Every child has a right to have access to basic literacy. However....
Thousands of children live with visual impairments in rural and remote parts of Asia and Africa and cannot receive basic education due to variety of reasons. These include a lack of infrastructure and pedagogy to teach visually impaired children in addition to a dearth of financial resources, transportation facilities, and assistive technology.
If visually impaired children cannot attend schools with such facilities, schools will go to them to provide basic literacy in their homes through a Mobile Blind School (MBS)
The Mobile Blind School Project envisions a situation every visually impaired child can have access literacy no matter where they are located. MBS provides Universal Braille Kits to children embark upon a life long journey of literacy and education. To implement the Mobile Blind School, Access Braille teams up with IISE, Kerala- India and with Worth Trust , Tamil Nadu India. Graduates from the IISE program will deliver these kits to students by traveling to these distant regions on motorcycles, three-wheelers, or horses.
Access Braille was launched initially in India in early 2010, followed by Liberia in November 2010
India Mobile Blind School was launched by Access Braille in Vellore and Thiruvallur districts in Tamil Nadu in early 2010 followed by a school in Pune, in partnership with the Pune Blind Men's Association an outreach unit of the reputed PV Desai Eye Hospital. In Andhra Pradesh, the program was launched in partnership with the Denvar School for the Blind.
Liberia The Mobile Blind School was launched in Liberia in partnership with Educate a Blind Child foundation Liberia. Headed by James P Johnson, a graduate of the International Institute for Social Entrepreneurs (
http://bwb-iise.org), the school has reached out to 100 visually impaired children in remote parts of Liberia.
Nepal In Nepal we have partnered with Himalayan Education and Development, HEAD. The project will be implemented in Humla in the North Western part of Nepal, bordering Tibet. This is a remote and isolated communicated that be reached only by helicopters or by horses. It has no access to electricity, communication (telephone, mobile service internet), clean drinking water, qualified and good education, proper health care etc. With the very low general literacy rate the plight of people with disabilities even worse. Hardly any blind or disabled children have access to education. Almost all people with disabilities are illiterate. The target group of the Mobile Blind School will be visually impaired children in Humla district, aged between 3 and 8. In the first year, the mobile blind school will reach to roughly 40 children in Humla district. Go to
http://headnepal.org/mobileblindschool.html to learn more.
Others in the Pipeline Kenya, Ghana and Madagascar are in the pipeline waiting to funded
Other Programs of Access Braille - Audio Books
- Quarterly Braille Magazine