Key elements – must do
‘Must do’ actions must be undertaken in all phases of humanitarian action when implementing inclusive education programmingfor persons with disabilities.
Participation
- Ensure that persons with disabilities, children, their families, and organizations of persons with disabilities (OPDs) are involved and actively participate in decision-making, identifying barriers, planning, designing, implementing, monitoring and evaluating all policies and programmes that support access to education for learners with disabilities.
- Ensure that persons with disabilities are fairly represented, taking into account the various forms of disability as well as age, gender and diversity. Make concerted efforts to promote underrepresented groups, such as persons with intellectual and psychosocial disabilities, indigenous persons, women and girls in formal and informal mechanisms and processes.
- Develop partnerships with OPDs and other organizations working in education. Involve them in supporting teachers and learners with disabilities, providing personal assistance, and advocating for and supporting inclusive education.
Addressing barriers
- Identify and monitor barriers and solutions to education and learning, and support learners with disabilities to meet their requirements and psychosocial needs.
- To ensure that education is accessible to learners with disabilities, enable all students to enrol in mainstream courses and provide reasonable accommodation to meet their requirements by removing barriers to participation in physical and digital environments. Include learning spaces and areas where children play, eat and congregate.
- Encourage all service providers to apply universal design principles when they plan and build education and learning facilities.
- Ensure that all education assessment and reporting tools, as well as information and communications, are issued in multiple accessible formats, meeting the requirements of persons with hearing, visual, intellectual and psychosocial disabilities.
- Run public awareness campaigns to address stigma and discrimination and promote the rights of persons with disabilities.
- Review sectoral policies, guidelines and tools to ensure that they clearly affirm the right of persons with disabilities to access and inclusion.
Empowerment and capacity development
- Mainstream protection and safeguarding measures across education and learning activities. Inform learners with disabilities of protection and safeguarding measures and how to access them. Recognize the gendered dimension of some protection and safeguarding risks.
- Build the capacity of teachers and school personnel (including staff involved in transport, canteens, and other school-related services). Provide training on, and make them aware of, the principles of inclusive pedagogy and the rights of persons with disabilities.
- Build the capacity of OPDs to enable them to contribute to the design, delivery and monitoring of education programmes.
- Engage persons with disabilities and OPDs in all community mobilization and outreach activities.
- Ensure that inclusive education systems (including through international cooperation) are able to include and meet the requirements of persons with disabilities.
Data collection and monitoring
- Collect and analyse data on learners with disabilities, disaggregated by sex, age and disability. Do so systematically, across the humanitarian programme cycle, in education management information systems, national reporting databases and other systems. Where reliable data are not available or cannot be collected, use the 15 per cent estimate of global disability prevalence.
- Map existing services, accessible education facilities, OPDs and key stakeholders, and where learners with disabilities reside.
- Together with OPDs and the community, identify groups or individuals with disabilities who may be out of school as well as those who require immediate support. Connect them to protection, health and other relevant services.
- Share information on the cross-sectoral needs of learners with disabilities in interagency coordination mechanisms (such as WASH, protection, health), and ensure cross-sectoral coordination.
- Ensure that data ethics and protection principles (including confidentiality, provision of information, informed consent, security) are respected whenever data on persons with disabilities are collected and used.
- Review education standards and tools and make sure they recommend the collection of data on learners with disabilities, and their disaggregation by sex, age and disability.
These guidelines conform to the INEE Minimum Standards. These standards apply to emergencies, including natural and human-madedisasters, to situations of conflict, and to slow and rapid onset crises, in both rural and urban environments. They affirmthe rights, needs and dignity of people affected by disasters.
Education authorities and humanitarian organizations should adopt a twin-track approach to promote inclusive education inemergencies. Disability-specific interventions targeted to meet the requirements of learners with disabilities should complement mainstream interventions that benefit all learners.
The following guidance will support education actors to identify and address barriers faced by persons with disabilities,as well as their families, support persons and caregivers, when they access education programmes in humanitarian settings.