Supporting Children with Disabilities, Bangladesh

On 1^st February MAITS started the third online Training of Trainers programme with the aim of training up to 26 professionals to become future MAITS Master Trainers. The organisations involved are the Centre for the Rehabilitation of the Paralysed in Bangladesh (CRP, Bangladesh) and Ziauddin University as well as one trainee joining from Al-Rozan Association for Special Children in Pakistan.

The training sessions ran over a two-week period, with each session lasting 2 hours comprising of 11 sessions in total. Following the feedback from the previous training, the International Master Trainers have decided to reduce the time spent on some of the slides to ensure that sessions do not overrun and to focus on training participants on the role of Master Trainer. We also introduced a polling to be run at the end of each session which helped ensure positive participation to sessions and encouraged participants to be as interactive as possible over Zoom.

The training concluded on 22^nd February 2021, after which the newly qualified Master Trainers trained the 60 Community Health Workers (CHWs) in respective countries to benefit their community settings. 

This is the first time MAITS has collaborated with CRP Bangladesh. The organisation, inaugurated in 1979, was founded to meet the desperate needs of people with disabilities. Over the years, CRP hasbecome recognized as an internationally renowned organization that serves and rehabilitates people with disabilities. MAITS is training young professionals from CRP and the team of prospective Master trainers are currently serving as Clinical Occupational Therapists, Clinical Physiotherapists and Clinical Speech and Language Therapists. 

60 CHWS are ready to reached out the families of children with special needs. The home visits started in October 2021 and MAITS is collecting the progress reports of the children for the next 3 quarters.

Dear Friend and Supporter,

We’re excited to give you an update on the incredible progress we have made to date in partnership with Centre for Rehabilitation of the Paralysed (CRP) in Bangladesh in 2021.

This is the first time MAITS has collaborated with CRP Bangladesh. This highly renowned organisation was founded in 1971 to meet the desperate needs of people with disabilities and is well-networked into the local community. MAITS has now completed both phases of our Community Healthworker Empowerment training this year in spite of pressures of the pandemic. We began by training 15 Master Trainers, in February 2021. These are expert therapists serving as clinical occupational therapists, physiotherapists and speech and language specialists.

Our Master Trainers (MTs) have now rolled out Phase Two of our programme to 40 Community Healthworkers (CHWs) alongside parents from the local community. This highly participatory programme ensures that parents of families with special needs learn practical and wellbeing interventions from feeding techniques, to positioning and muscle strengthening exercises. They do this in presences of CHWs to embed their learning and strengthen skills to better meet the needs of their child(ren).

CPR Bangladesh has also made 5 booklets separating the MAITS Manual to make it user-friendly, recently and have recently translated it into Bangla! 

We are so thrilled to have achieved our goals to date and look forward to updating you in the near future.

Thank you so much for your support.

Warmest,

The MAITS Team

Sadia, Kamila, Edwina, Emma