The plight of the disabled is little known by the Burkinabe authorities themselves, so much so that the last official report dates back to 2014 and was made by the Ministry of Social Action and National Solidarity, with the help of UNICEF and other international NGOs.
From the study, important data on the disabled in Burkina Faso emerges that can be summarised as follows:
- 82% of the disabled live in rural or peri-urban areas (non-localised neighbourhoods),
- 39.2% of the disabled are between 6-11 years old and 23.8% are between 12-15 years old,
- 72.6 per cent of the disabled do not currently attend school and 34.6 per cent have never attended school, only 7.1 per cent make it to secondary school,
- Only 1.8% attend apprenticeship courses or small informal jobs,
- 25% mobility impairment, 12% vision, 11% hearing, 9.5% hearing and speech, 9.3% epilepsy, 8.3% mental problems or delays,
- 48.6 per cent of disabled people experienced medium to severe social discrimination,
- only 39% benefited from help outside their own family, including the local community, NGOs, religious structures,
- only 2% received school aid.
For years, Nasara and the Redemptorist Fathers have been running two Rehabilitation Centres together , which in Burkina Faso are known as CMA (Centre Medicine Alternative).
These CMAs specialise in the treatment of severely handicapped children:
- The first CMA, run by the Congregation of the Redemptorist Fathers, has been operating since 1997 and is located in the Saint Gerard hospital in the capital. This centre was at risk of closure due to a lack of funding, which is why in 2018 Nasara ‘adopted’ it, allowing it to continue working until today three days a week. To date, the CMA provides an average of 450 interventions per month on a user base of around 60 families.
- The second CMA started activities in 2018 inside the Djicofè Centre, is open 2 days a week and provides an average of 180 interventions per month on a base of 25 families.
These two CMAs work in strong synergy, using the same specialised personnel who provide rehabilitation therapies to children up to 7-8 years of age.
In the centres themselves there are also spaces for socialising teenagers and adults with disabilities, who spend a few hours in the company of volunteer animators.
Next steps for the Child Physiotherapy Centres project in Burkina (CMA)
A natural evolution of the project is to modify part of the re-education activities, introducing the use of Community Based Rehabilitation techniques, i.e. ‘the art of helping a person learn to live as well as possible and to do as much as possible for themselves, taking into account their own limitations and disabilities‘.
In the coming months, we would like to help mothers of handicapped children break out of their cultural and family isolation by making them an active part of a mutual support group.
We are also striving to project the rehabilitation intervention above all in the context where the person lives, to reduce those barriers, both physical and social, present in the community that favour marginalisation.
