27th July 1991 – 27th July 2021: 30 years ago, National Deaf Association of Ivory Coast (ANASOCI) was created. Its objectives are to give each member of the deaf community in Côte d’Ivoire the opportunity to turn their dreams into reality: better health, quality education, decent employment, accessibility to all services through of sign language, ….
ANASOCI has a vision, a mission for deaf people in Côte-d’Ivoire.
Thanks to capacity building training for national board members and local/regional leaders, provided by the WCARS project, ANASOCI has developed into a federation which brings together several local and regional associations of / for deaf people. This has enabled it to gain notoriety among deaf people living on Ivorian territory, national authorities and international organizations.
Member of Ivory Coast Federation of Associations of Persons with Disabilities (FAHCI), World Federation of the Deaf (WFD) and WFD’s West and Central Africa Regional Secretariat (WCARS), ANASOCI, to mark its 30th anniversary, held a public conference on the theme “Right to sign language for all”. Suffice to say that since the official recognition of sign languages by the United Nations in September 2018, the blow was sent to all national associations of the Deaf around the world!
ANASOCI is undertaking advocacy actions from September 2019 with the support of the WCARS project. Its steps are proposed to gradually bring the Ivorian Government to recognize and officially insert the Ivorian sign language in the Constitution of the country. For the association, the only way to ensure respect for the Deaf human rights in Ivory Coast is through official recognition of sign language. The association firmly believes that it will be successful in order to be able to see the deaf people of Ivory Coast fully enjoy their human and fundamental rights and thus increase the number of countries in the world which have constitutionally recognized sign language like Austria, Finland, Hungary, Portugal, South Africa, Ecuador, Kenya, New Zealand, Uganda, Venezuela and Zimbabwe.
