Sylvie Irakoze, a Primary five pupil born with a disability was forced to put her studies on hold when challenges became too much for her to bear.

In class, she had relied on her feet to write but this was too hard for her and prevented her from doing most of her class work with ease. She also found it hard to catch up with others.

However, her story is yet to change thanks to the modern learning technology initiative -smart boards- that was introduced at her school- GS HVP Gatagara-Nyanza District.

The smart learning technology was launched last week alongside the physiotherapy to facilitate access to health services and access to quality education for persons with disabilities in HPV Gatagara Headquarters, Nyanza district.

Funded by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in partnership with the United Nations (UN) and Liquid Telecom, the initiative aims at sustaining the disability inclusion initiative.

A total of 11 smart boards were given out to three HVP Gatagara schools based in Huye, Rwamagana and Kicukiro districts, hence offering a new learning experience to a total of 1, 366 students including 494 students with disabilities.

According to organisers, the internet broadband provided by Liquid Telecom is expected to transform the learning experience for the students, making it easier and friendly, but also widen their learning spectrum.

The initiative as well aimed at serving to raise advocacy for persons with disabilities (PWDs) and to attract other stakeholders to support health and innovative education of PWDs.

Maxwell Gomera, UNDP resident representative said children with special needs require modern equipment providing alternative and adapted learning tools, and that lack of adapted tools makes their learning experience hard and impossible.

"Smarts boards and the internet are giving access to visual and sound contents which are more adapted to students with special needs while also initiating them to the use of the internet and new technologies,” he noted.

A conducive learning environment

Inadequate infrastructure, lack of adaptive sitting equipment, inadequate learning materials for the learners, lack of enough science laboratories, inadequate number of skilled teachers are some of the challenges still facing learners with disability.

Commenting on the setbacks under infrastructure, Dr Nelson Mbarushimana, Director General at Rwanda Education Board (REB) said they are putting effort in ensuring that infrastructure, including classrooms, are put in place to allow students have a conducive learning environment.

"We have a new unit for inclusive and special needs catering for students with disabilities. The unit is going to be strengthened. Also, our curriculum and teaching methods will be empowered since there are already specialised personnel in this particular area who are committed to make a difference, as well as support this inclusive and special need unit,” he says.

Current state

Rwanda is one of signatories and ratifiers of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) and the seven (7) year national strategic for transformation (NST1 2018-2024) has been designed to address several issues that citizens face in day-to-day life.

Using the concept of activity limitations to identify persons with disabilities, Rwanda counts 446,453 persons with disability (50.4 percent are women), according to the latest census (2012 RPHC).

Approximately 20 percent (87,900) of the population of children between the ages of 5 and 18 live with disabilities which are ages of education development.

The census reported a higher poverty incidence among households headed by a person with a disability (50 percent) than among households headed by a person without a disability (44percent), indicating that poverty remains a major challenge faced by persons with disabilities. Stigma and discrimination in society are other significant barriers.

Way forward

At the global disability summit 2018, the World Bank agreed to 10 commitments on disability inclusion, one of the commitments was to ensure all of their education projects financed by the World Bank, there will be disability inclusive by 2025.

Rolande Pryce, country Manager at World Bank Group-Rwanda said as a bank, they believe it’s critical to manage certain institutions to ensure disability inclusion upscale, and this could be addressed by building capacity.

She explains that disability inclusion is complex, expensive until local capacity is developed at an adequate scale. For education, she said teachers are the core of this capacity, need and challenge.

"We want teachers to feel comfortable in their skills and their access to the resources that they would need to continue with efforts to include and integrate children with disabilities,” she said.

According to Pryce, another critical area is improved access to data and statistics.

"At the moment, disability is still largely absent from data collection and monitoring mechanisms. In order to spar ownership, engagement and to better inform advocacy, we need stronger evidence and strengthening management information systems, to generate data on children and persons with disabilities,” she adds.

Also, Pryce noted that as a bank, there is need for disability inclusion to make it into institutional and policy reform, where they aim to develop human capital.

"One of the critical policy reforms that we supported is reforming teachers’ management, now teachers are mandated to complete modules on inclusive education among other compulsory courses for career advancement.”