Inclusive education also hit as global funding dries up

Since the start of the year, deep funding cuts have disrupted the global development landscape, and inclusive education for learners with disabilities has been no exception. Early this year, the Trump administration announced that more than 80% of the international aid projects funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development would be cut. The United States’ contribution represented around 40% of global aid. Similarly, member countries of the European Union have slashed their aid and official development assistance, or ODA, budgets as they look inward. At this month’s Inclusion International 18th World Congress, hosted in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, Diane Richler, the chair of Inclusion International’s Catalyst for Inclusive Education, said USAID was the largest funder of inclusive education. This funding was crucial because aid accounts for 12% of education spending in low-income countries and even higher in Niger, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone at 20%, and as much as 50% in the Central African Republic and the Gambia. She told Devex that with the cuts, education suffers, and inclusive education is easily pushed to the back burner because it is not seen as a critical need, such as lifesaving care, but it is important to the empowerment of the disabled. “I think that there’s a danger of losing progress. Because for inclusive education to be successful, the most successful systems are ones that are never satisfied with the status quo. They are always trying to improve,” she said. “It is much easier to just say ‘we are going to build a special school, we are going to put kids with disabilities in that school, and we’re going to forget about them’ than it is to say ‘we are going to try to improve the school system and include learners with disabilities, and make it a better system for all.’” Immediate setbacks Fatma Haji, the regional coordinator of Inclusion Africa, said USAID’s withdrawal left an instant impact on inclusive education, with, for example, the shuttered USAID Kenya Primary Literacy Program through which inclusive education training was deployed. In one year, the organization trained more than 91,000 grade 1 to grade 3 teachers and deputy heads of institutions on literacy instruction and inclusive practices to improve learning outcomes, and also trained more than 680 teachers of learners with disabilities on the use of new learning materials, such as universal design for learning — a framework that focuses on individual strengths and removes barriers to education. According to Inclusive Development Partners, 70% of disabled children in Kenya are undiagnosed and placed in mainstream classrooms. The program sought to address this gap and was also responsible for specialized teacher training in inclusive practices, free learning opportunities for disabled students from low-income homes, training parents, and improving infrastructure. The Opportunities to Learn, or OTL, program in northern Nigeria was also a victim of the cuts. The program found that children with disabilities are eight to 10 times more likely to be out of school than a child without a disability. OTL supplied assistive technologies such as hearing aids, glasses, and wheelchairs, trained teachers, and advocated for formal and informal education, among other things. Paula Hunt, an inclusive education specialist at Inclusion International, said after Western funding cuts, she has seen some funding coming in from China and Russia, but she said they largely fund work only peripherally related to people with disabilities, such as providing medical systems or supporting existing special needs schools. “They do not require that the project, for example, have a component of inclusive education, which is something that used to be a requirement, and there was money specifically allocated to inclusive education. And that now is not happening if it is not allocated specifically with an accountability framework that counts for inclusive education,” she said. Connie Laurin-Bowie, executive director of the Disability Rights Fund, said she is hopeful that the International Finance Facility for Education, a $1.5 billion growing finance engine recognized by the Group of 20 major economies, which will start making grants this year, will be able to help. Local solutions to local problems Organizations are now looking to domestic resources to help fill the gaps. Laurin-Bowie said her organization is helping local disability groups build the skills and resources needed to advocate for government support of inclusive education. Hunt, who works in São Tomé and Príncipe, said they are also exploring new partnerships with private partners, such as companies or consortia that have not been involved in inclusive education in the past but might be interested, as well as other marginalized groups. “I think it is important to create alliances with other marginalized groups because if we are talking about children with disability, we are talking about children who have been marginalized from the education systems, but they are not the only group,” Hunt said. “Perhaps if we join efforts and we could also share resources in a well-thought-out way than what we have done in the past.” Catalyst for Inclusive Education’s Richler said that ongoing conflicts and threats of war pose a further threat to the inclusive education agenda. But for now, development experts are trying to hold the line. “We are hoping that the current situation will not be permanent, that this is a dip, and we can hope that when the current administration in the U.S. ends, they will return more to their tradition of being an active global actor,” she said. Although some projects have been stopped, Haji said organizations and initiatives working in inclusive education have continued to create awareness and advocate to government ministries to adopt an inclusive approach. She said it is time for development leaders in the global south to go back to the drawing board to strategize on how to raise funds locally so the work continues. “We are really focusing on localization of revenue sources because we’ve realized we’ve depended so much on the West. And things are not working really well, we are left in a limbo … we have to identify our own local solutions to our own local problems, to ensure continuity of inclusive education.”