Vishnu Nair, Lecturer in Speech and Language Therapy, shares how a recent project helped to develop local support systems for children with communication difficulties in St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
Surrounded by the Caribbean Sea with long coast lines, mountainous small islands, lush rain forests and volcanic beaches, St Vincent and Grenadines (SVG) is a perfect holiday destination. In fact, tourism is one of the key drivers of this picturesque multi-island nation’s economy, along with agriculture. But when we decided to go to SVG, relaxing on the shiny white sands and staring at the deep turquoise waves was not what we had in mind.
The UN sustainability goals have a core focus on improving health, particularly in small island developing states. SVG is one such state – based on the 2023 World Bank report, the country has a population of 101,323 people. Its National Health Policy emphasises a number of health measures such as improving leadership and governance, health financing, and access to appropriate medical products.
Communication disability, however, rarely receives attention, despite being one of the most common reasons for referral to paediatric neurology services on the island. There is a high level of need but limited access to quality healthcare, particularly for people with communication disabilities. The majority of these individuals cannot access communication support locally or afford to travel to the US or Canada for treatment.
In this challenging context, one person has been making a big difference. University of Reading alumna Kimberley Cambridge is the only Speech and Language Therapist working on the island. She supports a large number of individuals with a range of communication disabilities – from children with language disabilities to stroke survivors – in diverse settings including community care, schools and hospitals.
Recognising the urgent need to expand these services, my colleague Emma Pagnamenta and I worked with Kimberley to design a project that focused on Speech and Language Therapy (SLT) capacity building through training grassroots level workers. In the summer of 2024, we received funding from Research England official developmental assistance to carry out a series of training workshops in SVG.
Through Kimberley Cambridge’s connections, we partnered with the SVG Ministry of Health and the St. Vincent Autism Society – a grassroots organisation that supports autistic individuals in SVG. These partnerships provided essential logistical and manpower support for the project.
We were aware that capacity building activities should account for colonial power relationships. Therefore, in order to enhance equity in the process, our first step was to design a survey that collected the views of local educators and healthcare workers. After distributing the survey across the island, we collated the results and developed training materials based on the feedback received. Most of the feedback indicated an explicit need for support strategies in the classroom and curriculum, particularly, for neurodivergent children accessing education.
Our team conducted five two-hour workshops using these training materials in January 2025, including two sessions with early childhood educators and teachers, two with families of children with communication disabilities and a final session with nurse practitioner and teacher educator students from St. Vincent community college.
In total, our project trained:
- 107 early childhood educators and primary school teachers
- 56 families of children with communication disability
- 52 teacher educators and nurse practitioners
The workshops received coverage in print media and television, and were attended by Kay Martin-Jack, the country’s Chief Education Officer.
Parents and educators who attended mentioned that they felt empowered by the experience:
“I was grateful for the opportunity to be among other parents with children like mine. I even created a communication board for my son” — Parent Participant
“ I’m going to make sure my child attends speech therapy sessions more regularly because I saw the benefits of being consistent and how it can help my child communicate better” — Parent Participant
“I enjoyed learning new strategies that could be used to bolster my curriculum and engage with the students in the classroom. We would like more training to be held biannually and hopefully next time certificates be given out as a form of our participation in continuing education” — Early Childhood Educator
While these initial workshops established our collaboration with SVG, we hope to continue and sustain this partnership through future activities. In fact, the participants have expressed interest in creating a certificate course that would upskill them with the knowledge of providing classroom support in the context of communication disability.
Through harnessing the University of Reading’s strengths in global engagement and support from the SVG Ministry of Health, we look forward to continuous engagement with SVG. We believe that this will be a necessary step towards advancing UN Sustainable Development Goals, particularly, in the context of health and communication disability in a small island developing state.
Project team
- Vishnu Nair and Emma Pagnamenta, Lecturers in Speech and Language Therapy at University of Reading
- Kimberley Cambridge, Practicing Speech and Language Therapist and Practicing Psychologist in St. Vincent and the Grenadines
Main photo by Ernie A. Stephens on Unsplash