This virtual school helps PWDs get educated and employed, fight discrimination

Ryan Gersava was 16 years old when he was diagnosed with Hepatitis B, a liver infection caused by a virus. Up to this day, he has no idea how he caught it—it is mainly transmitted through blood or bodily fluids—but he knows he was vulnerable because he was not vaccinated against it.

He grew up in Sultan Kudarat, one of the poorest provinces in the Philippines. His family did not have access to electricity or running water, let alone vaccines, when he was young. They had to survive on meals of lugaw as his parents struggled to provide enough food for 10 children. At one point, the entire family almost died of malaria.

The hard life led Ryan to dream of becoming a doctor, so he pushed himself in his studies and pursued a degree in medical technology. But when he finally graduated, his Hepatitis B diagnosis came back to haunt him.

He earned his license as a medical technologist, and yet no one hired him due to his condition. He was slapped with the reality that the system does not cater to people like him who have chronic diseases or other disabilities.

Instead of falling into despair, however, he began to think of solutions. He wanted to do something that could help change the lives of other people in his situation.

“Because nobody decided to employ me, I decided to employ myself,” he told GMA News Online over video conference. “I started Virtualahan instead. But this time, our dream is not just for me and my family, the dream is for every person that experienced workplace exclusion.”

Virtualahan is a portmanteau of the words “virtual” and “eskuwelahan.” It is exactly what the name suggests: a virtual school for persons with disabilities and other disadvantaged groups. Its goal is to equip its graduates with skills that will enable them to participate in the economy despite their condition.

‘Fit to work’

Ryan said unemployment is high among PWDs and people with chronic health issues because of two main factors. The first is the standard practice of companies to include a medical examination in the pre-employment procedure in order for a hiree to be declared “fit to work.”

“Anong laban nung mga persons with disability with that type of practice that automatically excludes them?” he said. “This is an institutionalized discrimination for people because we are forced to out our condition for the sake of getting a job.”

For some companies, PWDs are seen as liabilities rather than assets. The willingness to hire them could be there, but there are also apprehensions about pushing through with it.

“They don’t necessarily have the confidence to actually do it,” Ryan said. “‘What will happen if this person with disability has a seizure in my workplace? I will not just hire them in the very first place.’ There’s a lot of these assumptions and there’s a lot of fears around it.”

Republic Act No. 10524, which amended the Magna Carta for Persons with Disability, requires government agencies, offices, and corporations to reserve at least 1% of their positions for PWDs. It also encourages private companies with more than 100 employees to do the same, but Ryan said this is not met due to the second factor: the lack of accessibility in educational institutions.

“There are not enough talents available kasi our education system does not necessarily provide reasonable accommodation for persons with disability and other disadvantaged groups to go [to school] from primary to tertiary level,” he said.

Because a college degree is a requirement for many entry-level positions, the employability of PWDs is affected by the challenges they face in reaching and finishing higher education. Only a few specialized schools for PWDs exist in the country, which prevents them from earning the qualifications they need to join the workforce.

“These two things are keeping persons with disability and other disadvantaged groups even further down the poverty pyramid. And that’s exactly what we are trying to address in Virtualahan,” Ryan said.

Use of technology

Virtualahan began in 2015 as a bootstrap enterprise. The main idea is use technology to work around the roadblocks hampering PWDs and other disadvantaged groups from getting the skills and competencies they need in order to be employed.

“It’s impossible for you to teach a person with autism, a person who is blind, and a person who is deaf, and a person in a wheelchair in a physical classroom. But put technology in between, just like what we are doing right now, and you make it possible,” Ryan said.

Virtualahan does not place people with different impairments or conditions into separate classes. Instead, they all learn together and share the same virtual classroom, focusing more on their intersectionality and common denominator as fellow disadvantaged members of society. Each of their needs are then addressed so they can make the most out of the program.

“We have sign language interpreters for our deaf, there’s closed captioning sa class where materials are designed to make it so simple so that a person with neurodivergent disability or a person with autism would not get confused, a person who is color blind and person who has low vision can still use technology to view the images,” Ryan said. “So it’s built thoughtfully and comprehensively that way.”

The flagship program runs for 10 weeks, half of which is dedicated to intensive training of digital skills such as tools and automation, business English, customer service, digital marketing, and e-commerce. Students also get life coaching, a two-week internship, three weeks of job coaching, and additional employment support.

Ryan said this type of training is enough for their graduates to land their first job, but they can choose to enroll in masterclasses and learn specialized skills such as bookkeeping and accounting, software development, and others from industry professionals.

And if they can learn skills through the power of technology, then it goes without saying that they can also perform their jobs through the same method. This is, in fact, what a lot of people are now doing as a result of the coronavirus situation.

Silver lining

“If there’s a silver lining to this pandemic, people saw that it’s possible to work from home, that remote work is doable,” Ryan said. “This is a feasible solution especially if you are a person with mobility issues or other types of disability.”

“Just like you create a ramp on your building to make your building accessible, we advocate that work from home should be a permanent option especially to persons with disabilities,” he added.

And if others need more convincing that working from home is a legitimate job, they will be glad to know that big companies such as Microsoft and Accenture have partnered with Virtualahan to help them employ PWDs. Other firms sponsor scholarships to invest in the training of future job candidates. Virtualahan also boasts of a 78% employment rate, a testament to the competence of its graduates.

Thanks to his efforts in championing the plight of PWDs and other disadvantaged groups, Ryan has been named one of the three finalists for the Global Citizen Prize: Cisco Youth Leadership Award 2020, which recognizes advocates who work toward achieving United Nations’ Global Goals.

For Ryan, his nomination alone is already a huge opportunity and platform to reach the right organizations which can support Virtualahan in scaling its operations and help more people.

“I want to wake up in a world that when I read a newspaper and persons with disability are not glorified for simply getting a job or getting an education. That it is a part of the norm already and it is not 1% or it is not something peculiar that people will celebrate,” he said.

Aside from PWDs and people with medical conditions, Virtualahan has an extended community of other marginalized groups such as former sex workers, recovering drug addicts, incarcerated individuals, solo parents, out of school youth, and indigenous people.

And now, with many others losing their livelihood amid the pandemic, the number of Virtualahan enrollees suddenly spiked in volume as more and more people look for alternative opportunities to earn an income.

“A lot of people finally saw the value of the work that we do but also marami talagang nawalan ng trabaho and we are in a position to prepare them for employment so we do our best to serve the community,” Ryan said. – RC, GMA News