The Washington group questions and leave no girl behind: measuring disability prevalence among out-of-school adolescent girls in sub-Saharan Africa

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

The Girls’ Education Challenge (GEC) is a global programme which aims to support over a million of the world’s poorest girls to improve their lives through education. The GEC supports initiatives which aim to find better ways of getting girls into school and ensuring they receive a quality of education to transform their future. Leave No Girl Behind (LNGB) is a new programme under the GEC, to support highly marginalised, adolescent girls who are out of school (either because they have never attended school, or have already dropped out of school without gaining a basic education) to (re-) enrol in education, gain employment or improve the quality of their family lives.
The presented projects identify disability as a key factor in the extreme educational marginalisation of adolescent girls in sub-Saharan Africa. Around 5% of those aged 0-14 years living in low and middle-income countries have a moderate to severe disability, although in Africa this could be as high as 6.4%. Considerable evidence now shows that exclusion from education is a major issue for children with disabilities in low-income countries, with more than 50% of disabled children not in school.
The GEC takes a rights-based approach to disability, acknowledging girls with disabilities have the right to participate as active members of their communities, in all activities, some of which may need to be adapted for accessibility and inclusion. This implies that projects take responsibility for understanding what barriers may exist for girls with disabilities and initiate steps to mitigate them. The emphasis for inclusion in education therefore is placed on reducing barriers and promoting opportunities for participation and learning.
In order to ensure the GEC is able to capture reliable and consistent data on disability, all projects are required to use the Washington Group set of questions when collecting disaggregated data on disability. The Washington Group set of questions simply asks whether a person experiences any difficulties in several different domains, on a scale from no difficulty to cannot do at all. The results produce a continuum along which everyone can be placed. To record disability prevalence within the population using this tool we followed the Washington Group recommendations and set our cut-off point at all those with difficulty in at least one domain recorded at a lot of difficulty or cannot do at all. This widely used cut off point provides the most accurate representation of the population that has an impairment which is significant enough to cause some level of activity limitation (in other words, a disability).

Using the Washington Group questions fits with DFID’s requirements on disability disaggregation but more importantly enables data to be sensitively collected within a human rights framework. The key to making it so successful is that the survey tool avoids using the word disability. This is important because in many contexts disability is associated with considerable levels of stigma which discourages people from disclosing they have an impairment. Parents can also feel the need to conceal the disability status of their child which in some cases may lead to them being hidden away.
With so little reliable data available on disability and education outcomes, the GEC has a unique opportunity to contribute to global learning. By standardising data collection across the GEC programmes it will be possible to analyse prevalence rates, learning and transition outcomes for girls with disabilities and match that with qualitative experiences collected through interviews and case studies.
The presented projects employed the Washington Group Questions alongside tools to assess out-of-school adolescent girls’ literacy and numeracy during baseline evaluations of their interventions in Malawi and Ghana. The panel will also incorporate and reflect on the experience of other LNGB projects in sub-Saharan Africa which are currently undertaking similar baseline research. The panel will discuss how the prevalence of disability among out-of-school girls and their literacy and numeracy abilities compare to in-school girls and the wider population.
The panel will share learning from piloting and adapting tools that incorporate the Washington Group set of questions, and analysing the resulting data, that will have wide applicability for all projects working with children with disabilities. In order to provide reliable data on disability for cross-project comparison, these projects had to overcome challenges around enumerators with little or no previous experience of the tools utilising them accurately in contexts of extreme marginalisation and multiple local languages. The panel will discuss their learning about how to overcome the challenges they encountered.
All LNGB projects contain a sustainability outcome which is crucial to determine whether improved learning and transition to education, employment or further training can be sustained for future generations of girls who face multiple marginalisation factors and who are at risk of being left behind. The panel will explore the implications of disability prevalence for the sustainability of project interventions at three levels: community, school/provider and system, and will consider how the Washington Group Questions can be used to measure sustainability for girls with disabilities.

Sub Unit

• SIG: Inclusive Education

Chair

• Samantha Ross, Link Community Development International

Individual Presentations

• Transformational empowerment of adolescent marginalised girls in Malawi - Kate Sykes, Link Community Development International

• Strategic approaches to girls’ education - Susan Adu-Areey, World Education Inc.

• Disability as a cause of girls' systematic marginalization and exclusion from education - Amogh Basavaraj, World Education, Inc.; Susan Adu-Areey, World Education Inc.; Kate Sykes, Link Community Development International

Discussant

• Amy Parker, Relief International