History of Deaf Child Worldwide
Deaf Child Worldwide is the international development agency of the National Deaf Children's Society (NDCS) in the UK.
NDCS's vision to work beyond its borders stems back to 1944 when the 'Deaf Children's Society' was founded with the constitutional remit of 'deaf children everywhere'.
NDCS has been changing the lives of deaf children in the UK for over 60 years and began to receive requests for funding for international projects, giving ad-hoc grants through its international challenge events.
Research indicated that there was no organisation internationally with NDCS’s expertise, vision and values on working with deaf children and families and, in 2003, IDCS was created to fill this gap.
Since then, we have established ourselves as the only UK-based international development agency dedicated to enabling deaf children to overcome poverty and isolation. We have worked with partners in the countries where need is greater, providing financial support to 51 organisations in 35 countries. We have created an innovative database, the only one of its kind, that allows these organisations to learn from each other and share best practice. To date, there are over 100 reference and research papers on the website and over 1,200 contacts. We have established four offices in India, a country with 3 million deaf children.
As our knowledge, confidence and ambition has grown, we are no longer the same organisation that was created in 2003. We’ve learnt much about the situation for deaf children in the developing world and the role that we can play in creating change. The time is right to create a new strong and separate identity for the next steps in our journey and so in 2008, we created Deaf Child Worldwide.
