Using innovative ways and evidence to improve livelihoods of PWDs in Cameroon

In my community, programs and interventions have often been designed for people with disabilities (PWD) leaving out a key element: their voice. Because of that, most often these interventions tend to be ineffective.

So, with the objective of improving the livelihoods of people with disabilities through innovation and use of evidence, and borne out of curiosity on how to use different approaches to contribute to improving the lives of underserved populations, we launched our initiative. This population, especially people with disabilities, is largely left behind the evidence-based practice train, and we had to change that.

This is why in our project we included PWDs in the design and implementation of the intervention. We did this through a formative study where we conducted key informant interviews, as well as focus group discussions with parents of PWDs. The discussions were focused on a core question: what exactly needs to change and what do you need to see change to say this intervention was effective? Some of the findings from the discussions include needs the parents stated such as seeing their kids go to school without discrimination, being able to support their children’s school needs, having access to healthcare, having an income stream to support their daily needs, amongst others.

This information helped us in designing our intervention around the 5 WHO matrix including health, education, social wellbeing, empowerment, and livelihood. The intervention brings evidence-based recommendations to families and communities of PWDs on these 5 axes to help families make informed choices that will improve access to their rights and meet the needs of CWD. Watch the webinar recording here.

We currently work at the household level, because we firmly believe that people need evidence to be able to make informed choices. We need evidence to be able to make services more effective. Also, family is central and change that happens from within the family can spread to the community and the country and world at large. With this, we started looking at ways to bring our research to households and communities of PWDs and have them engage in evidence-based recommendations.

For the past two years, I have led a team that developed this innovative evidence toolkit that brings research into the households and communities of people with disabilities (PWDs). Once the participatory design phase of the initiative was done and the toolkit was ready, we have worked with 30 households with little funding we got from Wakka Foundation. We have had some interesting results so far including access to basic services like education.

Now, we want to do a randomized control trial and reach out to more kids and PWDs who are also left behind the evidence-based practice train.

Additionally, the intentions for 2022 include: 1) Publishing results of our research work from this project which we are already working on 2) Sourcing more funding to reach many more families and children with disabilities which we meet on the field as we go around to follow up 3) Improving on the income-generating activity scheme. The seed fund we have at first was really little (100,000 FCFA) but based on follow-up and implementation this is really small to create an impact in the lives of the participants. 4) Finally, we want to do a trail