The CEO of Crystal Lake, Patricia Safo, has urged businesses to consider employing persons with disabilities.

This according to her will help increase productivity with the necessary training and skills.

Ms. Safo adds that having an inclusive policy that makes room for disability in an organization will also ensure versatility.

She subsequently encouraged corporate Ghana to “look at it carefully and try it - they do need to be trained and you do need to learn sign language to be able to communicate with them, but once you are able to get over that hurdle, they are a very productive group of people.”

According to Ms. Safo, she wants firms to change their recruitment policies after government research showed that employers' attitudes were a barrier to persons with disability.

She also indicated that it is time to break the myth about the complexities of employing disabled people.

Speaking to the press after an event to mark the one year passing of her father, Daniel Osei Safo at Mampong-Akuapem, she observed that giving employment to persons with disabilities will not leave a company at a disadvantage.

“We noticed over the years that actually employing some people from this community [school of deaf] was not a disadvantage so long as you could train them, they could actually add productivity within an organization. So as business owners you look at workforce that can increase your productivity so you can increase your bottomline, and sometimes you employ people who don’t do that.

"But our experience has shown that if you give these people the right set of skills they are definitely able to add positively to the organization’s output.”

The late Daniel Yaw Osei Safo, Chairman of Combined Farmers Limited, was the first Ghanaian agri-businessman to engage persons with hearing impairment in his farming business.

According to his daughter, Patricia Safo, the occasion could not have been a memorable one without the inclusion of the people her father worked with.

“The reason for the day is to mark the one year passing of Mr. D. O. Safo, who started working with the people with such condition in this community. He loved them, he had the foresight to include them in his workforce when most people did not understand.

"They actually contributed to the growth of his pineapple business. So they learnt to grow pineapple very well and they did a good job, with the example created by D. O. Safo, other organizations like Blue Skies also followed suit.

"They are a group of people that we have to try and work closely with to promote agribusiness, so that is why we are here to mark the first anniversary of the passing of Mr. D. O. Safo.”

The Safo family also used the occasion to institute an agriculture award scheme to reward the best student in honour of their father and to mark the one-year anniversary of his death.

The Headmaster of the Demonstration School for the Deaf, Satum Ametewee, expressed appreciation to the Safo family. He, also urged business owners to consider engaging the services of people with such condition.

“These are children who are basically deaf, they use sign language and they are so hardworking that if you engage them because they use sign language, they would have to stop signing to do the work, so their concentration is basically on the work, so you get to see that they are much more focused on what they are doing than we the regular people. So, when you employ them, they do so well.”