Musie Tilahun

Musie Tilahun Yirga is a person with a visual impairment since the age of 5. He attended his primary and secondary school education in Addis Ababa and then joined Addis Ababa University to pursue his first degree in law. After successfully completing his stay in the faculty of law, he has been employed as a legal advisor at ENAB (the Ethiopian National Association of the Blind) and served many blind members by providing different legal advices to defend their fundamental human rights. However, he rejoined the Addis Ababa University for Further Development in education and successfully concluded his master's education both in special needs education and social work fields. Since 2011, he has been engaged in various disability inclusion initiatives with a view of contributing to the proper inclusion of persons with disabilities and their issues in various development agendas in Ethiopia. During the period of 2011–2021, he worked for various inclusive developments focused NGOs assuming different positions as a project coordinator, program officer, program director, training director and executive director as well.

In this decade of service, he mainly engaged in reaching out hundreds of government officials, development NGOs staffs, health extension workers, parliamentarians, universities’ instructors and regular teachers through a series of disability and development awareness trainings to educate, advocate and lobby for appropriate inclusion of persons with disabilities in all sectors of development of the nation.

Since April 2021, he has joined a newly established association of lawyers with disabilities as an executive director to lead the organization with the objectives of promoting disability rights, advocating for the full and effective realization of disability rights and providing free legal aid services for persons with disabilities whose rights are violated.

Currently, on top of this responsibilities, he has been playing an indispensable role in advancing the rights of persons with disabilities in Ethiopia being part of various platforms. Among the initiatives that he has been leading right now, the following can be mentioned among other things.

• Chairperson of the Network of Human Rights Advocacy for Persons with Disabilities (established by all national OPDs) with a view of advocating for proper inclusion of issues of persons with disabilities in all national agendas of the nation;

• Chairperson of the Ethiopian Human Rights Defenders with Disability Network, an informal entity established to promote and advocate the proper realization of disability rights in Ethiopia and;

• Vice chair for the national steering committee of Organizations of Persons with Disabilities, (OPDs), established with the purpose of  lobbying and advocating for the effective enactment of the Ethiopian Disability Act.