'I am able to contribute!' Blind female lawyer, 35, wins global award for promoting disability rights

- Yetnebersh Nigussie is joint winner of the 2017 Right Livelihood Award

- She was honored for promoting rights of people with disabilities 

- She has been blind since the age of five A 35-year-old blind female human rights lawyer has been named joint winner of the 2017 Right Livelihood Award. 

The winners of the Award, which is also known as Sweden's alternative Nobel Prize, were announced on Tuesday, September 26. Ethiopian Yetnebersh Nigussie was honored for promoting the rights and inclusion of people with disabilities. 

In an interview, she said: “I really want to see a world where nobody is discriminated because of his or her disability or any other status. “I started my fight, not by telling people, but showing people that I’m able to contribute. I have one disability but I have 99 abilities.”

Nigussie went blind at the age of five. She studied law at the University of Addis Ababa and had to transcribe audio recordings of her reading materials into braille throughout her five-year degree. 

 She helped establish the Center for Students with Disabilities at the Addis Ababa University and the Ethiopian Center for Disability and Development (ECDD). She said education was her turning point. She won the award jointly with Colin Gonsalves, an Indian human rights lawyer, and female journalist Khadija Ismayilova for revealing government corruption in Azerbaijan.