Success Story Details

02 Oct 2026

First Steps at the Community Therapy Centre

When a child first arrives at the WECY Community Therapy Centre, the usual picture is of a long waiting list and a family that has already spent months looking for help they could not afford. Many families in Nairobi tell us the same story: a child who is not walking, not speaking clearly, or not able to sit with other children, and a referral that goes nowhere because private therapy costs more than a month of income.

WECY opened the Community Therapy Centre to close that gap. The model is deliberately simple. A child is assessed, a therapy plan is written, and the family is given a regular weekly session rather than an open-ended referral. Physiotherapy, occupational therapy and speech and language support run in the same building, so a child who needs both movement and speech work does not have to be sent across town twice.

Because the sessions are subsidised, a family pays what it can rather than what a clinic would normally charge. That single change is what moves children from the referral pile into a therapy plan. Once a child is in a plan, progress becomes measurable in ways that matter to a parent: sitting upright for longer, responding to a name, tolerating a busy room, joining a group of peers.

The second change is follow-through. WECY does not measure success by the child who improved fastest, but by the child who is still in the programme a year later. Parents attend progress conversations, they are told what to work on at home, and nothing disappears because the family missed one appointment. For a disability that has to be worked on daily, that continuity is the intervention.

This is a story about reach. What we are trying to build is not a single successful child, but a neighbourhood where the distance between a first worry and a first therapy session is measured in days rather than months.