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BACKGROUND
In 2000, at the United Nations Millennium Summit, world leaders recognized the essential nature of education in third world countries and provided specific plans for a very lofty goal : to make a full course of primary schooling available to every child in Ethiopia ( and throughout Africa ) by the year 2015. This was one of eight “millennium development goals” (MGDs) set by the summit to end extreme poverty in any part of the world.
Since then, primarily due to large scale investments by the international community, the number of children attending primary schools in Ethiopia has nearly doubled. HOWEVER, there has been very little, and in some areas no effort to treat those children who struggle with speech-language delays. So, for a large majority of families, access to schools generally becomes little more than a source of great frustration and wasted money for the system.
RATIONALE
eelio initiative founder, Alexia Galakatos explains, “Development of basic speech and language skills is so dependent on parent-child interaction and communication. In these truly impoverished areas, parents are more concerned with their family's survival. Their focus is on feeding their children every day and very little 'bantering' and 'child talk' is happening. As a result, there is a very high prevalence of speech delays in the birth to teenage populations. In addition, for the children who have congenital delays, the parents do not have the resources or appropriate knowledge to interact with their children and these children are often ostracized from the community. I think it’s terrific that significant improvements are being seen in the development of primary schools, but now is the time to make sure these children can take full advantage of this opportunity. Putting a child with developmental or major speech delays into a classroom and expecting them to learn is entirely unrealistic and ignores a critical need that we are going to address – aggressively.”
OUR WORK
Each eelio speaks project will look largely the same :
- Identify a community school where the population will also benefit from the work of eelio digs, characterized by : community and school administrators motivated to pursue program initiatives, compliant school systems, responsiveness within the community among schools, churches, and community centers).
- Coordinate with the school administrators for an on-site visit by a member of eelio speaks management team. One week assessment, followed by the development of an action plan for on-site instruction and continuing plan implementation.
- Implementation of action plan, which includes : training school teachers, administrators, and counselors in the identification of 'special needs' students; training teachers to learn basic 'speech therapy' skills and providing therapy tools for ongoing evaluation and instruction.
> email for detailed budget in XLS format ( 1 year costs for the Speaks project )
> support eelio speaks
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