The Catholic Diocese of Nakuru is shifting focus from assisting people living with physical disabilities to providing housing and education to children with mental challenges.
Through its Small Homes Integrated Programme for Children with Disabilities, the project is now concentrating on children with intellectual challenges. This is because society tends to hide or in some cases kill such children as it is very difficult to handle them.
The church's programme coordinator, Hannah Maina, said the project was initially set up in 1980 within the society welfare programme after realising that children with disabilities have management needs and different departments were set up to help them.
“We have ability in disability and we therefore, for example, converted our Menengai home in Rongai from dealing with the physically challenged to the mentally challenged ones,” she said.
She added: "We started dealing with physically challenged children but with time realised our homes have few of them because they are able to attend schools as they are mobile. We also discovered that we have more children with mental challenges,” she said.
“Out of the 160 people with disabilities in Nakuru County, 58 of them are physically challenged while the rest have mental disabilities,” Maina said.
Njeri said that nationally, 0.3 percent of the population lives with disabilities. Children especially need support in access to education, she added.
The diocese has set up homes for the intellectually challenged at Menengai primary in Mang'u area west of Nakuru town, at Our Lady of Victory in Subukia and at Murereshwa primary school in Gilgil.
It also has homes for those with physical challenges in Rari primary in Subukia and the Karirikania one in Eldama Ravine.