers. None of this needs a new monitoring system; it needs a column in tools already in use.
Capacity remains tight in many districts, and procurement can be slow. Leadership is how systems build their own pipeline: trainee interpreter posts tied to service commitments, mentorship for new Deaf board members on budget literacy and safeguarding, and bundled purchases so access ships as a kit—interpreters, video remote tablets and bilingual form packs—rather than a patchwork.
What FEDWEN adds is not a pitch but tools that travel: role descriptions with access oversight, sample procurement lines that place interpreters and bilingual packs alongside video remote contracts, rota templates that align interpreter hours with clinic peaks and court lists, and simple dashboards with a few tick boxes that managers can maintain without consultants. The invitation is to look for the signal in local numbers and lock in what works. Nightly sign language on screen, a magistrate who pauses until the interpreter arrives, a teacher who welcomes an answer in sign and in writing—these habits shift how the Republic behaves in public. Deaf women in leadership make that shift durable, turning policy into the days people actually live.
The author is Sign Language Interpreter, Psychologist and Program Coordinator at FEDWEN Kenya.
