Inclusive Education First Aid

What happens to children with intellectual or developmental disabilities in rural and impoverished communities whose parents and guardians cannot afford the services of professionals? There are so many families who have no idea what to do when their child has any learning, developmental and behavioural challenges. We scream early intervention, Inclusion but that mother who barely has enough to feed her family cannot be bothered about sourcing for funds to hire a professional. Most schools that provide inclusive education are not affordable and available to families in the rural communities.

Most schools that offer opportunities for children from low income backgrounds are mostly dumping space where segregation is practiced. These challenges are the reasons why the number of out-of-school children with intellectual and developmental disabilities keeps increasing. According to Voice of Nigeria report, there are about 1.3 million out-of-school children with special needs in Nigeria and this report was in 2018. Of course, we know that there are many children with IDD who were not captured during the time of this report. So imagine how many productive generation we will be wasting if we fold our hands and do nothing.

That was why we started the Inclusive Education First Aid community drive. The aim is to train volunteers, teachers, parents on how to identify and provide some self intervention to ensure that children with intellectual and developmental disabilities can get intervention regardless of their resources, background and finances. After training over two hundred participants in Lagos, Abia and Kano by partnering with IRead Lagos, BLI Initiative Kano, Academic Planet school and Princeton Hall Schools Abia state. We decided to move the project across Africa and trained over a hundred participants in Cotonou and Port novo in Benin Republic and recently partnered Hands from Above to train families in the ten villages in Togo. We also have Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Comoros interested in this project.

We also distribute our Inclusive Education First Aid kit that contains various assistive and learning aids to enable parents and volunteers provide intervention for children. The kit is also used as an empowerment initiative for the women in the community who can then use the items in the kit to help other children in the community for a stipend.

We cannot do this alone and need to help more families. Join the Inclusive Education First Aid and become a First Aider. You can refer parents, families and communities to us and also partner with us as a corporate or individual partner to ensure there are no out-of-school children with special needs in our continent.

IEFA training in Benin Republic