On 27^th October 2010 WHO, ILO, UNESCO and the International Disability and Development Consortium launched Guidelines on Community-Based Rehabilitation (CBR) at the Fourth CBR African Network Conference held in Abuja, Nigeria. Conference participants made nine recommendations on making practical use of these new CBR Guidelines in Africa.  

The CBR Guidelines are very comprehensive and represent a distillation of over thirty years’ experience of managing CBR programmes by many different individuals and organisations around the world. They highlight the cross-cutting nature of CBR activities and demonstrate how many different sectors can become involved in strategy to improve the quality of life of poorer people with disabilities living in low-income and middle-income countries. Crucially they focus on indicating how CBR can be used as a strategy to implement the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities so that as many persons living with an impairment as possible can have access to health care, education, skills training, employment, family life and social mobility – thus favouring development of communities.

 

Importantly empowerment of persons affected represents a component of CBR strategy. This is concerned with findings ways to encourage persons with impairments to use their voice to speak up for their rights and responsibilities and giving them confidence to be able to, or allowing them to make choices and decisions about their lives. It is also about far more than this. It also includes, for example, developing self-reliance, raising awareness in the community, involving the community and even forming relationships between CBR programmes and disabled people’s organisations so that they can work together.   

 

Four other components were put together with the empowerment component into a visual representation of all possible elements of CBR programmes in 2004 - the CBR matrix. The other components are health, education, livelihood and social.

 

CBR Matrix

 

Local people running CBR programmes are free to select and incorporate elements into their CBR strategy that will best meet their local needs, priorities and resources. CBR programmes will need to also actively develop alliances and partnerships with other sectors not covered by their specific strategy to ensure that persons with impairments, their families and communities have their broader needs met.

 

Seven booklets make up the CBR Guidelines: an introductory booklet, the health component, the education component, the livelihood component, the social component, the empowerment component and a supplementary booklet, which includes a chapter specifically on CBR and leprosy, provided by ILEP Members.

 

The nine recommendations adopted for Africa are available in English, French and Portuguese:

http://www.afri-can.org/CBR%20Information/Recommendations%20CBR%20conference.ppt

 

See also report by Jannine Ebenso on this Conference: Outcomes of 4^th CBR Africa Conference and the Next Steps for the CBR Guidelines: 

http://www.ilep.org.uk/news-events/article/view/outcomes-of-4th-cbr-africa-conference-next-steps-for-cbr-guidelines/474/

 

Categories: Technical information