Toks Bakare is the founder of asktoks.com, a platform for parents of children with autism or challenging behaviours to seek guidance, treatment and support.
Asktoks.com provides behaviour treatment, trains specialised therapists and an information hub for resources on neurodevelopmental disorders and broader mental health issues
Toks is a UK trained Behaviour Analyst with over a decade of experience in the field of developmental psychology. She is a specialist consultant, providing Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA) services to children with developmental disorders and Autism Spectrum Disorders. She understood, through her visit to Nigeria for research on real life experiences, that there were few centres and schools available for kids with special needs, and that they had outdated and sometimes harmful programs.
With that, children were misunderstood and quite often misdiagnosed, while many were being neglected and attitudes towards these disorders were rude.
After relocating from the UK in early 2014, she began consulting with Nigerian organisations in Lagos and Abuja in her effort to bring ABA treatment services to the health sector and to improve the quality of specialist education services in Nigeria.
Toks has consulted for the UK Young Autism Project (UK YAP), division of the UK Behaviour Analysis Research Group, working with a range of young children and teens. She is providing training to special educators and therapists in her efforts to improve the quality of service provided to children with special educational needs in the country.
Her vision is to create a world that understands autism, and her mission is to establish sustainable services for people with autism in the developing world and in places where services are inadequate.
Toks is committed to bridging knowledge gaps through advocacy and education and to address the lack of treatment options by providing services to under-serviced area
Culled from Woman.ng
