Over 150 teachers from 75 schools in the Makoko, Lagos have been trained by Restore Foundation for Child Sight (RFCS) in collaboration with Association for Formidable Educational Development (AFED), on how to identify vision problems in children.
The training was held at Ken Ade private school Makoko, Yaba.
Executive Director of AFED, Dr Halima Alimi, said teachers must be trained to help detect any possible eye defect in children because three-quarters of children’s waking hours are spent within the school.
“The first two, or three years of life are the most critical, once the vision isn’t clear, they might struggle to get optimal vision going forward. And so we need teachers to understand. So we are educating teachers to know firstly, that children can have a visual disability,” she said.
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According to her, there are 19 million children with visual disability all over the world. “Three-quarters of that figure which is 12 million is just because of refractive error. They just need a pair of glasses. And so we need to help teachers know this and teach them how to in their simple classroom environment, check the vision and refer them early for care. We’ve done this now for a year; we’ve directly trained about 707 teachers, which we believe can easily extrapolate if one teacher teaches five others.
Beyond testing vision, Alimi said the teachers were given an atlas that will help them spot diagnoses.
“If they spot a white shadow in a child’s eye, that child is likely to have cataracts. You send them for help. You see a child that has one eye looking straight and the other eye looking in another direction.”
That’s a squint or you see a child with a white thing in the eye that could be cataracts, that could also be eye cancer, or you see a child that has excessively large eyes that could be a child with glaucoma. We give them an atlas that shows them immediately the sorts of things they can see and spot children with that, and so that’s also a basis for referring children to the ophthalmologist for proper eye care. And so the teachers are a veritable tool to use to detect children abnormality they spend most of their waking hours in school.”
Hon Ayeseteminikan Bawo expressed gratitude for the impact the foundation has made in the lives of school children in the Makoko area.
“I came across this foundation early this year, they came to do eye screening for the children in my school and other schools. They gifted those children that have eye defects glasses and drugs to correct their eyes, it was wonderful. Today, they are here to train the teachers who will go back to the classrooms or their various schools and also train other teachers for them to be able to identify children that have eye problems. And if that is been carried out, I assure you, most of the children who are seen roaming the streets, may want to go to school, maybe they have eye problems and they couldn’t detect themselves or their parents detect it, they are now roaming the streets and are not in school but with the step, this organisation is taking the sky is the limit.
“I’m grateful that they have been able to arrange teachers from within here and outside here to be able to teach them. One prime thing is that the teachers have taken it as a passion to know how to go about detecting children with a possible eye defect that is why you see them coming under the rain to come and be trained. I bless God for the foundation. And thank God for the people that came around to receive the training.”