There is a statistic that circulates about disability in Cameroon: that fifteen per cent of the population is disabled. We have used it ourselves in the past. We have stopped, because we cannot source it.
The figure we use now is narrower and checkable. More than 600,000 people in Cameroon are visually impaired, according to the Programme national de lutte contre la cecite, published in 2014. It is a national programme's own figure, it carries a date, and anyone can go and look at it.
We prefer it for a reason beyond accuracy. An organisation that quotes a large unsourced number is asking to be believed. An organisation that quotes a smaller sourced one is offering to be checked. For an association whose entire claim is that blind women should speak for themselves, being checkable is not a detail.
The same rule applies to our own figures. We say we were founded at a constituent general assembly on 8 November 2019 with twenty founding members, because that is what the record shows. We say we were registered on 26 November 2021, receipt number 00000647, because that is a state-issued instrument you can verify without us. We say that seven of our eight recorded officers are visually impaired, as an aggregate, and we do not publish the roster.
Where we do not know, we say so. Some figures about our membership have been reported four different ways across four documents, all of them true of different groups at different times. Until we can say which group a number describes, we publish none of them.
A figure you cannot source is not evidence. It is decoration.
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