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Hearing aids provided to critical qualitative support users within a very wide range

Published 05.06.23

Hearing aids provided to critical qualitative support users within a very wide range

Hearing aids provide critical qualitative support to their users within a very wide range from helping in improving hearing levels which result into increased self-confidence, independence and agency to providing them with safety due to the fact that they enable deaf users to be aware of potential hazards especially road accidents. However, only about one out of five people who would benefit from a hearing aid actually uses one. To change this, in 2018, we started a fruitful partnership with Kulczyk foundation on a project that would ensure that every deaf child in our school could have access to a hearing loss test and be fitted with a hearing aid(s) if their hearing loss degree allowed. As observed by our teachers, hearing aids also offer an added advantage to their users in terms of learning, over the last three years the school has not only segregated marks of children with hearing aids and those without them but also analyzed the levels of engagement and participation in class for the two groups and came up with findings that showed a significant positive difference in how well deaf children with hearing aids perform compared to their peers who do not have them. To back this finding, 16 out of 24 deaf children who have passed their end of primary national exams from Nyabihu school for the deaf since 2019 were all hearing aid users which means that 65% of all successful candidates were hearing aids users, a result that further demonstrates that it should be a right for every deaf person to get tested and fitted with a hearing aid if they qualify for it as it is a game changer for both their well-being and safety as well as their learning and development capacity. We are very happy and proud to have reached 360 children who were tested and 125 who have been fitted with hearing aids thanks to financial support from Kulczyk foundation towards this project since 2018 to date. Their support has ensured that no child from our school was deprived of their right of getting tested and being fitted with hearing aids according to their hearing loss degree. Equally important, the foundation has also supported the training of parents of deaf children with hearing aids on the use; basic maintenance and safeguarding of the devices to ensure that the children can fully benefit from these lifechanging devices both at school and at home during the school holidays.

Hearing aids provided to critical qualitative support  users within a very wide range

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