Implementation of the Right to Education for Learners with Disabilities: Lessons Learned from USAID’s Multi-Country Study on Inclusive Education

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Recognition of the human rights of persons with disabilities is a relatively recent achievement, with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) entering into force only in 2008. The CRPD was the culmination of efforts originating from a long history of advocacy and protest under the disability rights movement. In addition, the omission of disability, along with many other marginalized groups, from the Millennium Development Goals set the stage for the promise of “Leave No One Behind” in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (SDGs) where disability is referenced in SDGs related to education, growth and employment, inequality, accessibility of human settlements, as well as data collection and monitoring. Through these global commitments, activists, researchers, and development actors have seen a significant increase in requests for technical assistance and programming to realize the rights of persons with disabilities. One such area is inclusive education, the inclusion of learners with disabilities in primary education, specifically, which is an emerging field in many countries and one where there is a dearth of practical and robust evidence.
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has demonstrated a vested commitment to supporting education for all learners globally, including learners with disabilities. This commitment is reflected in the 2018 USAID Education Policy (USAID, 2018b) and the 2019–2023 U.S. Government Strategy on International Basic Education (USAID, 2018a). In line with this commitment, USAID has funded projects and programs that support early grade learning for students with and without disabilities, such as those in Cambodia, Malawi, and Nepal. It is against this backdrop that the Multi-Country Study on Inclusive Education (MCSIE) aims to generate evidence and lessons learned around the implementation of inclusive early grade reading (EGR) programs.

In addition to secondary source analysis, primary source data collection for the MCSIE work in Nepal included over 375 interviews and focus group discussions with classroom teachers, head teachers, national and sub-national government representatives, parents of children with disabilities, project staff, organizations of persons with disabilities (OPDs), observation of Nepali literacy instruction in more than 250 early grade classrooms, household surveys with 38 parents of children with and without disabilities, and more than 475 staff and teacher surveys. In Malawi, the MCSIE work included over 290 interviews and focus group discussions with the same stakeholders listed above, as well as 59 classroom observations of literacy lessons in resource classrooms, training observations, and over 370 surveys related to training and inclusive pedagogy. This presentation describes the endline findings for the evaluation of two of the MCSIE inclusive EGR activities, Reading for All (R4A) Nepal (May 2018 – December 2022) and Reading for all Malawi (REFAM) (February 2019 – August 2022).

USAID and its partners will use the MCSIE evaluation to learn from its inclusive education activities in Cambodia, Malawi, and Nepal and to plan for new inclusive education programming globally. The MCSIE evaluative questions broadly focused on the following five themes: 1) process of implementing inclusive programming, 2) identification of learners with disabilities, 3) teacher training models to support learners with disabilities, 4) instructional models to support reading for learners with disabilities, and 5) unintended consequences of project activities. Future programmatic recommendations in these areas will be presented as lessons learned when seeking to implement inclusive education programming in other emergent settings. Examples include: given that inclusive education is an emerging area for many donors, undertaking an extensive situational analysis before procuring a new program in a country can lead to an improved and more localized design, the importance of collaboration and knowledge sharing between sectors and technical experts is crucial to ensure that the multi-faceted needs of learners with disabilities are addressed, and to promote meaningful OPD engagement, allocate budget and time to ensure reasonable accommodation is provided, build organizational capacity for donor partnerships, and ensure representation for all disability types in those partnerships.
As evaluators, our team was able to make formative recommendations during project implementation. One such contribution was related to screening children for functional limitations and the need to allow substantial time and budget to pilot and validate screening tools and encourage collaboration with the health sector at the donor and government levels to ensure that the screening system as a whole is improved—from screening through referral to diagnosis and services.

Inclusion is as much about addressing attitudes as it is about knowledge and capacity. Through its activities, R4A was able to shift the attitudes of stakeholders, including national and local government, educators, and community members, towards a social model of disability where the responsibility is on the system to address barriers to inclusion. In particular, many stakeholders in Nepal experienced significantly increased awareness of the presence of disability in schools and a shift in perception: from a child with a disability being “a problem” to the school system being responsible for creating inclusive environments for that child. In Malawi, REFAM was able to strengthen government systems and understanding of inclusive education to support their efforts towards a twin-track approach to inclusion. An emphasis on Universal Design for Learnering (UDL) integrated throughout all stakeholder trainings, helped support understanding that learners with disabilities can participate in general education classrooms and that ongoing coaching of general education teachers in UDL can help support learners with disabilities in their classrooms.

Sub Unit

• Inclusive Education SIG

Chair

• Emily Kochetkova, Inclusive Development Partners

Individual Presentations

• Awareness and Understanding: Promoting the Social Model of Disability and Access for all through Universal Design for Learning (UDL). - Christopher Johnstone, University of Minnesota

• Voice and Participation: Lessons Learned in OPD Engagement - Padam Bahadur Pariyar, Inclusive Development Partners

• Representation: Measuring the Inclusion of Learners with Disabilities in Program Outcomes Disability Inclusive Indicators to Ensure Accountability - Niraj Poudyal, Kathmandu University School of Arts

Discussants

• Valerie Karr, Inclusive Development Partners

• Ashley Rae Stone, Inclusive Development Partners