Building knowledge about autism, and building a school, one step at a time – The Step by Step Foundation, Guyana
Dr Suraiya Ismail, Chair of the Step by Step Foundation’s Executive Committee, is a public health nutritionist and educator, with extensive international experience working in key academic institutions and international agencies. Her introduction to autism was recent and arose out of her efforts to find assistance in Guyana for the mother of a child with autism.
Dr Kala Ramnath is mum to Rohan, now aged 13, who inspired her, alongside Dr Suraiya Ismail, Dr Jim Ellis (then Rohan’s autism consultant) and Mrs. Deborah Seebaran, a Guyanese company director to help set up Step by Step Guyana in 2011. Kala is also a Caribbean disability and inclusion policy consultant who has published and presented papers and written articles on Autism policy in the Caribbean and the work of Step by Step Guyana.
Caribbean parents of children with special needs in 2017 continue to be not exactly spoilt for choice when it comes to accessing health, education and social services. Diagnoses remain notoriously difficult to access for the poor, because of lack of trained primary care personnel, and patchy even where those services are available. Appropriate schooling ranges from limited to extremely limited and archaic where they do exist. In many cases, it continues to be left up to non-governmental organisations and committed individuals to provide education and therapeutic services for these most vulnerable of our citizens in the Region.
It’s hard to doubt the sincerity of the organizations that do help children and young people with autism. Born as they are out of frustration at the continued lack of services and policy attention from the State, they however tend to run free – ad-hoc in terms of approach, and oversight-deficient. They remain free of any official monitoring largely because governments tend to be at best under-informed about contemporary mental healthrelated special needs ‘thinking’ and praxis, in spite of the usual expressed official broad commitment to ‘special needs’. A few ‘schools’ and ‘centres’ do offer some reasonable to good services, training children in literacy, numeracy and skills development and self-care. Many how- refers to the establishment of a body or bodies to promote effective practices aimed at preventing corruption. These bodies should be granted the necessary independence to carry out their functions effectively, free of undue influence. They should also be provided with adequate resources, specialized staffing and relevant training. In addition, State Parties are to evaluate periodically relevant legal instruments and administrative measures to determine their adequacy to fight and prevent corruption.
On the other hand, IACAC requires State Parties to take the necessary measures to establish under its laws as an offence a significant increase in the assets of a government official that he/she cannot reasonably explain in relation to the official’s lawful earnings during the performance of his/her functions.
The purpose of the SARA Act is to provide for the non-conviction based asset recovery for unlawful conduct and corrupt practices in relation to property and other assets owned by the State, or in which the State has an interest. This is to be undertaken by way of civil