The Gambia
The HARK! Gambia was launched in 2007 and has been incredibly successful and a model of best practice for our other projects.
The Gambia is a 200-mile stretch of land with the River Gambia running through its core, and surrounded by Senegal except for its coastal area to the west. The Gambia is an extremely poor country ranked on the UN Human Development Index at 155 out of 174 countries. For the population of 1.5 million, life expectancy is just 56 years. The Gambia has high rates of deafness and hearing impairment due to the prevalence of diseases such as malaria, yet until Sound Seekers’ involvement the country lacked any kind of audiology service.
As well as our five medical HARK! staff there are now two itinerant teachers for the deaf based at St John’s School for the Deaf who work to identify, refer and support children who have hearing difficulties to ensure they are able to access appropriate health and education service projects. They work very closely with our audiological team and have been instrumental in the success of the project. This close link between the medical and educational teams is one we are now looking to replicate and build in to future projects elsewhere.
The team have forged excellent links with other interested parties including health clinics, a school for the deaf, nurseries, Gambia Association of Deaf and Hard of Hearing, the Medical Research Council, VSO and the American Peace Corps.
The team have also given a lot of focus to improving awareness and understanding of deafness in their country. Examples of this include speaking to trainee teachers, providing training to officials about deafness, making specialist broadcasts for TV and radio, and speaking to government departments about the need for noise legislation. One of the plans they are currently working on is to arrange with local broadcasters for weekly radio announcements and information about the HARK!’s schedule to be made available through media.
We are now about to begin a new expansion of this project with the provision of training to medical professionals at satellite clinics throughout the country as well as the building of a further testing room and ear mould lab to develop better infrastructure. This is a new programme that we have developed especially for the Gambia, which, if successful will then be rolled out to HARK!s in other countries.
