About

After many years of living and working in Africa as a paediatric physiotherapist, Archie Hinchcliffe (Scotland) realised the need for children with cerebral palsy to have good therapy early in their lives. She also recognised the potential amongst African physiotherapists to meet this need if they could be given the necessary specialist skills.

She met Jean Westmacott (UK), who introduced the concept of Appropriate Paper-based Technology (APT) to enable people in:

• developing countries to establish sustainable production units.
• manufacturing assistive equipment from recycled cardboard for children with disabilities.

Having discovered that ‘rehabilitation’ is not considered a priority by neither governments nor (inter)national development- and aid-organisations, and knowing that there was insufficient local expertise (though a great deal of willingness to learn) to help children with cerebral palsy, Archie and Jean decided to set up Cerebral Palsy Africa in the early 2000s. This was an attempt to close this gap and enable local people to master the competencies to support children with cerebral palsy and their families to have a better life.

In 2019, the Board decided after 2 years of discussions to hand over the organisation to ‘Enablement’, a Dutch consultancy firm that has 35 year of experience in the field of CBR. Early 2020, a registration process was started, and the activities were taken over by a new Board as of April 2020.

Board CPA-NL as from 01-04-2020
The Dutch Board of Cerebral Palsy Africa consist of the following persons:

• Chairperson: Mr. H. (Huib) Cornielje
• Executive Secretary: Mr. C.J. (Kees) van den Broek
• Board member: Mrs Yvonne Vleeshouwers

Overseas partners
The overseas partners consist of:

• Short-term African trainers in childhood rehabilitation
• Individual volunteers from the UK & other countries
• Project managers from partner organisations
• Individual rehabilitation professionals