The Association of the Deaf of Niger (ASN) was created on April 31, 1979, by people who are deaf or hard of hearing under the leadership of the late Hassan Bana BA, a former agent of the labour exchange and founding father. It is the oldest organisation of people with disabilities still in activity. It is apolitical, non-denominational and non-profit making. Its headquarters is located in the school for the deaf Hassan Bana BA of Niamey, in the North Crown I district of the NY3 commune. Following its objective of promoting the schooling of deaf people in Niger, we owe it the creation of three schools for deaf students (Niamey, Maradi and Zinder); these schools are the only ones in the country and have allowed nearly a thousand deaf children to have the right to education. In 2020, we built a general education college integrated within our headquarters. The ASN has about 16,000 members throughout the country.

The “With Our Hands, Let Us Be Heard” project aims to promote the right of access to essential social services for people with hearing impairments by reducing communication barriers and building the capacity of deaf people through sign language training for their educators. The project strives to reduce communication barriers between teachers and students by training communicators in sign language, namely 11 inclusive middle school teachers and 13 teachers from the school for deaf students in Niamey and ten primary school teachers for deaf students in Maradi. The project also concerns advocacy at the local level with local authorities in the regions of Maradi and Niamey, where we have already worked with the project “Let’s Speak with our hands”. This project will be implemented to allow deaf people to acquire civil status documents to assert their rights as citizens through peaceful actions at the level of the communes. There will be activities of popularising rights through the media, televised and radio debates, the. Role modelling will be approaches and tools the project will develop to include people with deafness better. Capacity strengthening and exchange activities will be implemented to improve the leadership of young people within our association so that they can be at the forefront, especially young girls.