In the Nairobi slums,
10% of children under the age of 15 are disabled and live in conditions of severe marginalization from the socio-health point of view.
The high rate of infantile disability is mainly due to problems encountered during pregnancy, the conditions in which mothers have to deliver their babies (without any medical assistance) and to accidents in the home.
To be disabled in a context of extreme poverty means being marginalized: medical treatments have to be paid for and in the slums the architectonic barriers make life impossible outside the individual homes. To this can be added the stigma which affects children suffering from disabilities in that it is seen as a divine retribution, as something to be ashamed of. This leads to parents hiding their children at home, and not giving them sufficient care. Also the state schooling system does not accept disabled children, even those of normal intelligence and cognitive abilities because they are not fully self-sufficent.
The World Friends project Combating Disabilities is aimed at improving the quality of life for disabled children in the shanty towns of North East Nairobi (Korogocho, Kariobangi, Mathare, Eastleigh, Huruma, Babadogo, Kahawa and Soweto) and to encourage the integration of disabled children into their communities.
This aim will be reached by:
- Strengthening prevention and rehabilitation services for the disabled offered by the World Friends Neema Hospital, particularly maternal-infant health, maternity (assistance at birth), corrective and paediatric surgery and physiotherapy
- Supporting two physiotherapy centres on the outskirts of the Soweto and Babadogo shanty towns, to guarantee treatments for patients who are unable to reach Neema Hospital
- Organizing awareness activities and training for the families of disabled children and the communities to which they belong.
Each year:
- around 350 disabled children will benefit from physiotherapy and rehabilitation services at Neema Hospital and in the outlying clinics
- around 150 children will undergo orthopaedic corrective surgery operations
- 10 local health workers will be trained