Water For Justice

LYCS holds workshop on promotion of all indigenous languages

Human rights programme attended a workshop organised by Lesotho Young Christian Students, it was the training Workshop for Advocacy for the Promotion, Development and use of all Indigenous Language in Lesotho and these include sign language, xhoza, setebele e.t.c. It involved many organizations so as to discuss together on how this can be promoted as well as the strategies that can be utilized. Since one of TRC's departments is that of Democracy and Human Rights, it was then that this organization was going to have more input in this project. Not only were they having great input but they were also going to show the violation of this fact on the fundamental human rights.

The main concern was that most of the time the formal institutions do not allow those kinds of people to have access to services simply because of the barrier of language and that in itself show a lot of discrimination. We can cite an example of media in which the deaf do not have access to information since there are no trained individuals who can interpret for them what is being discussed. This neglecting of sign language as a major concern among other minority languages has lead to the deprivation of their linguistic rights.

In order to deal with this issue effectively, there were some strategies that we thought could be used to fight this problem and these include among others: government consultation through its ministries like the Ministries of education and training, Health and Social Welfare e.t.c, public awareness campaign, open seminars for higher institutions as well as the forums for teachers and teachers.