Namibia: Community-Driven Priorities

Leaders in child welfare and disability from the University of Minnesota worked with stakeholders in Namibia last month to kick off an effort to create The Child Research Initiative and Training Center at the University of Namibia (UNAM).

ICI Director Amy Hewitt (pictured at center), along with her longtime colleague, Mikala Mukongolwa (pictured fourth from left), shared insights from their work to provide services to children with disabilities in Zambia as part of the three-day event.

Traci LaLiberte (pictured at right), senior executive director of the Center for Advanced Studies in Child Welfare (CASCW), is leading the University of Minnesota team working to develop the center. UNAM and UNICEF are partner organizations. LaLiberte said the successful kickoff event in the Namibian capital, Windhoek, engaged critical partners across Namibia, including government officials, non-governmental organizations, and academic leaders.

“Traci and Ndilimeke Nashandi (a University of Minnesota graduate who is from Namibia) have a vision of creating an institute at the University of Namibia that would blend the work of CASCW and our disability work at ICI,” Hewitt said after the kick-off event, noting that many children in the child welfare system have disabilities. “What came out of these three days were community-driven priorities for improving the lives of all of their children.”

Stakeholders identified the most critical child welfare issues facing Namibia and prioritized goals for workforce training and research related to the needs of children and families. Academic leaders at the University of Namibia will now analyze the data collected at the event and begin scheduling free workforce training. They will also work with government leaders to plan and implement their research agenda.

“Each of these areas of work included significant attention to disability,” LaLiberte said. “Dr. Hewitt and Mikala were instrumental in leading the group through practice, research and training discussions for working with children with disabilities in Namibia.”

Hewitt and Mukongolwa shared their work in Zambia since 2006 to locate children with disabilities and connect them with education and other services. More than 5,000 children who have been found there remain enrolled in school today, and ICI/UMN’s TeleOutreach Center has helped identify various disorders in children there and connect them with treatment. Mukongolwa uses ICI’s College of Direct Support content on the DirectCourse platform to train local providers, families, and individuals with disabilities.

“When you’re in a country with very scarce resources and very little infrastructure, you have to think about services and support in a totally different way,” Hewitt said. “There are too many examples of people coming into poor countries to help and ending up doing more damage than good. You have to come up with replicable models, and this work we’ve done in Zambia is just that.”

With at least adequate and consistent funding, Namibia will be able to create the training and materials needed to put the country’s policies on inclusion into practice for children with all types of disabilities, Mukongolwa said. This progress can help end the stigma around disabilities that has been pervasive in Africa, she said.

“Sharing our personal experiences with disability was a good idea,” she said. “Attendees learned that advocating for the rights of those with disabilities calls for family members to participate. It was clear that most of the professionals found it difficult to talk about their own children or relatives with disabilities, and a good number of them approached us after the presentation with questions about their loved ones’ specific disabilities. This encouraged participants that they, too, can do something to help those with disabilities gain the skills they need.”