Ms Sarah O'Toole:

Of course, and I thank members for their comments and questions. We have partnered with Irish Aid for a number of years. Currently, we are co-funding a project with it in Goma in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, DRC. It is a significant programme for us because we are working on community-based rehabilitation, which is focused on providing access to services for people with disabilities and ensuring their participation in providing those services. It is a significant leap forward in how we deliver our development programmes. The project focuses on orthopaedic care. It is sometimes misleading when one says, "Christian Blind Mission", so we say "CBM". Our founding services related to eye health but they now concern eye health, ear and hearing care, physical disability, mental health and intellectual disability. We cover the whole spectrum of disability. We view poverty as a cause of disability and vice versain the communities in which we work.

In 2015, Irish Aid gave us funding to the tune of €51,500 for the Goma project. We hope to build upon that project. We welcome that we are a recipient of a civil society fund grant from Irish Aid. An important part of the programme is that it supplies us with good data on how to provide our services better. They also serve as a measure of the programme's performance. We are committed to that. Significantly, we seek to fight the stigma of disability under the programme. Members spoke about culture and beliefs around disability. We have a group of community workers involved in the project who are trained. They also have disabilities. They go into communities to discuss the project and encourage people to participate and come forward for services. It is an important project for us. Obviously, we hope to build on it next year and work more closely with Irish Aid with a view to disability-inclusive development in the broader sense and a consideration of how we might assist in developing and enhancing programmes in order to ensure that people with disabilities are not left behind.