In Ghana, Nigeria and Ethiopia, our Partners in African Cleft Training (PACT) project supports local surgeons and specialists in the development and delivery of advanced training programs in plastic surgery, anaesthetic nursing and speech therapy.
The project, a collaboration between Transforming Faces and the Seattle Children’s Hospital, grew out of the desire to build sustainable African-led training programs specific to cleft, so that professionals will need to rely less on North American or European training.
PACT trained five assistant speech therapists in the Speech Therapy Assistant program. Two more training programs will take place each year over the next two years.
Recently,Felicia adjei Sarpong, a CLP team member in Kumasi, Ghana and a PACT trainee, wrote to us about her experience:
“I would like to express my heart-felt appreciation and immensely thank all of you for accepting me to be part of the Pan African Conference Training (PACT). The training project (i. e . speech and language therapy) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia was informative and educational. The strength and success of this project lies in our ability to reach a lot of communities on cleft lip and palate management so as to eradicate superstitious beliefs. The training allowed me to broaden my scope of knowledge on children with cleft as well as enhancing smooth speech and language development therapy after surgery.”
For more on PACT, click here.