Home-Based Education Programme Mfuwe
Writer: Elizabeth Sadowski, Executive Director, Time + Tide Foundation Photography: Edward Selfe
P
romise Chirwa is a two-year-old boy with cerebral palsy. He lives with his unemployed mother, Zeria, in Chikosi village. We met Promise when he was just over a year old and unable to crawl, grasp objects or sit independently. Zeria told us that neighbours often laughed at him because he did not have the dexterity of other children his age. They told Zeria he would never be able to attend school and never amount to anything. She took him to the local clinic, where the nurses were confused about his condition and referred him to a Lusaka hospital. Zeria was trying to raise funds for this journey when she was introduced to the home-based education programme. In 2016, the Time + Tide Foundation and the Bauleni Special Needs Project, a special needs school in Lusaka, launched a community-based support service for disabled children in Mfuwe. In remote areas of Zambia, government provisions for handicapped children are limited or non-existent. Accordingly, Bauleni Special Needs Project has pioneered a home-based education programme, a model of intervention that relies on the altruism and goodwill of
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TRAVEL & LEISURE ZAMBIA
compassionate community members. In this model, volunteer caregivers are trained to offer physical and social support to children with a variety of disabilities, with the aim of helping these children acquire the motor functions and other skills necessary to attend school.
We began the programme by recruiting 30 children and 33 volunteers, assigning each volunteer to one handicapped child in his or her immediate community. During weekly visits, the volunteers work closely with guardians on the individualized education plans that have been structured according to each child’s developmental needs. The programme is monitored by three co-ordinators, all of whom meet the guardians and children at the end of each month to assess if and how the programme is having an impact on the children’s development.
Since the programme began in March 2016, the volunteer caregivers have received over 120 hours of specialized training on disabilities and devoted more than 2,700 hours to supporting handicapped children in Mfuwe. In 2017, enrolment increased to 40 children, the majority of whom are affected by cerebral palsy, epilepsy, Down’s syndrome, hydrocephalus and microcephaly. After the first nine months of the programme, 81% of guardians reported that they felt better
Promise
