Many organisations choose between advocacy and service delivery; between promoting people’s rights and giving them practical help. Disability Africa recognises that the only way to improve outcomes for disabled children and young people immediately and sustainably is to do both. Using playschemes as an entry point, we offer practical, tangible and consistent support to disabled children, whilst also empowering and training advocates throughout the community.
We combine both approaches in our replicable Template for Inclusive Development:
1. Raise awareness and educate local communities in the rights and needs of disabled young people by:
Changing Perceptions. Through participating in our playschemes, families, playscheme staff and the wider community discover their children’s skills and talents, often for the first time. Families have described how our playschemes have helped them to understanding that “their child is human”. Consequently, they become powerful advocates for inclusion.
Creating Parent and Caregiver Support Groups: To provide information and support on impairments. Families of disabled children are often very isolated; a support group allows them to share issues and receive appropriate support. Sharing experiences also changes attitudes.
Advocating in the Community: Using meetings, events and radio programmes to educate and challenge attitudes to end children’s isolation and exclusion.
Training Young Volunteers: To ensure that our projects are locally led and sustainable.
Survey Local Communities: Currently, poor data means poor outcomes for disabled young people. By empowering local people to gather data, we can find and then support disabled children and their families.
Working with Schools: To educate teachers and prepare them to include disabled children and to inspire non-disabled students to think and act inclusively.
2. Develop and deliver services to meet identified needs by partnering with local people to provide:
Access to Inclusive Education: We see play as a valuable access route to education. By learning through play, we start to prepare children for education. We work with local education providers to think and act inclusively and develop accessible routes into education. Our playstaff, who develop nurturing relationships with children in a play environment, are prepared to support as classroom assistants for children who are ready to transition into more formal education.
Improved Infrastructure: Improving accessibility and, if necessary, constructing new dedicated facilities to support inclusion and deliver inclusive services. In The Gambia, we have built the Gunjur Inclusion Centre - a facility which includes a play room, a training room, a soft play therapy room and a physiotherapy clinic.
Medical Support: Funding surgery, providing medication, palliative care, regular home visits and after-care.
Community-Based Physiotherapy: Providing physiotherapy which is vital to children’s physical development and something which benefits the whole community. This includes providing prosthetics and mobility aids to individuals who would otherwise have to travel miles at great expense to get such help.
3. Replication and sustainability:
Every initiative that we have developed has potential for replication. Africa is a diverse continent and adaptation will be needed to different settings and cultures but the values we promote and the outcomes we seek are simple and universal - INCLUSION.
Our model works through empowering and building capacity within local partner organisations to manage and deliver playschemes autonomously. We develop a robust relationship with our partners where we train, support and monitor our partner teams over a long period. Once capacity and governance mechanisms are in place , we work to gradually decrease dependence on UK lead support. We believe that this approach creates sustainable impact, in contrast to traditional “big aid”, which often fosters dependence without long term improvements.
