TANZANIA, Dar es Salaam MORE EDUCATION and awareness is needed to parents and relatives of children living with mental disabilities to save them from sexual and physical abuses they encounter within their homes and communities in general.
Bibie Abdallah, parent of a child living with Down Syndrome condition told reporters at a press conference organised by Strategic Alternative Learning Techniques (SALT) held in Dar es Salaam on Wednesday that, majority of families which have children who have mental disabilities do not believe that those children are trainable and that they can improve their conditions with the help of medicine, encouragement and therapy.
“Through raising my own child, I have learnt that these children with mental disability can be transferred from their hopeless state to productive state only if there is joint eff
efforts between the parents or guardians and respective community where the child is living”, she said.
SALT Director, Rebecca Lebi said SALT Vocational Training Centre was established in 2019 in Mbezi Makabe, Dar es Salaam with the aim of enhancing the quality of life to children and youth with mental challenges by equipping them with productive skills.
She added, “currently we have a total of 40 children at the centre who we have been trained and they are now able to produce these products that you see which include snacks, shampoos, petroleum jelly and others which are now sold at the supermarkets”, she stated.
Ms Lebi added that the organisation is in the process of expanding the services due to the increasing number of children who need to be brought at the centre, pointing out there are at the moment 451 children who need to be joined at the centre.
“We already have an area of 9 acres for constructing more buildings and we have organised charitable walk event which will take place on the 24th of September at the Green Oysterbay Grounds in Dar es Salaam and we will also sell 10,000 t- shirts at 35,000/- each to raise sum of 765m/- which will make us meet our goals of being able to accommodate large number of children,” she explained.
