News! 25 April 2010 More details about our mobile phone project can be found here!   We are currently developing a large-scale social inclusion project in Kabale, Uganda to measure the perceptions of parents, relatives and the wider Kabale community towards disability in general and deafness in particular. Cambridge to Africa has been involved with the Child Africa International School for 2 years now; one of the first schools in Uganda to combine both deaf and non deaf children into the primary school curriculum. Our mission is to provide inclusive education to all students enrolled at the school by carrying out activities and baseline research to foster the integration process. This is a challenging project! The integration of deaf and non deaf children into the school curriculum is difficult within the developed world, let alone working within a poverty context. There are limited resources and great barriers that still exist for the deaf and non deaf students enrolled. Uganda lacks clear statistics about its deaf population; however we know there are a significant number of deaf Ugandans. A percentage of these also use Ugandan Sign Language, recognised as the official language of the deaf by the Ugandan government. It must not be forgotten that these deaf children live in hearing communities and this is the case in Kabale, Southern Uganda where we carry out our work at the Child Africa International School. Deaf children have the right not only to an education but to become part of community life at the local, regional and national level in Uganda. Unfortunately many deaf children grow up without such language exposure and as such have rudimentary signing and communication skills. Such deprivation is the result of many factors: severe discrimination, socioeconomic background (particularly those living in rural areas), deep-seated cultural taboos, gender differences (deaf females are extremely marginalised due to gender differences, deafness and extreme poverty) and a deep misunderstanding of what deafness really means by community members. There are a multitude of stories we can tell you about what is happening to these deaf children –large numbers are abandoned as deafness is still seen as the result of witchcraft, many others are locked away at home due to shame, others are exposed to public ridicule, and girls in particular face terrible sexual and physical violence that leads to more exploitation and of course increased HIV infection. These are the reasons why our social inclusion project is so necessary. We will be posting information about this project as it develops. If you would like to donate towards this work, or get involved, please email info@cambridgetoafrica.org. Mobile phone integration project: Deaf and hearing children using SMS text messaging We are setting up a mobile phone social integration project at the Child Africa International School that will run from March-August 2010. This small scale pilot study aims to measure the communication devices used by deaf and non-deaf students enrolled at the school when using mobile phones as a texting communicative device. We are most grateful to Ken Banks from Kiwanja Net and the use of his Frontline SMS software that will allow us to monitor and capture text data generated by students. More information about this project will be posted here in April 2010.