Research Fellowship - Monitoring OKU Rights

Type

Research and knowledge generation

Status

Implementation

Project Activity Details

The "Monitoring OKU Rights" project, implemented by Adhura H. Farouk from 14 July  2025 to 15 January 2026 in Malaysia, was designed in response to the significant challenges faced by Persons with Disabilities (OKU) and their advocates in tracking and engaging with parliamentary discourse on issues that affect them. Parliamentary Hansard records and policy documents are often fragmented and not easily searchable by topic, creating a barrier to effective oversight and advocacy.

Objectives

• Centralise and make accessible all parliamentary documents related to OKU rights into a single, open database;
• Enhance the capacity of civil society and journalists to utilise this data for monitoring and advocacy;
• Promote greater government transparency and accountability on OKU issues.

To achieve these goals, the team conducted activities including data scraping and cleaning of hjstorical Hansard records, the development of a user-friendly public database, and a stakeholder engagement roundtable for disabled persons' organisations and media representatives.

Full concept note.

Malaysian Hansard OKU Analytics Project
04 May 2026 A project by our 2025 Tech Fellow, Adhura, addresses the gap in accessible information on parliamentary debates and policies concerning Persons with Disabilities (OKU) in Malaysia. By using Natural Language Processing (NLP), Hansard records spanning 2008–2025 were analyzed to quantify government attention, sentiment, and alignment with the Pelan Tindakan OKU 2016-2022. Read More