Why this is needed

Roughly one in seven South Africans has medical aid. Everyone else depends on a public health system that has very few therapists to spare — and private physiotherapy, occupational therapy and speech therapy are priced far beyond what most families earn.

So the therapy exists. It just isn't reachable.

The delays start before that. In South Africa, a child with Down syndrome is often more than a year old before the diagnosis is confirmed — which means the most valuable months for early intervention are gone before anyone tells the family that intervention is what their child needs. And many parents are never told where to go next. Some leave their jobs to care for their child full-time. Others keep their child at home, out of sight, because that is what the people around them expected.

Meanwhile a child's brain is doing its fastest developing. Children with Down syndrome typically have low muscle tone, which makes sitting, crawling and walking harder to learn, and they often find spoken language harder than understanding it. All of that responds to therapy — and it responds best early, while those pathways are still forming.