Trained physician, Olayinka Akindayomi, is passionate about helping children with developmental challenges to be part of the society. That led her to start the Children Development Centre (CDC) two decades ago. In this interview with COLLINS NWEZE, she speaks on ‘We Too Can Grow’, a new project CDC is executing in partnership with Promasidor Nigeria Limited. Its target is to change the financial status of parents of Children with Disabilities (CwDs).
YOU often talk about ‘giving a sense of belonging’ to children with developmental challenges. How do you go about doing this?
There is a major problem when you realise that the society is very hostile to CwDs (Children with Disabilities) and that it does not accept them as its members. Every child, regardless of the challenge he or she has, deserves a sense of belonging; a feeling that they are part of the larger society, a feeling that they are part of families and that they are loved. According to the United Nations Charter, which Nigeria is a signatory to, every child has the right to life, education and identity. Before now, the perception was that any child that had any form of disability should not be reckoned with. That also applied to parents of such children. I am talking from an experience because I have a CwD who is 34 years. The society does not even want to accept parents and families, particularly mothers, of the affected children. When we were building Children Development Centre, not many people even regarded general human rights discourse as a serious issue, much less when you talked about Persons with Disabilities (PwDs). What did Nigerians understand by rights of PwDs?
So, we needed to create a catchphrase that people could relate with. That was how we came up with giving the affected children a sense of belonging. The more we tell people that such children must have a sense of belonging, the better chance they stand.
How has the journey been in the past 20 years?
It has been tough. The first 10 years were spent on trying to remain focused on what we wanted to do. My position was simple: this is what I want to do regardless of whether the society accepted it or not. I was bloody-minded. And I was very fortunate to have good, determined and great team to work with. If I was not desperate and stubborn, I would not have survived the first 10 years.
Yes, money was a big challenge, but the toughest challenge was stigma. But we decided that Nigeria could not continue that way. There were places such as orphanages where children with special needs were dumped. But that was where it ended. We came to the scene and said, ‘Children should not be abandoned by their families.’ And we promised to give such children support. In the first 10 years, I made up my mind on what I wanted to achieve and was not ready to accept any advice.
As I became more mature, I met people like Mrs. Delphine Misan-Arenyeka, who also has a child with a developmental challenge. She began to share her ideas and said, ‘Dr. Akindayomi, even if you were strong-willed in the first 10 years of the journey, you should be open to new ideas and more collaboration in the next 10 years.’ There was much hostility against people with disabilities. The laws were there but they were not implemented. Parents and guardians of such children were also stigmatised. Some people believed they offended certain deities; hence they were given such children as part of their punishment.
Have there been remarkable changes?
To a great extent, there have been improvement. And this is partly as a result of what we have been doing. CDC has taken it upon itself to educate the society. We have moved from one local government to another and from one state to another. Between 2007 and 2011, we toured 31 states, engaging Nigerians on the need to see CwDs as members of the society. We did a lot of road-shows to change the wrong perception about children with special needs. In the first road show, we had no funding from any organisation. Yet, we embarked on the trip because it was necessary we got a complete view about the challenges CwDs were going through.
Could you speak on your new initiative – We Too Can Grow?
After the road-show that took us to different parts of the country, we found out that many parents of CwDs in those states were still as helpless as they had always been. We left them with nothing. Then, we decided to begin with those who could not afford – and were not receiving – professional therapy for their children. We gathered and trained them on how they could give their children therapy. We set up a group in Lagos, Kaduna, Kano, Rivers, Oyo and Ogun States.
At some point, we did not have sufficient resources and manpower to continue to move around the country, so we chose to continue with Ogun and Lagos States. In Ogun, we started with about 30 mothers and caregivers who were very enthusiastic about doing something. Among these were two fathers. These people were initially bringing their children to us for therapy but, gradually, they started doing it themselves.
Then, people began to hear about “We Too Can Grow.” Mothers began to ask for help. They wanted their children to go to school. Some requested we built a centre in Abeokuta, which we did not have the capacity to do. Through the project, we trained over 1,000 mothers in therapy.
At some point, we started thinking about adding empowerment. We wanted the mothers to see that the children other people considered worthless could actually bring something to the families. I shared my ideas with Misan-Arenyeka, who tutored me on how it could be achieved. That was how we started.
We encountered with Promasidor Nigeria Limited in 2016 during an international conference for PwDs. The company came to the conference, encouraged and gave us products and financial support. The conference was a turning point in our relationship with Promasidor Nigeria. After the conference, the company encouraged us to come up with a more sustainable plan it could key into. We thought about the cost of taking care of CwDs. First, we were concerned about how the therapy in Abeokuta could be sustained. We also considered other empowerment means such as micro credit.
While we were still putting our ideas together, the 2017 Parents’ Summit came, which further reinforced the CDC and Promasidor Nigeria relationship. This is because the company supported the two summits.
Parents are also feeling the pains of disabilities because most of them, especially the mothers, cannot do time-demanding jobs. The concern has been how do you motivate, engage and empower the parents.? All through these processes, Promasidor Nigeria has been motivating, inspiring and encouraging us. It took almost two years to work out the new template of ‘We Too Can Grow’ with Promasidor Nigeria.
What is the focus of the scheme?
The whole idea is to empower the under-privileged parents and guardians of CwDs. Some of them have sources of livelihood but they cannot expand because of the demand of giving care to their children. Some work for only three hours daily and spend the remaining time taking care of their children. If the children are in places where they can get therapy, the parents would be freed to go about their business and concentrate on earning incomes.
From offering therapy, the project will now be giving micro credits to the affected parents, courtesy of Promasidor Nigeria. We may not be able to set up a full centre in Abeokuta but we could set up a station where therapists can attend to CwDs while their parents continue their normal businesses. In Lagos, we will set up a mobile dental clinic to attend to these children.
It is common to have parents get discouraged from investing resources and energy in those children. But if such people are given credits to expand their businesses as a result of the children, they will begin to see them as valuable and worthy members of their families; hence, an individual must have a CwD to subscribe to the facility.
Besides access to cheap microcredit, what are the other values?
The memorandum of understanding between CDC and Promasidor Nigeria covers a period of one year. This is how it will work: the beneficiaries will form cooperatives whose common denominator is CwDs. The loans will be disbursed via cooperatives and will be repaid in six months with little interest, which will be single digit. The rationale behind the interest component is that we don’t want them to think that the money is free. Secondly, the interest will add to the early child care centre and the dental clinic proposed for Ogun and Lagos States respectively. The interest will not be enough to build the centre but it is justified by the concept of village-level operation and management. They have to own the projects to be responsible for them. It is like saying, ‘It is your money that is used to set it up.’
Will this go nationwide?
We are taking off with Lagos and Abeokuta. But we have the plan to expand it to other states. However, CDC’s Memorandum of Understanding with Promasidor covers a year and it is restricted to Lagos and Ogun States.
Who is providing the fund?
The grant is coming from Promasidor Nigeria.