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Key informant methodology (KIM)
The Key Informant Methodology (KIM) is a foundation for all our projects and services.
Pioneered in partnership with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine KIM provides a cost effective mechanism for identifying children in low and middle income countries, like Bangladesh, where the remoteness of rural communities and poor access to health, education, and rehabilitation services renders other methods ineffective.
KIM was piloted by means of extensive field research in Bangladesh, and has been successfully replicated in China, India, Iran, Ghana and Malawi.
What is KIM?
KIM is an innovative social mobilisation strategy to enable community-based diagnosis, treatment and provision of assistive devices for children and adolescents with disability throughout hard to reach regional and rural areas of Bangladesh.
This method fulfils two important roles:
(1) Providing data on the frequency and causes of disability in children and adolescents in the community
(2) Identifying and providing services to children and adolescents with disability, be it clinical, educational, or rehabilitative.
Community volunteers are essential to the success of KIM
Our innovative approach to case finding requires well-trained and highly motivated community volunteers to act in the role of key informants.
Key informants are people who know their community well, either through their occupational or social roles. They are commonly health workers, school teachers, non-government organisation (NGO) staff, government staff, religious leaders, traditional healers, local journalists, or other people who are actively involved in the social network of their communities.
Over 25,000 community volunteers have received training on case detection and primary eye care using the key informant method.
Adults with disability play an important role as key informants. Challenging stigma and assumptions about the impact of disability, KI’s educate families of children with disability and forge linkages between families and local services.
Register to become a key informant in your community
Diagnosis, treatment and dissemination of assistive devices
For children identified through KIM we arrange medical camps where our specialist mobile medical team travel to local communities and perform examinations, provide diagnosis, identify causality, provide advice, give information and refer children to appropriate services and treatments, subsidised by the project.
Using KIM we have identified more than 18,500 blind children and adolescents and over 6,500 children and adolescents with other forms of impairments such as cleft palate, cleft lip, visual impairment, hearing loss, epilepsy, hydrocephalous, clubfoot, and cerebral palsy throughout Bangladesh.
Providing assistive devices
We provide free assistive devices to children and adolescents with impairments. Assistive devices include glasses, white-canes, wheelchairs, special chairs, special shoes, and crutches.
Providing surgery
Alongside our partner hospitals we provide surgery to children and adolescents with disability. All costs are subsidised by our program so that services are provided to families free of charge.
Find out more about our specialist child vision centre.