Supporting Children with Disabilities in Pakistan

Community Health Worker Project- Pakistan (September 4^th, 2018

This has been a busy time for the MAITS Community Health Worker project in Pakistan! We have hired a local coordinator locally to coordinate training and provide logistical support as up until now we were coordinating the project from the UK and having someone working locally on a part-time basis makes a lot more sense! Our coordinator arranged a meeting of all of our master trainers, including local charities MEANS and ACELP and Ziauddin University to organise the roll out of the training. Trainers from Aga Khan will join the project at a later date. A group of 5 Community Health Workers (CHW) in Karachi, Pakistan has been agreed; we also have Master Trainers who will train a further 2 therapists in their organisations.

Training/Beneficiaries

Over the summer, all the Master Trainers met up to agree on the process of rolling-out training of Community Workers. This training is beginning in September and there will be 2-3 weeks training for the Community Workers, after which time, they will start directly using their disability training with beneficiaries from 1st Oct 18.

For the first phase we will have 15 CHWs. Each CHW works with around 4-5 children with disabilities. That means overall, we have a minimum of 60 and maximum of 75 direct beneficiaries for this part of the project.

The Plan

• The CHWs will collect data on the children they are supporting and the ways in which they are being supported on a fortnightly basis and this will be submitted to our local coordinator to collate.
• At the end of November, one of our partners, who is a Professor and Principal in the Faculty of Speech and Language and Hearing at the Ziauddin University will evaluate the data and look at whether to keep the visits fortnightly or extend the evaluation.

Manual Translation/Stationery

We have identified translators to undertake the translation of the Community Health Worker manual and Parent’s Guide into Urdu. This is a MAITS’ resource that was developed to help Community Workers to support families in their own homes and covers a range of neurodevelopmental disabilities (disabilities that affect the way the brain works). The translators are a team of graduate therapists from Ziauddin University, to make sure that the manuals are translated in a way that is accurate but also in language that is accessible to parents. As well as this, we have made translated Urdu copies of the manual in order to effectively support families, including extra blank pages to enable CHWs to take notes in their language. They will only be using pictures with the parents, but their hand-written notes will be helpful in reminding them the content.

MAITS will issue Master Trainer certificates to the newly trained Master Trainers.

We have provided 300 sets of evaluation forms for the organisations have been provided for training and evaluation purposes.

We, at MAITS, are very optimistic about the Community Health Worker Project in Pakistan and, once again, would like to take this opportunity to thank our donors, without whom the project would not be possible! Thank you for supporting us in helping some of Pakistan’s most vulnerable children and their families.