Help Us Create Long-Term Sustainability

Access to hearing health care is severely limited in this country of 65 million, with less than a handful of audiologists. Currently, children with hearing loss are not identified until they enter school at age 6, well beyond the critical period for developing speech and language. Many hearing impaired children are ostracized, misunderstood and maltreated because there are no early identification and intervention services. Since parents must choose who will benefit the most from schooling, hearing impaired children who do not have a means of communication are often left to languish in villages to do the menial chores.

In 2024 a small team visited Tabora, Tanzania to provide hearing evaluations and hearing aids for children in orphanages. Through the generosity of our community, the team was able to equip a hearing clinic at AMUCTA University with specialized audiology equipment and train students to provide the follow-up care needed to continue to serve the children we fit. We sponsored the Audiology Assistant at AMUCTA for a Master’s degree in Audiology and continue to support his efforts to expand services at the University Clinic.

The 2024 trip led us to a connection with the Otolaryngology and Audiology departments at the Bugando Medical Center in Mwanza, Tanzania, which was the site of our training and development trip in May 2025. Our joint goal is to increase their capacity to evaluate and treat children. We established a hearing aid dispensary and trained the local providers in hearing aid fitting, pediatric assessment and ABR. We have an ongoing collaboration with Ohio State University to implement a screening process to identify infants and young children with hearing loss. We will return in July 2026 with a larger team to continue training local providers and provide outreach testing to children in the schools.