Education Sector Development Program - VLIR-UOS

Education Sector Development Program IV
Create forums for increasing awareness about the
importance of having female administrators
Component 6 A gender sensitive curriculum
established and materials produced
Number of forums organized
Number of male and female participants
All teachers will use gender sensitive
curriculum.
Eliminate stereotyping in curriculum and textbooks
Produce and distribute gender sensitive training
materials
Curriculum and textbooks fully revised to
eliminate stereotyping
Number of training materials produced
% of teachers with access to training materials
Special Needs Education (SNE)/
Inclusive Education
1. Situation analysis
The Ministry has
designed a strategy for
Special Needs Education,
the final goal of which
is to ensure access and
quality education for
marginalized children and
students with special
educational needs.
Special needs education is the education of
students with special needs in a way that
addresses the students’ individual differences
and needs. Ideally, this process involves
the individually planned and systematically
monitored arrangement of teaching
procedures, adapted equipment and
materials. Inclusive education is a process
of addressing and responding to the diversity
of needs of all learners through increasing
participation and reducing exclusion within
and from education. It involves changes
and modifications in content, approaches,
structure and strategies to respond to
diversity needs. Generally, SNE focuses on
providing services for individual child, while
inclusive education focuses on the change of
the whole system of the school environment to
the need of the individual child.
A limited understanding of the concept of
disability, negative attitude towards persons with
disabilities and a hardened resistance to change
are the major barriers impeding special needs
and inclusive education. The main barriers to
learning are lack of knowledge about diversity,
rigid and poor teaching methods, inconvenient
learning environment, lack of identification
processes, and inadequate assessment
procedures.
The Ministry of Education started collecting
data on children with disabilities since 1999.
These indicate that the number of children with
disabilities enrolled in the different levels of
education (mostly in special schools or special
classes in regular schools) has modestly
increased during the last three years, but remains
extremely limited. Applying the international
estimates by WHO of an average 10% prevalence
of disability in any population, in Ethiopia less than
3% of them have access to primary education.
Access to schooling decreases rapidly as children
move up the education ladder and girls are
manifestly underrepresented. Generally schools
have difficulty in addressing their students’
special educational needs. Some studies have
shown that these special schools and special
classes are understaffed, under resourced and
also have a shortage of instructional materials.
The first two Education Sector Development
Programs did not pay much attention to
the education of children with disabilities.
This changed with ESDP III which gave due
consideration to the expansion of educational
opportunities for children with special educational
needs in order to achieve the EFA goals.
To reduce the existing gap and to actualize
Education for All, the Ministry of Education has
designed a strategy for Special Needs Education,
the final goal of which is to ensure access and
quality education for marginalized children and
students with special educational needs. Different
universities and colleges have started new
teacher education programs on special needs
education. Core curricula have been modified for
children with disabilities and manuals are being
prepared on disability specific curriculum at the
federal level. In addition, special needs education
is mainstreamed across all teacher education
and training institutions in the country. Currently
five Teacher Education Institutes and four Higher
Education Institutions opened SNE departments
and are training SNE professionals at different
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