Support museums to improve
The Head of Education of the Ghana Museums and Monuments Board (GMMB), Ms Sandra Bruku, has appealed to corporate and non-governmental organisations to support the National Museum to improve services for children with disabilities.
According to her, the museum lacked an elevator to aid children with disabilities to access other parts of the gallery, braille plaques for children who are blind and a child-friendly cafeteria or a waiting area to have their meals and wait for their parents.
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In an interview with the Junior Graphic, Ms Bruku noted that it was sad to see children with disabilities such as the visually, hearing and physically impaired wait downstairs as their peers used the staircase to view the gallery on the first floor.
Nonetheless, she said, the board had refurbished its spaces to make them more accommodating for visitors, especially persons with disabilities. However, she said there was still more to be done to ensure equal opportunities for all who used the museum and not to a limited class of children.
“The National Museum also instituted a sign language interpretation video that has visual information about the various sessions in the gallery to aid visitors who are deaf or hearing impaired. We currently have a children’s corner where young children can get to play with toys or even read some of their favourite books and educational materials related to Ghanaian culture and history,” she stated.
That notwithstanding, Ms Bruku said if there was an elevator and other disability-friendly equipment such as braille and audio-visual files in place, children with disabilities could make the most of the museum whenever they visited.
She also mentioned that there were nine museums across the country under the mandate of the GMMB of which the National Museum had the biggest gallery.
But, she noted that despite the number, none of the other museums had child-friendly facilities to provide better services to children especially those who required special attention.
On other services the National Museum provides to ensure equal access to opportunities for every Ghanaian child, Ms Bruku explained that they usually embarked on outreach programmes to educate schoolchildren in the various regions on the country’s rich history and heritage.
For instance, she mentioned a workshop at the Upper East Regional Museum, storytelling sessions on Ananse with some schools in Accra, and a hands-on session to give the children a feel of how to produce their own leather works.
A year after the reopening of the National Museum, Ms Bruku said they intended to implement more plans and projects to make the museum more visible to the general public.
International Museum Day As International Museum Day was marked on May 18, Ms Bruku encouraged schoolchildren to think about how they could sustainably preserve and conserve objects and artifacts that were important to them and their environment.
The theme for this year’s celebration was: Museums, sustainability, and well-being.
“The role of museums is creating awareness of the need to take good care of the environment so that the environment can take care of us. As schoolchildren, you are supposed to be ambassadors of our environment and our well-being. You can play your part in the fight against climate change by recycling plastics, and not littering in the streets and on your school compounds,” she said.
Additionally, she mentioned that children with disabilities should be included in activities within the school so that they do not feel left out. That, she said, would also improve their mental health and well-being and ensure inclusiveness for all.
For his part, the Senior Museum Educator, Mr Samuel Amegah Jnr., expressed his dissatisfaction at the extent to which some children broke artifacts at the museum and cautioned them to be extra careful when they visited the gallery at museums.
“For these artifacts to last long enough to benefit future generations, they must be properly maintained. For some objects, once they are damaged, they may be impossible to replace or repair. Even when they are restored, they lose the originality of the context and period in which they were made. Hence, that history may be lost forever,” he stressed.
