A free hearing health training tool available on WhatsApp has been developed to help South African teachers spot hearing loss!
South Africa (04 March 2025) – Around 90 million children and teenagers across the world are living with hearing loss, and most of them have never been diagnosed.
In many cases, it won’t be a doctor or specialist who first notices something is off; it’ll be a teacher who wonders why a child keeps asking for things to be repeated, or seems ‘switched off’ in class, or is falling behind in ways that don’t quite add up.
The problem is especially acute in lower-income settings where audiologists are scarce, and waiting lists are long, the University of Pretoria shares. In those gaps, teachers are effectively on the ‘front line’ of hearing health. The catch is that most teachers have no training for this.
Spotting the signs of hearing difficulty in a child isn’t intuitive. It could show up as inattention, behavioural issues, or slow learning. Without some basic awareness, it’s easy to miss and in the long run leads to delayed speech and language development, struggling literacy, social isolation, and mental health challenges.
The good news is that more than 60% of childhood hearing loss is preventable or treatable, especially when caught early. Which brings us to what the University of Pretoria, in partnership with hearX Foundation has just launched.
The programme, called EARS, is a free, AI-powered training tool built specifically for teachers and delivered entirely through WhatsApp, for free!
Teachers just send the word ‘EARS’ to a number, and the training begins.
The programme walks educators through practical, digestible modules covering the early warning signs of hearing difficulty, what untreated hearing loss actually does to a child’s development, what to look out for during everyday classroom interactions, and how to refer a child for proper assessment when needed.
What makes the 2026 version different from earlier iterations is the AI component. There’s now an AI agent built into the chat, trained on WHO guidelines and current evidence-based research. So if a teacher has a question, they can just ask and get a real, informed response.
An earlier version of the programme was tested with over 1000 early childhood development practitioners. Not only did their hearing health knowledge improve significantly, those gains were still measurable six months later.
“Healthy hearing is the gateway to healthy learning,” says Professor De Wet Swanepoel, of UP’s WHO Collaborating Centre for the Prevention of Deafness and Hearing Loss. “As Africa’s only such WHO Collaborating Centre, the University has a responsibility to translate research into real-world impact. This partnership with the hearX Foundation does exactly that. By placing an evidence-based, AI-supported training tool in the hands of every teacher, we are taking the science out of the laboratory and into the classroom, where it truly matters.”
If you’re a teacher working with preschool or school-aged children, send the word ‘EARS’ on WhatsApp to +27 87 813 4013 or click this link to start a chat.
UP is home to Africa’s only WHO Collaborating Centre for the Prevention of Deafness and Hearing Loss. The launch of the newest version of EARS ties into WHO’s 2026 World Hearing Day theme, ‘From Communities to Classrooms: Hearing Care for all Children.’
Sources: Linked above.
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