The Irish charity Health Action Overseas is to send two special education experts to one of the poorest provinces of China to improve the training of teachers who work with children with mental handicap or sensory disabilities.
The specialists will be based at Anshun teachers' training college in Guizhou province in southern China for two years, starting in March 1998. They will be recruited shortly. Mr James Dillon, chairman of Health Action Overseas, and Mr Gerard Byrne, executive director, visited the region earlier this month.
This is the first training project in China undertaken by Health Action Overseas, which has been involved in Romania for six years and Albania for one. The charity has 18 Irish and 13 Romanian staff working in two orphanages in Romania.
The aim of the Anshun project is to share skills and build a partnership with Chinese special education experts, Mr Dillon said.
Special education for blind, deaf, dumb and mentally handicapped children in China is a relatively new concept. In 1986 only 0.2 per cent of such children were receiving special education in Guizhou. Now authorities say the figure is 20 per cent and the target for the end of the century is 50 per cent.
Mr Byrne said that rather than leading them to showpiece institutions, the Chinese authorities went out of their way to bring them to a poor ethnic minority village, Puyi, outside the provincial capital Guiyang, to look at conditions for children with special needs.
Guizhou has a population of 30 million, of whom 25 per cent live below the poverty line.