CIICA CONVERSATION: PARENTS VIEWS IN LMIC: FINANCE

Raising awareness of CI for children and infants in Low and Middle Income Countries  

Parents from LMIC – their  views on financial issues

Our recent series of CIICA Conversations focused on strengthening access to CIs and related CI services for Infants and Children in Low and Middle Income Countries. These discussions shed light on a critical need to raise awareness for the successes and challenges that families face on the CI pathway. Please visit  www.ciicanet.org/events to read the meeting summaries.

The group that has been driving the Conversations are facilitating this effort by collecting stories, sharing them and reporting on the challenges and successes so that we can all learn from them. The stories highlight challenges and successes in accessing and using CIs and corresponding services for their children as part of Ear and Hearing Care. Hillary Ganek introduced the conversation with sharing some quotes from the stories about finance.

Hillary shared several quotes from the stories about the barriers to financing a cochlear implant in an LMIC to highlight the type of information this project is collecting:

We feared that pursuing the surgery would lead us into a debt trap or cost us our farmland, which is our only source of livelihood.-India

Imagine living in a country at war, facing an economic crisis, while trying to raise a huge amount of money so your child can hear.-Armenia

We would lay awake at night thinking how we could do this to make it possible for our daughter to hear. South Africa.

Technology continues to advance rapidly, and there will come a time when this device will no longer function properly. Unfortunately, we do not have the means to maintain or replace it on our own in the long term.-Paraguay

You can download the full  Summary of the Conversation here. 

CIICA are currently collating all the stories and will write a report on the topics that arise in these stories from parents/legal guardians. See NEW RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT: PARENTS’ VOICES IN LMIC – CIICA  for more information.

We currently have 73 stories from 19 countries: Angola, Argentina, Armenia, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Georgia, Guatemala, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Nepal, Panama, Paraguay, South Africa, Uganda, Ukraine, Vietnam. On World Hearing Day we shared some quotes from these, and  now we work on preparing them to be shared on the website. 

This CIICA Conversation discussed the project, and we learned about the issues which are emerging, particularly with regard to finance of CI and CI services. What are the challenges, and how are they being addressed?