Communication and  Advocacy Program

CDI works to assist people with disabilities to develop advocacy and communication skills, and ensure that their environment provides appropriate opportunities and support to allow them to make decisions and express their needs and desires effectively.

Approaches used to help advocating disability rights are,

Citizen advocacy: matches people with disability with volunteers.

Family advocacy: helps parents and family members advocate on behalf of the person with disability for a particular issue.

Individual advocacy: upholds the rights of individual people with disability by working on discrimination, abuse and neglect.

Legal advocacy: upholds the rights and interests of individual people with disability by addressing the legal aspects of discrimination, abuse and neglect.

Self-advocacy: supports people with disability to advocate for themselves, or as a group.

Systemic advocacy: seeks to remove barriers and address discrimination to ensure the rights of people with disability.

Sexual and Reproductive Health Program

We work to ensure that people with special needs are able to access services including menstrual hygiene, contraceptive information, and option of walking confidently to health facilities for antenatal, skilled delivery, and postnatal services.

Education Support Program

Supports Children and young people with disability to access education. The support include identifying and enrolling disable children to school, retain them, and assit them to get knowledge and skills that can pave way for employment.  We have been providing Scholastic Materials, Stationaries, Health Insurance and Sanitary Pads, Meals and Accommodation. We are working to support fees and direct cost for marginalized disable children to special centers.

Economic Empowerment

CDI Provides skills and seed capital to families of children with disability. Mostly mothers or Care takers. We provide knowledge and skills on Income Generation Activities and facilitates them to establish income generation activities to reduce household economic vulnerability.

We further support young people with disabilities in income generation activities by provision of seed capital and soft loans to established saving and loaning groups.

Combat COVID-19​

CDI has been spreading awareness by speaking with individuals in community spaces, like markets and village centers. CDI team members wear masks and hand out visual signage to share the message for hand washing and social distance. CDI is looking to increase their efforts by providing masks and hand soap to hand to members of the community as they campaign about the pandemic.

Youth Empowerment

CDI believes that an empowered youth can create a huge impact in the community. Therefore, CDI advocates for the rights of young people aged 15 to 35 years through capacity building and creating awareness.

Disability Support

Children with disabilities are among the most vulnerable and marginalized groups in Tanzania. Despite the Government’s efforts to support primary education, 98% of children with disabilities are not in school and the rate of children with a disability enrolled in schools is only 0.3%.