About CARD

CARD is a project born out of the association between Professor Sally Hartley and the staff of the former UNISE at Kyambogo Uganda.

This association originally took the form of a linkage with the Centre of International Child Health at the University of London. The Linkage related to the development of the Community Based Rehabilitation Department and the Disability Resource Centre in the (now) Department of Special Needs and Rehabilitation. These courses and services are now well established. As the next stage the staff identified a need to develop their capacity to do research and to use the results to inform their teaching. they wanted to make sure that the training they offered was more effective and more likely to result in improved quality of life for disabled people and their families in Uganda. This is the point at which CARD secured support from a UK based charity called 'Ka Tutandike'. They agreed to fund a research capacity development programme into disability in conjuction with support from the University of East Anglia, where Professor Sally Hartley now works as a professor of Communication and Health.

At the first workshop, the participants decided to call the project Community Action Research into Disability (Uganda), CARD in short. The idea is for teams of Ugandan researchers (with key members from Kyambogo, from service providers and from disabled groups) to generate their own research questions and with the help of a team of expert mentors, conduct the research and most importantly, write up the research so that others can benefit and build on what they have discovered.

CARD now has 17 research projects involving 58 researchers 17 of whom have the experience of living with disability themselves. Their contrbution is helping to increase the validity of CARD research and ensure that it is relevant to disabled people's lives. The results of the research findings are bieng disseminated through radio programmes and seminars.

Objectives of CARD

• Fund teams to carry out action-based research on disability in Uganda.
• Develop research and administrative capacity to manage the initiative within the Academic Registrars office at Kyambogo University.
• Incorporate the new knowledge generated from the studies into the ongoing local CBR and Special Education courses.
• Ensure wide dissemination of research findings and the replication of good practice.