Challenges Faced By Children With Disability in Kenya

  

Date Posted: 4/1/2017 2:33:41 AM

Posted By: kimemia5  Membership Level: Silver  Total Points: 977

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In every country in the world may it be developing country or already developed country, the issue of children with disability is common. According to statistics done in 2014, 93 million children under the age of 14 years in the word were living with a form of disability. This is 5.1% of the total number of children in the world. Of this number more than half of children with disability are from the developing countries, Kenya included. This means that a lot of these children face many challenges all from home, school and community.

1. Rejection
When a child is born and the parents discovered he is disable some of them have left their children in hospitals and run away. If the disability is discovered much later, majority of Kenyans hide them in their rooms so that people will not see them. For those disable children who are not locked in their rooms face a lot of difficulties in associating with the rest of the children. Whenever they attempt to join they are either cursed away or the children run away from them. This brings a lot of sorrows to the innocent children. This is because of the misconceptions and old time beliefs that those people have. Also in reported cases in Kenya, the parents to the disable children quarry and blame each other for that action. In most cases women are the one who fall culprits of the situation. The bitter part of it is that the community around the families with children with disability start to associate the fact with traditional beliefs and the family as a whole is rejected by the community. The hatred toward children with disability has made them being rejected by the community.
In 2014, a child with cerebral

palsy was not allowed to join a nearby primary school by the head teacher of the school in Kibera. As reported by insurance for war and peace reporting [IWPR]

2. Isolation
After the disabled child has reached the age to go school, their parents can’t take them to any school thus they are taken to special schools to learn. What happens their? Isolation of those children occurs. This means that even in future association with other people will be very difficult for them because they are brought up in an environment where they are only alone in those schools.
Inadequate number of special schools in Kenya has been another problem to children with disability. The few special schools available are widely scared and most of them are found in big towns. That means that it’s very hard for the child with disability to access school and gets education. The long distance travel to get to school is a major challenge that the national council for people with disability [NCPD] and the ministry of education has to look into.

The other big problem to these children is the fact that the special schools are there though few, but the number of teachers teaching in those institutions are very few to even much the large number of learners. To add to that is the fact that there are very limited learning resources for the children with disability to use. Although the government has vowed to help people with disability, it has done little to prove that.

According to report done by united nation international children’s emergency fund [UNICEF] in 2013, 9% of children with disability join schools. And out of those only 6% complete primary school. What happens to the remaining 3%, they are not able to finish primary school so that they do not join secondary schools.
Better solutions to these problems have to be found to resolve some of these challenges.

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