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.