Inclusion for People with Disabilities in Colombia

Since 2017, MAKAIA has managed two digital inlcusion centers (Telecenters) close to Bogotá, one in Suba and one on Kennedy, in collaboration with Tigo, a local telecom.

Many people go to them to learn digital skills. We have partered with the Secretariat of Social Integration of Bogotá. They offer comprehensive services to the population between 6 and 18 years of age with moderate, severe cognitive disability and autism.

At the telecenters we train children and youth between 8 and 18 years old. We work in collaboration with one or two psychotherapists from the Secretariat of Social Integration of Bogotá, training youth in:

• Sígueme (Follow me): Application developed by the Orange Foundation and the University of Granada, with the aim of supporting the development of the perceptual-visual and cognitive-visual process. It includes videos, photographs, drawings, pictograms and games.
• GCompris: program with different activities for children between 2 and 10 years old. Educational video games that allow them to practice calculations, elaborate some texts and basic computer skills.

Additionally, basic computer skils and some fun and easy-to-use tools such as Paint are used.

This year, 50 children and youth with dissabilities have been reached in these centers thanks to our work and your donation. 

This is the last report that we will be publishing about this project since is now fully funded. Thanks to all your donations, we have been able to reach thousands of people with disabilities in Colombia and have developed methodologies that help us reach them in an efficient and effective way.

Please visit other projects implemented by MAKAIA and continue supporting our work.

Best regards

Catalina Escobar

Co-Founder, MAKAIA

A new proposal for training that facilitates employability

At MAKAIA we are excited to work on a new challenge: We are transforming our training proposals based on the opportunities of the environment, the analysis of available figures, contact with organizations of great experience and evaluation of the most demanded competences for the employability of people with hearing disability.

How are we doing this?

Currently, we are developing a series of meetings with facilitators who have devoted their entire lives to training within organizations that have worked for decades to include people with hearing disabilities. During these encounters we collect key information that connects and reach agreements on the expectations of people with the opportunities that exist in the workplace, because gradually, business organizations have found more reasons to promote inclusion and have been surprised with the outstanding results of incorporating people with special abilities into their teams.

In the region, the commitment to inclusion has been promoted by different social and economic sectors which have formed working groups and generated proposals to advance from different approaches, in this work they have obtained data and figures that allow interested organizations to access to inputs to achieve greater relevance and efficiency in the interventions, so that efforts are not duplicated and activities complement each other: thus our beneficiaries gain more

During this task we have met wonderful people in each of the places we have visited and we are sure that it will continue to be so in those that we have yet to find, there will be thousands of experiences to tell that we will continue to build together, because -thanks to the trust that hundreds of people like you have had in this process-, we have dared to imagine a world where hearing disabilities does not represent any obstacle.

For the second semester of 2019 we will take to the action all these learnings with training pilots that will involve the most outstanding findings and we will seek to connect with elements, tools and new links to know the impact of our actions. We are changing the lives of people with the help of technology.

Links:

• Our project website

At MAKAIA we are convinced that technology is a tool that enhances access to opportunities in communities. That is why we constantly generate spaces where, by identifying the characteristics and needs of different population groups, we build contents that allow us to accompany them in the use of technology, adapting to their realities and adding value to the activities they carry out or could carry out on their daily basis. 

Among the population groups we work-with are people with hearing disabilities, for whom, during the month of February of this year, we developed a digital literacy process in a 4-hour workshop, focused on the basic technological tools for administrative processes, search for information and construction of presentations. 

Once again, we were able to resume an alliance that has been successful in the past and contacted the EPM Foundation, who kindly joined the process, facilitating the use of space and computer equipment from one of the Training Rooms of the EPM Library. Due to its public nature, its recognition in the community and its location (in the center of the city), having this place to host the workshop benefited the registering process, that we also displayed through our social networks and using WhatsApp messaging. Our invitation reached unexpected allies of various programs of the city that work for the inclusion of the population with disabilities and that helped us to spread the invitation and get to people who sign up and had never been in our workshops, who therefore meet us for the first time with this activity. 

Finally, we had 14 participants of different ages (children, youth and seniors), who expressed their approval of the activity and requested more spaces to continue learning and meet more people with hearing disabilities. Our trainer dedicated individual support spaces and it was common to see the participants help each other, constantly approaching other people’s desk and interacting with them to clarify the concepts that our facilitator expressed on the screen that served as a board. 

For this reason, we conclude that the workshops are also important meeting spaces, where people with disabilities find common ground and collaborate with each other to learn about technology. We also re-affirm our goal of continuing to provide these spaces, with the support of all our donors in the network of GlobalGiving. Thank you for making it possible!

