Around the world an estimated 1.3 billion people – or 16% of the global population – live with significant disability, according to the World Health Organization. The UN Convention on Rights of Persons with Disabilities defines persons with disabilities as those who have long term physical, mental, intellectual, or sensory impairments that hinder their full and effective participation in society on an equal basis with others.
Data from UNESCO shows that 240 million of those with disabilities are children, with 10% in Africa. And while education is supposed to offer equal opportunities to all, statistics further show that children with disabilities are less likely to go to school. If they do, they are segregated from other children, thus impacting their social development.
The September 2024 edition of EdTech Mondays Africa explored how EdTech solutions can be harnessed to support learners with disabilities, how educators can access assistive, user-centered EdTech tools that emphasize equity and inclusion, and how learning tools can be tailored to different types of disabilities.
Zachary Nyange Muasya, an educator on disability inclusion and assistive technology and a lecturer at the Kenya Institute of Special Education (KISE), has been visually impaired all his life. Growing up, he attended Thika School for the Blind in Kenya, a primary and secondary school built for learners with hearing impairment and other disabilities. While educators tried their best to accommodate such learners, access to learning materials was a challenge.
Pursuing education as a visually impaired learner was not very easy because we had limited resources, especially when it came to materials for studying some subjects such as mathematics. We had to share books, which meant if my colleague was reading, I just had to sit there and listen without interacting with the words.
Georgine Auma, another panelist on the platform, founded Studio KSL at eKitabu, an e-learning platform working to lower the cost of delivering accessible content for quality education in Africa’s local languages through a global collection of digital content. Georgine has had a hearing impairment since the age 9.
Auma and Muasya have both made it against the odds of an education system that was built for learners without disabilities and a society heavily discriminative of those with disabilities.
Georgine, like Muasya, went through education as a person living with a disability. Her parents struggled to find her a suitable school, but upon finding none, they got her some hearing aids and then put her through the regular school system. The hearing aids did not work, but despite the challenges, she persevered.
“There was no support for me in school as a deaf person,” says Georgine whose narration was done by her sign language interpreter, Suzan Thuo. “I was vulnerable in class, but my father, who was also a mathematics teacher at time, saw my struggles and brought me textbooks, encouraging me to study them on my own. I would say I taught myself in school because the teacher did not fully understand me.”
At the recent inaugural Mastercard Foundation EdTech Conference in Abuja, Nigeria, stakeholders recommended that for education to truly be impactful in Africa, it needs to cater to the needs of all learners including those in under-resourced, under-served communities. Policies need to be designed with the needs of learners with disabilities in mind to enhance inclusivity in Africa.
Muluneh Atinaf, Ethiopia’s eLearning Coordinator for ICT Education, who attended the conference and was featured on the EdTech Mondays conversation, shared that policy frameworks allow for guidelines to be set on how learners with disabilities can access government funds to buy learning materials and the appropriate mechanisms to access digital content.
There are many learning interventions around, including the ones exhibited at this conference by entrepreneurs in Africa. However, very few have included learners with disabilities in the interventions. The best strategy is for [entrepreneurs] to consider people with disabilities during the design phase of their solutions.
Global Partnership for Education, for example, launched a technical assistance initiative to help governments identify what EdTech solutions and capabilities best fit their context and needs. The framework will also set guidelines on how learners with special needs will get the opportunities provided by emerging technology.
Anna-Maria Tammi, Senior Education Specialist and Thematic Lead for Equity and Inclusion at Global Partnership for Education, GPE, says, “Children with disabilities are unable to complete schooling or achieve the same learning outcomes as other children. Girls with disabilities are more marginalized from primary school to higher education. It is still the negative attitudes in communities and among teachers themselves. It's also inaccessible school buildings and lack of assistive technologies that can then help children with disabilities to participate and learn when they are at school”.
The Mastercard Foundation, in partnership with various stakeholders, is currently working on some programs to make learning all-inclusive even for learners with disabilities. Under the Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program, the Foundation works with the University of Gondar, which aims to reach about 450 talented but financially disadvantaged university students living with disabilities in Ethiopia. Another program, in partnership with Queen's University and the University of Gondar, focuses on strengthening the capacity of key faculty within the School of Rehabilitation Sciences while co-developing Ethiopia’s first occupational therapy program.
“What we have learned from these programs, particularly the partnership with the Gondar University, is that assistive technology and reasonable accommodation are very important. People with disabilities, whether visually or hearing impaired, require assistive technology to effectively take part in the classrooms and achieve better learning outcomes,” says Andre Okunzuwa, Lead, Disability and Diversity Inclusion at the Mastercard Foundation.
The Mastercard Foundation seeks to engage more young people with disabilities to understand the gaps in providing education to this demographic.
“We are also intentionally looking within our programs to ensure that they are designed with inclusion from inception while strengthening our collaborations with organizations of persons with disabilities,” added Okunzuwa.
While technology makes learning simpler for other learners, assistive technologies make all things possible for learners with disabilities especially if policymakers and other stakeholders make education inclusive from the foundational learning level. The panelists recommended review of all policies that are not cognisant of the needs of learners with disabilities to make education meaningful at all levels.
Watch the full EdTech Monday's Africa September video edition on Technology for Learners with Disability
