This report documents the experience of exclusion of people with intellectual disabilities and their families during the COVID-19 pandemic. These experiences reveal pre-existing structural inequalities that affected the lives of people with intellectual disabilities and their families before COVID-19, during the pandemic, and beyond, and this report raises up the voices of those most excluded in a time of global crisis and demands an inclusive COVID-19 recovery.
This report includes the experiences of people with intellectual disabilities and families across eight different issue areas. Across these themes, we examined how and why people with intellectual disabilities were left out and excluded in pandemic responses, what pre-existing conditions and inequalities contributed to their vulnerability and exclusion, and how future policy structures could begin to address both this immediate and systemic exclusion.
Together, these experiences and policy solutions form our global agenda for inclusive COVID-19 recovery, an action plan to ensure that government efforts to ‘build back better’ are inclusive of people with intellectual disabilities and their families.
The Inclusive Education in the Sahel Project 2017-2021 implemented by HI and co-financed by NORAD and AFD (Burkina Faso) has created a “collaborative dynamic for organizations of persons with disabilities (OPDs) and civil society movements working in education at the regional level (West Africa) and national level (Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger) for the promotion of inclusive education”, and this study aims to capitalise on this dynamic. The ultimate goal of the project was to increase the number of children attending school in these three countries, especially children with disabilities and/or marginalised children. To achieve this objective, the project has developed an advocacy component aimed at sensitising communities about inclusive education on the one hand, and bringing about changes in education policies and sectoral plans to make them more inclusive, on the other hand.
“This document presents a Model Policy for Inclusive Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in Education for Persons with Disabilities. The focus is upon the use of ICTs to support the implementation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD, 2006), specifically:
Article 9: Accessibility;
Article 21: Freedom of Expression and Opinion, and Access to Information;