"Withdraw Cedi Notes"

A number of visually-impaired persons are up in arms against the Bank of Ghana (BoG) for introducing the Ghana cedi notes without the special features promised to aid them in their transactions. They are angry with the BoG for what they describe as outright deception at the introduction of the new Ghana cedi notes which, were making them lose money to unscrupulous people anytime they approached them for help in identifying the notes. According to them, BoG promised to introduce tactile dots on the new cedi notes specifically to help in the identification of the notes; a promise the frustrated visually-impaired told The Finder newspaper at the premises of the Ghana Society for the Blind.�We don�t read with our eyes, we feel with our fingers so the tactile dots are supposed to protrude well enough to enable us to identify by touch but that is not the case. We believe it was mere talk without any intention of fulfilling the promise,� Mr. Nicholas Halm, a teacher and journalist at the Ghana Braille Press said. �It is sad that before the printing of the money, the bank widely publicized the special feature and the attention it was paying to the blind, this is not he case. My brother, you go out there and ask anybody who is blind to identify the notes; they can�t, so I think we need to sit with them again to find a lasting solution to this problem. He said former President Kufuor�s government spent so much money trying to get those special features but the printers did not do a good job. According to him, the tactile dots could only be felt within the first few days of circulation but after that, they were unable to use the money on their own. Mr. Halm said that BoG should have emulated the European model where denominations of the Euro come in different sizes depending on the value of each note. �Apart from the one cedi note, you cannot differentiate between any of the notes, so we cannot tell the difference with the tactile dots and we cannot tell the difference by the sizes either,� he said. In an experiment with the six other blind people to identify the notes, they were not able to tell the difference or identify the notes. �I have to call on other people who can see to help me choose what money I want to use,� one of them said. According to another man who lost his sight during infancy, people stole from him anytime he gave his money to them to help him arrange the notes in a sequence to help facilitate his transactions.