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Summer Update

With a plane ticket sponsored by our partner KLM, inABLE was able to send our Executive Director Irene Mbari-Kirika to attend two key events held in Accra, Ghana and Nairobi, Kenya.

5th Africa Forum Blindness Conference – July 2011

inABLE was invited as a presenter at Africa Forum Blindness Conference, the largest-ever gathering in the blindness field. The Forum attracted nearly 400 delegates from 43 countries from Africa and various parts of the world. A number of significant milestones for African people who are visually impaired were announced or launched at this international conference on blindness in Africa.

During the event, inABLE and Georgia Tech co-presented a paper on the Mwangaza Project, which is our collaborative research project identifying ways to use technology to teach math and science to blind students. The presentation was very well received and generated livley discussion about obstacles in this area and options for overcoming them. As one attendee said, “This is a real issue for students across Africa is that this program needs to be expanded to reach more of them.”

inABLE Stakeholder Meeting in Nairobi – 22nd of June

This meeting was held at the Thika Primary School for the Blind, where inABLE’s inaugural computer lab is located. The purpose of the event was to engage policy makers in the educational sector to seek ways to expand our model for computer education for the blind. Among those attending organizations were the Teachers Service Commission (which trains, deploys and pays teachers), the Ministry of Education, the Kenya Institute of Special Education (which trains all special needs instructors), the Kenya Society for the Blind, the African Braille Center and the International Council for Education of People with Visual Impairment. Also attending were representatives from four schools for the blind (St Lucy’s Primary, St Lucy’s Secondary, Thika Primary and Thika Secondary) and the Salvation Army which is their founding body.

Some of the accomplishments were:

· Recognition of our model by the attending stakeholder institutions as a proven and viable strategy that can be applied to other schools.

· Commitment to participation in making the program a success. For example, the Teachers Service Commission agreed to assign a full time instructor to our computer program at Thika Primary.

· Discussions with the Kenya Institute of Special Education about adopting our instructor training program into their trainer curriculum. KISE has identified an initial group that they want to be the first KISE-trained computer instructors for the blind.

New Dawn for Students at Thika School for the Blind

Experiencing computer-based learning is an adventure. Try to remember the first time you saw and test a computer. For many of us, it has been many years or even decades since embracing computers at work and even at home. Now imagine what it would be like if you never knew about or ever touched a computer.

Thankfully the students at Thika School for the Blind Students now have access to computers with assistive technology and are quickly becoming computer savvy. Enclosed below is a recent experience that demonstrates how computers are expanding our students’ learning and lifestyle horizon. It is really a new dawn for our kids at the Thika School for the Blind.

Cyber-Cafe Outing

During a recent holiday break class eight, low vision student Joel Wandai visited a cyber cafe to surf the web and check email. After coming across unfamiliar computer software, he called for assistance and explained that he required a talking computer with Mozilla software- http://www.mozilla.org/ . This was the first time the cyber-café attendant had ever heard of a talking computer, and Joel was able to confidently explain how a talking computer worked.

The cyber-café attendant was very impressed with Joel’s computer knowledge and inquired into his school. The Mozilla program was successfully uploaded and Joel proceeded to access the internet, just like all the other cyber-café customers.