Rukia Ahmed Sheikh is the Minister of Youth with Special Needs in the National Youth Parliament in Kenya. It is the first time that disability occupies a ministry in the National Youth Parliament and she believes this is a positive step for disability leadership in the future.

The main objective of having a Youth Parliament in Kenya, she explains, is to teach parliamentary procedures to the youth and to promote their leadership skills. Her work is to ensure that the different National Youth Parliament ministers include disability in their work. Her ministry makes sure that specific problems affecting youth with disabilities, like access to equal education and job opportunities find priority in the applicable ministry. She explains that her ministry is only six months old and needs to design policies to create a framework that will ensure equal access to opportunities for youth with disabilities in all ministries.

Ms Sheikh admits that there is no real relationship between the National Youth Parliament’s ministries and Kenya’s national ministries and is adamant that such interaction is important for progress. Kenya’s National Ministry of Youth is an exception, but only interacts with the National Youth Parliament on a ‘youth level’ and not on a ministerial level. She is of the opinion that the lack of interaction between the two levels is largely because the Kenyan national ministries are not accessible.

- You are not able to make an appointment with a Kenyan national minister easily, she explains.

Her mandate ultimately comes from the youth in the disability sector. They provide issues important to them for her to bring up at the National Youth Parliament sessions. Large parts of the consultation process with her constituency are done through workshops and seminars. She thinks that the new Disability Rights Convention will mean a lot.

- The new Disability Rights Convention is a very important and useful document for children and youth and I will table it at the National Youth Parliamentary sessions and advocate for it to go to the Kenyan national parliament, she says.   

Rukia Ahmed Sheikh’s life changed completely when she, as a preschooler, contacted polio. She comes from a nomadic pastoralist family and at the age of seven just could not move around anymore with the rest of the family. Her parents arranged with her uncle to care for her because he stayed in a town. She insisted on attending the local primary school.

- Going to school it was the best thing to have happened to me, she says.

She completed her Bachelor of Arts in Economics and Sociology at the University of Kenya and now plans to do her Masters in community development. This self-assured young woman has a clear vision of her future. She sees herself as a democratically elected member of the Kenyan national parliament in a few years time.

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This article was published in Human Rights Africa number 2, 2007.