Hearing for Humanity

Who Are We?

Hearing for Humanity is a program of Arizona State University's Speech and Hearing Clinic that includes a team of audiologists, speech language pathologists, and ASU students to provide humanitarian audiological and speech services in Malawi, Africa. We have been traveling since 2010 with 15-20 students and professionals to conduct our month long humanitarian missions.

What Are We Doing?

Hearing for Humanity's mission is to provide sustainable humanitarian audiologic, speech language and rehabilitative services in Malawi Africa and clinical training abroad for undergraduate and graduate students in the ASU Department of Speech and Hearing Science. This trip will provide invaluable opportunities for students and a unique clinical experience that exposes them to challenging clinical settings, and ear/hearing and speech disorders not commonly seen in the USA. Students also gain cultural sensitivity and their experience has the potential to change the course of their future professional endeavors. Although the progress since 2010 to increase the scope and availability of audiological services in Malawi has been remarkable, the proper training of Malawian students is essential to have long-term sustainability of audiology services and eventually less reliance on outside aid. Hearing for Humanity contributes to a current program at the African Bible College in Malawi to make available a core group of trained Malawians to strengthen service provision in the area of hearing loss identification and rehabilitation. The program emphasizes training of front line Malawian students to acquire skills that can enhance and improve service provision in hearing healthcare. Each year we see hundreds of children and adults with hearing loss and speech language difficulties. Based on principles of best practice we fit hundreds of hearing aids and earmolds, and address basic issues of ear health.

Why We Need Your Help?

Approximately 2/3 of individuals with hearing loss live in developing countries; however, developing countries lack sufficient resources for hearing screening, and the diagnosis and treatment of hearing loss.The need for humanitarian assistance is dire and resources are limited. Malawi is the poorest country inn the world based on GDP. Fundamental supplies such as hearing aids, earmold materials, testing equipment, and otoscopes are essentially non-existent. We need your help to purchase hearing aids and medical supplies to implement our mission and to provide the much needed audiological and speech services, including cleaning ears, fitting hearing aids, and training local students. All the funding will go directly to the people of Malawi.