BACKGROUND

A year into the Africa Decade of Disabled People (2000-2009), persons with disabilities population continues to grow and continues to be marginalized throughout the continent. Today, more than 10 percent of all people in Africa are believed to be mobility impaired. War and civil strife, hunger, epidemics, poor environmental health and limited service provision, combined with superstition and little knowledge about disability resulting in stigma and discrimination, serve to relegate disabled people toward alienation and dependence while at the same time derailing advocates' development agenda to empower them.

Since 1998, USAID through the Leahy War Victims Fund (LWVF) has provided technical and financial assistance to war victims and other disabled groups, including mobility-enhancing devices and follow-up of rehabilitation services, in Angola, Ethiopia, Liberia, Mozambique, Sierra Leone and Tanzania. The OMEGA Initiative works to bring about the end of social and economic exclusion of people with disabilities in Africa. Omega's key goal is to channel targeted resources in support of the implementation, extension and strengthening of existing or proposed rehabilitation services for civilian victims of war and other people with disabilities in Africa.

Pact, Inc. in collaboration with the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation (VVAF) are the main players in this initiative. Pact will serve as the lead organization, responsible for overall program management and coordination for enhanced, policy dialogue and improved access to essential services and livelihood/recreational options whereas VVAF will be responsible for technical inputs and oversight, particularly with respect to physical rehabilitation.

Countries emerging from conflict, with little or no rehabilitation services will be a program priority. These countries are typically plagued by inadequate infrastructure, population flight and/or internal displacement and moribund economies.

The goal of this program is to provide quality rehabilitation services to civilian victims of war through implementation of an umbrella mechanism designed to increase the scope and breadth of LWVF. The Omega Initiative will seek to achieve the following four major intermediate results.

1. Increased use of appropriate orthopedic and rehabilitation services
   this result addresses the need for increasing availability of, and accessibility to, essential rehabilitation services for the targeted beneficiaries. Governmental and social safety nets for this vulnerable group are most often weak or non-existent in conflict and immediately post-conflict countries. For example, large numbers of disabled are not yet served by facilities currently operating or are in areas with limited access, land mines continue to kill or maim thousands of new victims annually, and new internal conflicts continue to break out among many countries lacking political systems adequate for compromise and nonviolent conflict resolution;
   
2. Improved policy environment for civilian victims of war
   The effectiveness of PVO and field-based programs is weak at best if the policy environment under which they operate is inhibiting rather than enabling. This result is focused on including improvements both in the broad policy environment in which resources are committed to address issues related to persons with disabilities and in the technical quality of those policies, so that the resources committed will have the greatest impact. At the international level, this may be achieved through collaboration with multilateral, bilateral and other U.S. government agencies and private institutions. At the national and local level, impact may be achieved through participation in donor country programming, in partnership with national and local - including community - representatives and partner organizations;
   
3. Improved institutional capacity to deliver quality services
   The prosthetic needs of persons with disabilities in developing countries cannot be met simply by providing the same devices used in developed countries. Persons with disabilities in most of the countries where the LWVF has had programs are rural dwellers, farmers (or children of farm families) too poor to be able to shift from labor-intensive to machine-based cultivation methods. Thus, it is necessary to adapt the design and material composition of prostheses to make them less expensive, more suitable to local working and cultural conditions, and more durable to resist deterioration from exposure to the environments in which they are used. Moreover, the challenging situations presented in the developing world demand that service delivery personnel obtain and maintain requisite skills and techniques. This result, therefore, focuses on advances in the state of the art relevant to developing countries as well as internationally recognized and standardized training and technical assistance.
   
4. Increased social and economic reintegration of civilian victims of war
   This result focuses on creating conditions and mechanisms that help persons with disabilities to participate and contribute as productive members of society in both a local and global context. Examples include: increasing target group enrollment in formal and non-formal education; increasing participation in recreational and cultural activities; and increasing participation in household and community-level economic activity and growth

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