Children with disabilities

PATH has partnered with the Mozambican Association of People with Disabilities, ADEMO, in northern Mozambique, to develop and implement a community-based rehabilitation program for children under 5. ADEMO volunteers learned to identify children with delays and disabilities in the community, ensure referrals to health services, conduct regular household visits, and help families make or obtain affordable assistive devices such as parallel bars and corner chairs. Links with the health system were reinforced through medical outreach brigades and transport subsidies to families. Additionally, ADEMO was supported to strengthen its financial and administrative processes.

A series of tools and job aids have been developed during this work, to support the identification and tracking of the children’s progress and to assist volunteers in counseling caregivers. Results and lessons learned were documented in several briefs.

PATH used the insights from this implementation work to provide inputs into the National Rehabilitation Plan of the Mozambique Ministry of Health, which is in its final stages of approval (2024).

In 2022, PATH collaborated with the International Center for Evidence in Disability at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine to adapt the group-based Ubuntu program for caregivers of children with disabilities in rural Mozambique. The resulting manual has been piloted with close to 200 caregivers, and a subset of the families were visited and interviewed to follow up on their learning from the program. Based on the pilot results, the program was further adapted and specific program components were reinforced, among them counseling on nutrition and on communication with children and positioning of children with cerebral palsy.