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Context: Committee Evidence - SDIR-40 (SDIR) - Nov/28/23

Mr. Mohammed Emrul Hasan (Chief Programs Officer, CARE Canada)

11:09:38 a.m.
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Good afternoon. Thank you, Chair, and thank you to this committee for inviting us to share CARE's experience on international disability-inclusive education. My name is Emrul Hasan. I'm chief programs officer of CARE Canada. I'm joined by Nidhi Bansal, director of program quality and impact. CARE is committed to equitable access to inclusive education and skills development for children living with disabilities. We particularly seek to address additional underlying barriers to education faced by vulnerable girls living with disability. We have all heard the staggering data that 50% of children with disabilities in low- and middle-income countries are still out of school. Crisis, conflict, climate disruption—these are just a few other formidable barriers to inclusive education for many children living with disabilities. In many countries, we do not even know how many children living with disabilities are not able to access education, because the data is simply missing. Imagine that this child living with disability is a girl. Her chances of accessing or completing her education are further diminished. From our own study, we found that while boys in most cases are most likely to experience disabilities, girls across most contexts are more disadvantaged by disability due to a confluence of restrictive gender norms and disability-related stigma. In particular, adolescent girls with intellectual impairment are at a higher risk of experiencing sexual violence. These challenges are further amplified in fragile contexts and humanitarian emergencies. A CARE study in northern Uganda found that both boys and girls who experienced war injuries, abduction, forced recruitment and ill health were significantly less likely to complete their education. Disabled girls were the least likely group to attend school. We can take this northern Uganda study and apply it to all those children who will survive today's wars with significant physical, emotional and psychological injury. The need for gender-responsive disability-inclusive education is more urgent today than ever before. Canada has been playing a leadership role to promote inclusive and gender-responsive education. Today we offer two key recommendations for Canada's continued leadership in disability-inclusive education. From our experience at CARE, the first thing needed is significant investment in strengthening systems to deliver disability-inclusive and gender-responsive education. Yes, we need more funding for programs that ensure that children living with all types of disabilities, especially girls and those in conflict contexts, can continue to learn in healthy and inclusive learning environments, with access to such critical support as trained teachers and accessible infrastructure. Equally important, investment is needed in supporting education to propose progressive education policies, building capacities of teachers to integrate the diverse needs of all children, establishing quality standards and promoting innovative assistive technologies for disability-inclusive education. We also need to invest in improved collection of sex, age, and disability disaggregated data and accountability systems. Over the last decades, we have seen improvement in collecting sex and age disaggregated data. We need to make sure that we have not only age and sex disaggregated data but also data disaggregated by disability as well as other intersectional variables. I will end here by observing that while there are incredible barriers for children living with disability, we know that each and every effort brings the barriers down a bit lower. The ideal of disability-inclusive education is a continuous process of incremental gains. Every effort and every investment towards this process counts. For gender-responsive disability education, we need to act today to address the multiple barriers and intersecting vulnerabilities. We need financial investments. We need your political leadership. Thank you.

601 words

Context: Committee Evidence - SDIR-40 (SDIR) - Nov/28/23

Mr. Mohammed Emrul Hasan

12:24:21 p.m.
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Those are absolute priorities, but I'll add one more here. We've been talking about measuring and having data, and a number of people have mentioned this. We quite often forget how difficult it is to get data in any circumstances, forget about going to hard-to-reach populations for data. I hope that it is a part of the mix and that we're able to really up the game there so that we can not only get the data that helps the programming but also measure the progress and show the progress over the time of the commitment.

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Context: Committee Evidence - SDIR-40 (SDIR) - Nov/28/23

Mr. Mohammed Emrul Hasan

12:38:43 p.m.
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I have to tell you that I'm not a disability expert, but what I know from working with people living with disabilities in a different context is that whenever there is a disability you can see, people focus on that one. Quite often, you will see an educational program talking about ramps, school infrastructure and everything, but we forget developmental disabilities and disabilities you get from being in a very stressful conflict situation. You get so many different types of it, so whenever we design a program and we talk about disability-inclusive education, it is important to take all of this into consideration. That's why I go back to the same narrative I have been talking about, which is data. You collect data about the disabilities of children, but if you are not able to really understand the different types of disabilities and to train people to collect data in a very consistent manner, you'll never be able to capture that narrative to inform your strategy. That's why we say that it's not “one size fits all”. We need to really understand there are different types and different implications for your strategies and programming.

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Context: Committee Evidence - SDIR-40 (SDIR) - Nov/28/23

Mr. Mohammed Emrul Hasan

12:48:05 p.m.
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Absolutely. I think you just said the most important thing here, which is that the context will make it very different. For example, if you're working in Mali, the context is different from that in Cameroon. Your work in northern Cameroon is very different from your work in southern Cameroon. I think it's a very important variable. Where we are living or where we are staying is one intersectional variable, and all of these other elements go along with it. I'll just give a very quick example. I lived in a village called Kita in Mali, and I had an opportunity to really see the difference even from one village to another, despite the fact that they're in the same district. The intersectional identity and the background and upbringing, I think, basically define what kind of programming you need to do. I think that bringing all of this disability narrative and all the intersectionality is very critical to understanding that your programming will be different, your cost structure will be different and your approach will be different. I totally agree with you on that.

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