Links:

• Workshop invitation in our website
• Workshop invitation in our Facebook Page

After a very successful experience with the last Training activity realized in the month of August where the efforts focused on the development of skills for Job Search and the use of basic ICT tools of people with hearing disabilities, and we achieved that 20 people obtained their certificates, create their resumes and even have realjob interviews; our channels and social networks were getting more and more comments and requests of people interested in taking similar training.

We propose ourselves then to have a fourth activity this year and keep exploring the possibilities of the alliance with Comfenalco, a local entity focused on education and employment services that also has several spaces in the city of Medellín, among libraries, community centers and classrooms that allow realization of activities, and works as the main link to the Public Employment Service (Servicio Público de Empleo), the governmental initiative that allows people to access job offers in the public sector that also promotes policies of inclusion and incorporation of the workforce of people with disabilities in the private sector and works across the country. With our strategy focused in this alliance we contacted this unit of the Ministry of Work, a key partner, and were able to keep working with them.

This allows us to host this training in of one of the most beautiful spaces in the city, symbol of the transformation and investment in education developed in recent years: The Belen Library Park. Located west of the city is also the main office of the Public Employment Service and has conventional and digital classrooms, an auditorium, a documentation center, reading rooms, among other services. Two sessions were developed in October 11 and 16 with a total of 6 hours of training. One more time, we had the accompaniment of the facilitator Alejandra Serna, who guided all the contents in the Colombian sign language and we were able to achieve that 6 people with hearing impairment strengthen the use and appropriation of technological tools for the registration and search of employment, through Tools that facilitate their communication and their interaction with hearing people.

It should also be noted that the activity coincided with the visit to the city of Medellin of world leaders and social entrepreneurs from Echoing Green who met for their Annual Fellows Conference. This Global Organization selected MAKAIA as one of the most outstanding social experiences of Colombia selected us for a "Site visit" where a group of 15 Fellows got to know MAKAIA's work and see this project up close. Taking advantage of the potential of this visit to find new supporters or spokespersons and using the donations received, MAKAIA hosted the visit in the Library Park and reached two translators (Sign Language – Spanish, Spanish- English) that help the beneficiaries communicate their own ideas and opinions to the guests of Echoing Green, interacting this way in a more personal and close way. We also prepared a material that presented the initiative and invited the Fellows to learn Sign Language and donate to our cause. The impressions were very positive and helped to strengthen the diffusion and community engagement with the initiative. 

For the group of participants, this training process was a learning experience, with personal and professional achievements that encouraging them to use of technology as a everyday tool, believing in their own capacities and identifying the organizations that can help them find job opportunities, as well as a global community that support them keeps working to create spaces and access to those opportunities.

Thanks to all the people who make it possible!

“What do they need?", "How we can make more impact in people?" "How we reach more people?”

 Every time we are planning an ICT training-workshop for people with disabilities, we ask ourselves these kind of questions. After 12 years of experience, in which our organization has developed projects for people with disabilities, we know that our beneficiaries’ needs are evolving and changing constantly, so, every day means a new challenge, a new opportunity to give our best and provide tools to improve the quality of life of people with disabilities in Colombia.

 On the beginning of this year, MAKAIA started to implement ICT training workshops conducted to develop skills in people with hearing disabilities from a job perspective. By January, the results were remarkable with some participants being able to create curriculum vitae, databases and find a job in specialized websites. Part of Makaia's strategy to reach more people, are the alliances. Through a combined work with other social entities, we are able, for example, to find a place where we can develop our workshops (digital classrooms in libraries and education centers) and identify special needs that people with hearing disabilities express on a daily basis. However, with the donation we received from our Global Giving donors, we can contract our trainer and work in the logistics involved to develop our workshops.

 Thanks to a recent alliance with a local partner whose main activities are to facilitate future job placement, and especially by the support of our Global Giving Donors, we have made a huge effort to implement a training workshop with a duration of 24 hours during a whole week. Based on our first experience in January, we felt more encouraged to provide a better experience to the participants, and most important, tools to find or create by themselves better opportunities.

 At the beginning, we were expecting to receive 15 people, but one week before the starting of the workshops, 20 people were enrolled and ready to take part in the process. At the end of the workshop, the participants were able to create their own curriculum vitae in a variety of styles; recorded a video (with their smartphones) introducing themselves and explaining (in sign language) their professional experience, education and skills (a multimedia CV), and to register their professional profile on specialized job web sites, creating more complex data bases, among other activities. Some of them even had the chance to have real job interviews.

 In words of the participants, the workshop was a complete success. They are wishing to receive more courses and contents like these. In the short time, our challenge is to create a second course for the recent participants, with more and new contents focus in employment and maybe entrepreneurship as they expressed.

 We are very thankful for the support of our Global Giving donors, they allow us to make these actions happen.