Global-Report-Living-Colour-dr2-2

Inclusive Communities = Stronger Communities
GLOBAL REPORT ON ARTICLE 19: THE RIGHT TO LIVE AND BE INCLUDED IN THE COMMUNITY
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“I was told by teachers in the local secondary school
that when a child on a wheelchair has to attend a
class on a top floor, the whole class moves to the
ground floor. There was a situation where the grade
12 could not be moved to the ground floor for other
reasons, (so) the pupils had to carry their colleague
on a wheelchair up and down every day”.
– South Africa
In Africa we heard: “What do we want? The same things
as people without disabilities. We want employment, our
own house, to get married and have children. What can
you do? Make sure we go to school. Help us build selfadvocacy.”
Families in the focus groups in Colombia found many
barriers to education for their children including the
unwillingness to accept children, lack of knowledge in
the schools and the lack of an accessible inclusive
education system. The result was that these families
had to leave their children in special institutions with
low expectations and targeted to rehabilitation
programmes. Families have been convinced that their
children cannot develop skills and therefore must
spend the rest of their lives with them. This leads to the
big concern; what will happen to their children when
they are not around?
A parent in Benin said that “disabled people are
marginalized by the government himself, there are
schools for some disable but nothing for intellectual
disabled children and without education no
independence, no inclusion. We must work together to
find the way to make them independent.”
The country report from India talked about the reality
compared to the policy;
Under the policy of Education for All, government
has been trying to include all students with disability
(6-14 yrs) in the mainstream education. They have