Supporting Children with Disabilities in Pakistan

The response to our GlobalGiving campaign has been fantastic!  We are very grateful to everybody who has donated to MAITS' Community Health Worker project in Pakistan!

Since the campaign started, we now have the funds in place needed to run the project in Karachi and surrounding areas.  Our therapists are meeting this month to finalise the dates for the first training of the Community Health Workers who will support families directly in their homes and have selected the first Community Workers that they will be training. 

Trainers and their seniors are planning for an initial roll-out in Karachi to organisations running community programmes and known by Ziauddin University Hospital and ACELP). For this initial Karachi roll-out, the trainers may choose to train all together initially, and may then break up into teams to take turns to train on different sections of the programme.

Translations of resources for parents, which teach families more about their child's disability and techniques they can use to support their children from exercises and feeding techniques will be made available in the local language Urdu.  We are also currently arranging for translation of the resources for Community Workers, so that they can more effectively support families. This resource will also be available on the MAITS' website in our resources section in Urdu, which is excellent as we are building a library of resources in different languages to share. 

We have identified some clinicians who will check the translations to ensure accuracy in terms of the technical input and how accessible the language will be for parents/carers.

We have also developed the following plan:

• We are identifying a local administrator to arrange for printing of the ‘Guide for Parents’ and ‘Working with Children with Developmental Disabilities and their Caregivers’ for the trainers, as required.
• Local administrator to organise for the first 8-day training programme to take place for Community Health Workers in Karachi.
• Trainers will supervise 3 months of roll-out with assistance of local administrator – Ensuring that the Community Workers are receiving weekly supervision from the Trainers and that data is being collected by the CHWs that will be used for the project evaluation. This is collected using forms that are contained within the programme itself and which the CHWs will be trained to complete.

Having just received the funding for this project, we wanted to say how grateful we are to all our donors, as we would not been able to proceed with the project without your support.  48 individuals donated to help support some very vulnerable children in Pakistan who will now receive support in their own homes. We are delighted to say that the interest the project has generated has meant that we have now had requests for this training to be run in India, Sri Lanka and continue in Nepal as well. 

• A description of our family resources (PDF)