This project was about giving our members the resources they need to support families to become strong advocates for inclusive education.

Inclusion International worked with our members on this project from 2021 to 2023.

It was funded by the Inclusive Education Initiative (IEI), which is a fund run by the World Bank. The IEI is funded by donors like NORAD (Norway) and the FCDO (UK). The IEI funds programmes that are trying to create technical expertise or resources to help make education systems more inclusive.

Our Goals

Our goals for this project were to:

  1. Document the strategies that families use to advocate for inclusive education in their communities
  2. Share the strategies with other members in the region, who can support families in their country to replicate them
  3. Create tools for families to advocate for and be local leaders in inclusive education
  4. Connect members to share knowledge on how to translate the voices of families at the grassroots level into national policy advocacy

Who took part?

Our members collected detailed family-level and community-level data and supported the development of resources for families in local languages. They also shared the project work and learning within their region.

We worked with 3 of our members in Sub-Saharan Africa and 2 members in Latin America to do this research project.

  • La Chrysalide (Benin)
  • Zanzibar Association of People with Developmental Disabilities (Tanzania)
  • Kenya Association of the Intellectually Handicapped (Kenya)
  • Sociedad Peruana Sindrome de Down (Peru)
  • ASNIC (Nicaragua)

Inclusion Africa and Asdown Colombia were also involved as regional coordinators.

What activities did we do?

  1. Identifying and mapping grassroots community mobilisation models that link families to other community stakeholders to improve access to inclusive education
  2. Analysing community mobilization models to identify successful models to replicate.
  3. Creating resources and guides for families to replicate community mobilization models and to equip families with the technical knowledge to advance inclusive education through these platforms
  4. Building capacity of OPDs to translate the experiences of families advocating for inclusive education in the community into policy innovation at the national, regional, and global levels.

Outcomes

We created resources that share the stories of family groups and how they do advocacy, and made tools for our network on how to support families to mobilise.

These are the resources we made through this project.

Reports:

Toolkits: