Inclusive ECCD: - Consultative Group on Early Childhood Care and ...

CASE STUDIES
with the magnitude of the problem within their
own communities. Many began to formulate specific
plans to address the needs of the disabled. As
a result of this more intense focus on disability,
about 20 school-age children who had previously
been kept at home started attending school.
The CBR teams began to work actively to promote
the integration of people with disabilities
into every aspect of village life. At health clinics,
health workers began encouraging mothers to
bring their children with disabilities to the clinic.
A number of CBR teams acted at the village education
level. One CBR team made sure that every
disabled person in their community was always
brought to village events and meetings.
These acts of integration, which broke down
age-old barriers, affected the attitudes of villagers
in the Rupununi about disabled people: 60% of
respondents in Stout’s 1966 research sample identified
changing attitudes toward and help for disabled
people as a major impact of the CBR
Program, 35% felt that disabled people were better
adapted and less shy, and 27% identified the
integration of disabled people into village life as
the main strength of the program.
The formulation of village-level plans to integrate
disabled people into the villages had another
unexpected effect, however. Until then, the CBR
teams seemed to have responded largely to program-level
suggestions; the act of initiating their
own plans to respond to the needs they had documented
within their own communities helped the
CBR teams to begin to own the process and to
identify themselves as CBR agents rather than as
CBR recipients.
The CBR Program however did not abandon its
commitment to address broader development priorities
in the region as it took advantage of the
newfound focus on disability. During the same
period of time that the third series of workshops
were being held, three other major areas of focus
developed in response to needs expressed by villagers
or needs perceived by the program: health
education, literacy, and cultural affirmation.
Health Education
The focus on health education developed as a collaboration
with the Bahai Community Health
Partnership (BCHP). A 50-minute video called
Facts for Life depicting the key health messages in
the UNICEF document by the same name, was
filmed using scenes from the Rupununi. Over the
next months, CBR regional coordinators traveled
throughout the region using portable video equipment
to hold video shows in each of the villages to
convey these health messages to the community.
The key messages in the Facts for Life series were
also summarized in a simple, illustrated pamphlet
package and distributed to every home in the
Rupununi through village visits made by the
BCHP.
A series of Facts for Life festivals were held in
every subdistrict, as well as at the regional level.
Hundreds of poems, songs, skits, stories, and
drawings were submitted to the competition.
UNICEF funded the publication of a book which
featured the winning entries. The combination of
video, teaching manual, and art competition
proved to be extremely effective in both communicating
health messages to the general public
and in empowering health workers to teach these
messages themselves.
Literacy Training
This aspect of the program arose out of the
recognition that general education and literacy
were major areas of need. Part of the need was
identified as a lack of books to read and part as a
lack of knowledge about how to teach children to
read through an approach other than the rote
repetition method. The CBR Program decided to
devote part of the third series of workshops to
the promotion of literacy and developed a Steps
to Reading package consisting of a 15-book series
that included workbooks, teacher manuals, and
story books designed to take the teacher step by
step through the process of promoting literacy.
Cultural Affirmation
Cultural affirmation came about through the
use of locally-available materials, particularly
those reflecting cultural craft forms, that was encouraged
in the early stimulation program. Cultural
shows and art competitions were used to
encourage people to translate program themes
into their own culture and environment. A book
of stories around CBR themes was written and
translated into Macushi and Wapishana, and a
tape was produced containing nearly extinct indigenous
songs and stories. Several videos were
filmed in the Rupununi using people there as
both consultants and active participants. All of
these steps showed respect for the culture of the
Rupununi people and helped to make the program
and process culturally relevant. For the people
in this region, who for the last 100 years have
been beaten for speaking their traditional language
in school, and who are seeing their culture
and way of life rapidly die out with the new ‘modern’
generation, this work represents a reaffirmation
of the integrity and value of their culture.
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