Cheshire Ethiopia (CE) announces its 60th anniversary celebratory events that comes in connection with the colorful marking of its six solid decades of life changing and impactful rehabilitation services it has been rendering uninterrupted for persons with disabilities and their families.
“Due to the successful rehabilitation, I undergone at CE, my mobility and functionality is immensely enhanced. 1 have become a strong person with big dreams,” says Solomon Mulugeta, former beneficiary who is running his own charity now.
Founded in 1962, Cheshire Ethiopia is a leading disability and development organization striving for the realization of disability inclusive society through rights-based affordable and standard rehabilitation services as well as empowerment of persons with disabilities and communities with health, educational, economic, social, and over all empowerment interventions. CE offers free comprehensive disability rehabilitation services rendered to the poorest segments of the community across seven regional states and two city administrations.
Cheshire Ethiopia was founded by the initiative of the grand children of the late Emperor Haile Selassie 60 years ago. The service that was started with small number of children with developmental impairments, later on incorporated the provision of rehabilitation services and enhancement of mobility of children affected by post-polio paralysis. The successful rehabilitation interventions have improved the mobility and functioning of over hundreds of thousands of children and youth with mobility impairments through the years. These changed the despair of children with disabilities and their equally ashamed, stigmatized and discriminated families to happiness. The hopelessness on their children also changed to hope for a new life.
These meaningful therapeutic services popularized the organization. As a result, the name Cheshire has now almost become synonymous with disability and disability with Cheshire.
CE’s strong presence in Ethiopia at the time when the global initiative to eradicate polio got underway in 1988 meant that most new polio cases have been diagnosed, properly treated and patients supported by community-based rehabilitation services.
As a parallel initiative, CE has opened branches in Hawassa, Harar, DireDawa, and later on in Addis Ababa – major urban centers in the south, east, and central parts of the country. Assistive technology production workshops and physiotherapy facilities are supplemented by training and, most recently, seed funding for income-generation aiming to draw families of persons with disabilities into commercial enterprises as a step toward ‘inclusiveness’.
In the past sixty years, Cheshire Ethiopia has undergone through series of policy and developmental changes including changing its names due to changes in strategy, dynamism of the sector, and development of international disability movement as well as national policies.
