Childhood disability: South Africa's invisible crisis

New reports show that South Africa may be undercounting and underreporting childhood disabilities by over 90%.

Karen Mara Moss founded the non-profit support organisation Steps in 2003, after her son’s successful treatment for clubfoot. She says this is an ongoing, global problem.

"It's something that people have tried in several ways to fix, but unfortunately up to this point there still hasn't been much progress... it's something that occurs in many other countries where tracking the disabilities and the birth defects surveillance of children is very underreported, if at all even existent."

Moss says early intervention is key.

"We should be taking care of our children and counting the children, and getting the intervention they need as early as possible – particularly when it's something that can be treated like clubfoot or cleft palate."

Through 48 public health clinics across all nine provinces, Steps has developed a low-cost system that has enabled them to gather anonymised, POPIA-compliant data on more than 12,000 children.

"It's all just collected on numbers, which means it's not compromising confidentiality."

To listen to Karen Mara Moss in conversation with CapeTalk’s Amy MacIver, click below: