CBR & New Technologies

I was engaged in Community-Based Rehabilitation (CBR) programmes from early 1980s till a few years ago. Over that period, I saw CBR change from a health programme to a multi-sectoral approach dealing also with education, occupation and empowerment issues of persons with disabilities.

In this write-up I want to briefly look at the historical evolution of CBR approach, and some of the key persons involved in it - I was fortunate to meet and work with many of them. I will conclude with a brief reflection about the future of CBR and the possible roles of new technologies in it. (You can click on the images below for a bigger view)

The image below has a volunteer from red cross visiting a woman with disability who had received a loan from CBR programme to buy a sewing machine, in Da Nang province, Vietnam (2010) - image by Sunil Deepak. 

Origins of Community-Based Rehabilitation (CBR)

Through the Alma Ata conference on primary health care in 1978, Dr Halfdan Mahler, DG of WHO in Geneva promoted the community based approaches including CBR.

In the image below (from right) - Dr Halfdan Mahler, author (Dr Sunil Deepak), with Armando & Hani Serag from PHM, in Geneva, 2007 

While Alma Ata was being planned, Einar Helander was appointed at the rehabilitation department of WHO in Geneva and asked to look at CBR. Over the next few years,  Padmini Mendis (Sri Lanka) Anne Goerdt (USA) joined him. The three of them prepared what came to be known as the WHO's CBR manual, which  came out in 1989.

The basic premise of the WHO CBR manual was that in rural areas and small towns, there were few rehabilitation professionals. Often, only families and communities looked after the children and adults with disabilities. The manual presented simple rehabilitation techniques with illustrations, which could be taught to the families, so that they themselves could promote their greater autonomy and well-being.

However, the question was who would teach the simple information explained in the manual to disabled persons and their families? During 1980s and 90s, two main approaches were developed to answer this question - (1) Existing community workers, especially health workers; (2) Community volunteers, especially persons with disabilities themselves and/or their family members. Those persons were supposed to receive training for 21 days.

Another important CBR manual was developed in 1987 by David Werner, titled Disabled Village Children. However, instead of working in the communities, he proposed setting up of resource centres, where children with disabilities accompanied by a family member came to learn and practice self-care, which they could later continue at home.

From Health focused CBR to Multi-Sectoral CBR

Around 1990-91, Dr Enrico Pupulin took the place of Einar Helander at the Rehabilitation department of WHO. He started consultations with other UN agencies including UNESCO for education, ILO for work & UNICEF for children, for their roles in CBR. As a result of these consultations, The first Joint Position Paper on CBR was drafted in 1994, which was updated in 2004.

The pioneers of CBR - from left - Enrico Pupulin, Einar Helander & Alana Officer, at the CBR congress in Agra, India in 2012 - image by Sunil Deepak  

 

In 2006, Disability & Rehabilitation (DAR) team of WHO under Alana Officer, together with UNESCO, ILO and IDDC, initiated a consultative process for the preparation of CBR Guidelines, under the guidance of Chapal Khasnabis. The CBR Guidelines came out in 2010. These guidelines proposed the CBR Matrix, a visual map to understand different components of CBR and their activities.

The term, Community-Based Inclusive Development (CBID) was proposed as an alternative to CBR to express its multi-sectoral nature.

Some of the Key Persons in CBR

During the 1980s, 1990s and the first decade of 2000, important CBR programmes covering large areas or entire countries or regions were started. Some countries adopted CBR as the national rehabilitation strategy. The image below from 1995, shows some of the key persons known for their work in CBR.  

The image above is from a CBR workshop in Rome, organised by AIFO-Italy in 1995, with some of the key figures who played a big role in developing CBR approach including Brian O' Toole & Geraldine Mason Hall (Guyana), Dr Ferial and Dr Rati (Indonesia), Bob Ransom (ILO), Maya Thomas (India) and Dr Tran Trong Hai (Vietnam) - Image by Sunil Deepak 

CBR & New Technologies in Last 15 years

Over the past decade, the diffusion of internet and smart phones across the world has changed the situation in terms of accessing information. For example, the video-platform YouTube is full of videos made by persons with disabilities of all kinds, by their families and by professionals, from around the world. These videos can be automatically translated and have subtitles in different languages.

Another example of technological change is the role played by social media and apps in connecting people and families and services. 

Another change has been the predominant role of Organisations of Persons with Disabilities (OPDs) in the countries after the adoption of the International convention CRPD at the UN in 2006. 

Compared to a health worker or a school teacher or a community volunteer, who had to be trained over 2-3 weeks in basic rehabilitation approaches to different kinds of disabilities, today the access to that kind of basic information is even more effective because individuals can connect with other families facing similar challenges.

Some years ago, together with International Disability and Development Consortium (IDDC), there was an effort to create a mobile app to provide the basic rehab information to CBR workers, through an app called RehApp. I tried looking for it on the Google store (in July 2026), found 2 apps of that name - one had been downloaded less than 100 times and the other around 1000 times.       

WHO also has more than 20 self-learning modules on the TAP platform, which can be used for training health workers and others about different disabilities and assistive technology needs.

A Question to the CBR/CBID Programmes

My impression is that due to all these changes over the past decade, the CBR programmes as they existed up to 10-15 years ago, are no longer there. To understand the present situation, I have 3 questions for individuals and organisations that work with persons with disabilities:

(1) Is a CBR programme still useful? For doing what?

(2) Compared to 10-15 years ago, how have CBR related work changed?  

(2) What roles are new technologies (including social media, whatsapp, messenger, youtube, etc.) playing in your work today?

You can answer by leaving a comment below (you can answer in English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Hindi, Bengali or any other language that you prefer). Looking forward to hearing from you!

If you wish, you can also send me an email at sunil.deepak@gmail.com  

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Artworks From Sareo 2026

Sareo street festival is an annual art event in Schio, where local artists present their works in a public exhibition held on Via Pasubio in the city centre. Since, the old name of this street was Via Sareo, so that gives it the name. 

The painting below is a portrait by Moreno Greselin titled "Serenity and Understanding". I like the amused turn of lips and the twinkling eyes of the lady. (Click on the images for a bigger view of the artworks).

Like every year, I want to present the art works that I liked in this years' exhibition - here are the 12 artworks that I liked most this time.

Some Specific Issues with This Years' Exhibition 

This year, in 2026, the event was held on the last weekend of June, but not in the street. Instead it was held in the Shed hall, the old building of Conte Wool Mills, used for cultural events.

It was supposed to be the weekend to celebrate the festival of Schio's patron saint, St. Peters, but all the public celebrations were cancelled because of an accident which claimed the lives of 2 persons from the local Salesian school, a young priest (Don Francesco) and a student (Alberto).

The Sareo 2026 art festival was not cancelled but it remained inside the Shed hall. Since, this weekend was especially hot, with temperatures going up to 36° C, it may not have been easy, any way, to organise it in the open street.

12 Artists & Their Artworks from Sereo 2026 

The artists are not presented in any specific order of importance or quality of their artworks. 

(1) Let me start with a painting by Giuseppe Fochesato. He paints old abandoned rooms and buildings, where you can see the peeling paint, dusty surfaces, a feeling as the time has stopped, and shafts of light illuminating them. In this particular work that I have chosen for this post, I love the shades of purple in the walls, the orange in the old sofa and the blue in the windows. The painting was titled "Blue windows". I also love the feeling of dust and light, the glass left on the table and a sense of frozen time, as if someone went out and never came back.

I met Giuseppe at the exhibition and I am planning to interview him for this blog, after the end of the summer.

(2) The second artwork that I really liked, is by Lanfranco dalle Carbonare. It is titled "From above" and has an abstract look, mainly in blues with a touch of red. It makes me think of a histology slide stained by methylene blue or the colours used for acid-fast bacilli. It is a drone's eye-view of a landscape, a kind of a Google map, which he turns into abstract lines and shades.

(3) The third is a landscape by Mauro Marzari. I had interviewed him sometime ago. I like the way he uses colours, mixing together forms and abstraction. The orange background of this artwork, titled "Landscape", gives an idea of a forest fire and yet the white silhouette of the tree in the foreground gives me a feeling of coolness and mitigates the orange heat.

(4) The Cathedral by Luigia Meneguzzo is simple and evocative, a mixed materials artwork, using the bark of a tree. Probably, I am influenced by the images of the inauguration of the Sagrada Familia church in Barcellona a few days ago, but the bark of the tree used by Luigia with a little colour reminded me of that. I thought that it was clever and effective. All of us have the experience of seeing faces or figures in clouds and in random surfaces. Luigia saw a piece of a bark and saw a cathedral in it.

(5) Antonia Bortoloso makes very femminine and delicate artworks, with pastel colours and diaphanous laces and taffeta skirts. This time she had two artworks in the exhibition and I liked this one, titled Empty Space, more because of the bird sitting on the hand of the woman lost in thoughts in the painting. That bird somehow reminded me of the well-known Indian artist B. Prabha, who often painted women with birds.

(6) The artist Ercole Lino Bettiale had a few artworks in the exhibition, among them a round-shaped fantasy landscape of an old city quarter. However, I liked his "The Chess" (shown below) more because the two figures, the queen and the knight alongside the background of a chess-board, seem to be laughing at a private joke. It has a drunk-happy kind of vibe.

This painting also reminded me somehow of the Netflix series about chess, titled Queen's Gambit.

(7) Luigi Bernardi, originally from Schio and now based in Malo, started his artistic journey in 1977 and makes abstract compositions, using dark and spent colours that seem to merge into each other in a soft background, where you can, if one so wishes, see all kinds of figures and shapes, as in a psychologists' Rorschach test. They reminded me of walls that often come out when you scratch the paints and whitewashes covering them.

(8) Mario de Poli's abstract composition, titled "Light and the Tower" was similar to Luigi Bernardi, but a little more structured, mostly in the shades of green with a touch of orange. In an interview I have read that Luigi Bernardi and Mario de Poli (from Padova) had started their artistic journey together. Perhaps that explains the affinities in their approach to abstract art. However, in his long carrier as an artist, Mario has experimented with different styles.  

(9) Flaviana de Marchi's "Full Stop" with its reds and pinks, made me think of the hot summer afternoons with an angry red sun and someone furiously strumming on an electric guitar to express his anguish. I think that it would the right painting to look at, on a morning when I am feeling sleepy and need to wake up!

(10) The next artwork that I have chosen for my list is of a baby boy, holding a bunch of grapes and his eyes full of tears. It is by Moreno Greselin and was titled, "Boy grapes crying". I like it for the boy's expression and for the colour combination of blue and yellow, which always reminds me of Van Gogh. Moreno is the only one in this post, who has two paintings (the first painting at the top, of the old woman, is also his).

(11) Gian Battista Clementi is known for his landscapes, especially from the Leogra valley. Often, I can recognise the houses and contradas he paints, because they are from Sant'Antonio or Valle del Pasubio, a few kilometres north of Schio. For example, this year, I think that the two paintings he presented were both of the corner houses at the bridge in Gisbenti on Via dell'Acqua, a mountain hiking path that I love. His paintings had two versions of this place, one in the spring and the other with the winter snow. I liked more the one with the snow, which is presented below.

I am hoping to interview Clementi this year.

(12) The last painting that I have selected for this year is a small artwork, a pencil drawing of a young woman with tears in her eyes by Zohra Aljabbari. I am not sure if I have seen any of her works earlier and from her name it seems that she is an immigrant. So I am happy to include a new artist's name in my list. Her work was framed and covered with glass, but fortunately it was in a shadowed area, so I could take a picture of it without too much reflex.

In The End

Some of the artworks in this exhibition were framed and covered with glass, and I am unable to include them in my list. This was because of the strong morning light in the Shed hall, when I visited the exhibition, since it created strong reflections on the glass, so I was unable to look at them properly and to take their pictures. 

Over the last few years, I have been going to different art exhibitions in Schio and writing about them in my blog. This means that I have started recognising their names and recognising their art-styles. The moment I see their art work, I can tell who is the artist. This gives me pleasure.

I have also interviewed some of them and this year, I am planning to interview two of them, Fochesato and Clementi. While some of them have Facebook and Instagram pages, but some of them are almost invisible on internet. They are the ones, I want to interview and present in this blog.

Finally, you can also check my post about Sareo 2025.  

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