Gabay Project

Eligia S. San Pedro

TO strengthen the country's inclusive education for children with disability, the United States government launched the Gabay Project recently.

This project also seeks to increase the capacity of service providers and community health workers to detect the needs of children with visual and hearing impairments.

One of its goals is also to improve the abilities of teachers in delivering appropriate learning plans for persons with disabilities.

We all know that the United States is a strong advocate of disability policies and programs all over the world. They believe that people with disabilities have and should have all the same rights as others, including education, health, training and employment.

The project will be well-coordinated with the Department of Education and the local government units and is seen to benefit around 1,800 Filipino children with disability by the end of its implementation in June 2022.

The organizers want to institutionalize this in areas and where they will become models. In the future, they want to introduce it to other local government units.

The target beneficiaries of the program are children enrolled from Kindergarten to Grade 3 or the levels where a large percentage of kids are dropping out of school.

According to studies, one of the causes for dropping out is that some of children could not hear well or they could not see well so they choose to drop out from school. This is when some teachers have a hard time detecting.

The project is looking at early detection and intervention for kids as a model then, later on, institutionalize it in the other schools, with the help of DepEd.