Fresh call to sensitize Rwandans on Autism that impairs children mental health

By Elias Hakizimana.

Autism Rwanda in collaboration with Rwanda Ministry of Health through the Rwanda Biomedical Centre (RBC) celebrated the World Autism Day (WAAD) 2022, calling all Rwandan population to know Autism and help families of children with this disorder instead of discriminating them.

Autism is a serious developmental disorder that impairs the ability to communicate and interact.

This mental impairment existed since a couple of years but was not known. Children who suffered from this disorder as well as their parents were discriminated and lack access to education and healthcare, saying they are idiots, crazy or were poisoned.

The theme of this day: “Health and Education for All” calls for everyone’s efforts to support families who have Autist-children.

This theme also aims to put a spotlight on the hurdles that people with autism and others living with autism face every day.

Dr. Yvonne Kayiteshonga, Mental Health Division Manager at RBC said that there is need for training and mobilization, awareness campaigns to tell Rwandans about Autism.

“As RBC, we have capacity to gather parents with Autism together to hear from them, to respect them as parents so that they get motivated to help the children, a parent does not need to be depressed as it hampers her/him to cater for a child, there is need for joint efforts to help these children, it is not a parent’s mistake to give birth to such a child.” Noted Dr. Kayiteshonga.

During the celebration of World Autism Day 2022 in Kigali on April 2, 2022, Autism Rwanda in partnership with the African Institute of Mathematical Sciences (AIMS)-Rwanda and Africa Research Excellence Fund (AREF) launched a mobile application that will be used by Community Health Workers (CHWs) and parents to be able to detect whether a child will develop Autism disorder since he/she is born.

Cedric Shema, Software developer at AIMS who contributed to this application development said that it is done on the way that it can be used in both i-phones and Android smart phones and it uses three languages including English, Kinyarwanda and French.

“They can use the application to identify parents who have children with Autism. It detects the autism level, and allows user to read information on Autism, to register children with autism and manipulate its screening tools for a patient, then request appointment with the medic doctor if some symptoms were observed.” Shema explained.

“The application user has to register full identification including the age of the child. The application gives different information following the autism stage and the age of the child. It has the capacity to detect Autism from 0-6 month old babies, from 6 to 12 months; from 2 to 16 years and children aged above 16 years.” Shema added.

Since its establishment in Rwanda by Rosine Duquesne Kamagaju, Founder and Executive Director of Autism Rwanda, this center has advocated and mobilized Rwandans to try detect whether their children can have Autism behaviors so that they take them to the hospital.

However, it is not affordable for everyone to afford special education needs for children with Autism.

“We created an application that will help us detect autism since a child is born. The challenge we have to date is that we do not have statistics of all the children with Autism in Rwanda.” Kamagaju said.  

Cyril Ndegeya, the parent who represents others who have children with Autism being supported by Autism Rwanda said that the more Autism is detected early, the better children get effective support.

He said that the schools that help such children require high level financial capacities and resources as one child can have more than two teachers, which many parents cannot afford, so, the children remain at home inside closed houses.

“We thank our government to avail schools but there is still a long journey to go, we thank but we cannot also forget that only few children are in autism schools which are not enough, autism is not only an unknown disorder by the public, but also many of us did not know it before.” Ndegeya said.

“Rwanda has established various programs to promote inclusive education and I think that they can also establish a strategy to help these children access education countrywide without depending on only few autism schools in the country.” He added.

Ange Akimana, another parent who has a child in Autism Rwanda said that it is not easy to cater for the child and affirms that significant improvement was made since the child started to get support by Autism Rwanda.

“I decided to stop everything and look after him because such children are violated and they cannot say what happened to them as sometimes they cannot speak. I knew he had autism when he was 2 years old.” Akimana said.

Regarding the developed mobile application to detect Autism, Dr Kayiteshonga said that RBC will help to improve the App in a way that people with small USSD phones can also access the App information.

Dr. Kayiteshonga also said that RBC will establish a new strategic plan that will set up a center of Excellency that will give solutions to help children with disabilities.

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