We are delighted to report that MAITS’ volunteer Dr Shabnam Rangwala, has won the Bond International Development Awards 2020 for her voluntary work with MAITS. Shabnam has been a long-standing MAITS volunteer and in the since last year alone, she has run the MAITS’ Community Health Worker training in Cambodia, India and Sri Lanka. Shabnam was instrumental in getting the Indian Government to fund the roll out of MAITS’ Community Health Worker training amongst their therapists in the whole of the state of Himachal Pradesh and she was also a key part of an earlier project in Jamaica which won a merit  in the World Cerebral Palsy Awards 2018. Many congratulations to Shabnam, and thanks for her tireless work for MAITS.

Click here to see the results on BOND International

Worlds collided recently in Accra, Ghana, where two training programmes were being delivered at the same place, at the same time, and our fantastic volunteers were able to meet! Jane, who was delivering training to the Speech and Language Therapy cohort at the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital in Ghana, was able to go along to David and Diane’s training workshop. The pair were visiting Korle Bu to deliver training in creating low resource, adaptable paper-based therapy equipment, as part of their training in 3 different organisations. Jane took along two of trainees from her course, who can you see pictured here: From left to right, 2 Speech and Language Therapy students, Jane and Diane.

In December 2019, expert trainers, Dr Shabnam Rangwala and Ali Punjabi travelled to Cambodia. They delivered MAITS’ transformative Community Healthworker Training at CARITAS Cambodia’s Centre for Child and Adolescent Mental Health, an NGO providing support for children with disabilities. 9 different organisations including CARITAS brought together 25 trainees from different fields, all working with people with disabilities. The trainees loved the interactive, hands-on training and that they were “all taking away lots of practical strategies to help children with disabilities in each of their own settings.”

With the current situation of the spreading of Coronavirus, MAITS takes health and safety very seriously for all our team and volunteers. We are following regularly the updates regarding the latest information and advice from the UK government GOV.UK.

MAITS has put in place a standard hygiene practice. Regular assessment is being made for all staff and volunteers to ensure the employees’ health and safety.

We are still encouraging applicants to apply for grants, and we advise them to apply for travel insurance as soon as they book their flight. We do a risk assessment for all our applicants close to the time of travel and we implement the advice of the official government foreign travel and World Health Organisation.