Education of Disadvantaged Children in OIC:
The Key to Escape from Poverty
58
Accessibility is an issue and measures are being taken to achieve it in a number of member
countries. In Uganda accessibility standards have been made a part of the guidelines for building
schools and in the recent years schools with accessible latrines have been built.176 In Togo, under
the Togo Education and Institutional Strengthening Project, 1,000 classrooms accessible to
disabled children were built, now serving 42,000 children both disabled and not disabled.177 In
Bangladesh, under an EU funded holistic project with the overall objective of promotion of
inclusive education by working with children, parents, teachers, schools and education
authorities 85 mainstream primary schools were made physically accessible with ramps,
accessible toilets and seating arrangements. 178
It is important to train teachers in order to ensure inclusive education for disabled
children. Teachers in mainstream schools may not know different types of special needs and
disabilities and how to answer the needs of these children which creates a problem for the
enrolment and education of disabled children. As part of the aforementioned project in
Bangladesh 402 mainstream primary school teachers received a 6 day training on inclusive
education.179 Results from focus group discussions suggest that before the training teachers did
not know that disabled children could be mainstreamed and hence did not want to enrol them in
the school but after training they are more aware of different types of disabilities and how to
answer the needs of disabled children.180 In Turkey, an in-service training program was also
found to be associated with an increase in positive attitudes towards the inclusive education of
deaf children.181 In Iran, elementary school teachers’ knowledge of attention deficit/hyperactivity
disorder (AD/HD) was found to be associated with a more positive attitude towards children with
AD/HD in regular school settings.182
Interventions addressing language and ethnicity
Education in a child’s mother tongue is gaining ground, especially in member countries in
Sub-Saharan Africa. Bilingual education is applied in many Sub-Saharan African countries
currently. Over time many Sub Saharan African member countries including Burkina Faso,
Cameroon, Mali, Mozambique, Niger and Senegal increased the intensity of local language use in
education.183 For instance in Mali, the first bilingual schools were opened in 1978 as
experiments.184 The country then gradually added new languages to the education program
starting in 1994. In the 2005-2006 school year 31.6 percent of schools were providing bilingual
education. Bilingual education had positive effects in Mali. Children in bilingual schools in the
country were 5 times less likely to repeat the year, more than 3 times less likely to drop out of
school and their end of primary school examination pass rates were 32 percent higher than
176 Degenhardt and Schroeder (2016)
177 World Bank (2015)
178 Chowdhury and Gomes (2015)
179 Chowdhury and Gomes (2015)
180 Chowdhury and Gomes (2015)
181 Sari (2007)
182 Ghanizadeh, Bahredar, and Moeini (2006)
183 According to the Intensity of Local Language Use Scoring as calculated in Albaugh (2014)
184 Albaugh (2014)