Subcommittee on International Human Rights Committee on Nov. 28th, 2023

[The Chair, Liberal, Fayçal El-Khoury]

Good morning, everyone. I call this meeting to order.

Welcome to meeting number 40 of the House of Commons Subcommittee on International Human Rights of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development.

Today's meeting is taking place in a hybrid format. Members are attending in person in the room and remotely using the Zoom application.

I would like to make a few comments for the benefit of the witnesses and members.

Please wait until I recognize you by name before speaking. For those participating by video conference, click on the microphone icon to activate your mic, and please mute yourself when you are not speaking.

Regarding interpretation for those on Zoom, you have the choice, at the bottom of your screen, of either Floor, English or French. For those in the room, you can use the earpiece and select the desired channel.

For members in the room, if you wish to speak, please raise your hand. For members on Zoom, please use the “raise hand” function. The clerk and I will manage the speaking order as best we can, and we appreciate your patience and understanding in this regard.

In accordance with the committee's routine motion concerning connection tests for witnesses, I am informing the committee that all witnesses have completed the required connection tests in advance of the meeting.

Please join me in welcoming the witnesses who are appearing this morning as we continue our study of international disability-inclusive education.

From CARE Canada, we have Nidhi Bansal, director, program quality and impact; and Mohammed Emrul Hasan, chief programs officer. From Humanity and Inclusion Canada, we have Anne Delorme, executive director; and Julia McGeown, director, inclusive education. From Plan International Canada Inc., we have Lindsay Glassco, president and chief executive officer; and Peter Simms, senior education adviser. From Right To Play International, we have Susan McIsaac, president and chief executive officer; and Tracey Evans, director, global partnerships. From Save the Children Canada, we have Danny Glenwright, president and chief executive officer; and Sarah Moorcroft, senior education adviser. From World Vision Canada, we have Michael Messenger, president and chief executive officer; and Tiyahna Ridley-Padmore, policy adviser.

Thank you all for being with us today.

You will each have a maximum of five minutes for your remarks, after which we will move to questions with members of the subcommittee. I will let you know when you have one minute left.

We will begin with CARE Canada. Thank you for agreeing to appear.

Ms. Bansal and Mr. Hasan, the floor is yours for five minutes. Please proceed.

[Mohammed Emrul Hasan, Chief Programs Officer, CARE Canada]

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.

[The Chair, Liberal, Fayçal El-Khoury]

Thank you. That's good timing.

I would like to invite Madame Anne Delorme or Ms. Julia McGeown to take the floor, please.

[Anne Delorme, Executive Director, Humanity and Inclusion Canada]

Good morning.

Thank you for inviting me to appear before the committee.

Canada has made significant commitments toward inclusive education, which are also reflected within the Feminist International Assistance Policy's intersectional lens and each of the Minister of International Development's mandate letters. However, Canada must adopt and fund more specific and targeted interventions in order really to meet its inclusive education commitments.

The numbers are stark. One in 10 children has a disability, and an astounding 49% are more likely than their peers to have never attended school. Forty-two per cent are less likely to have adequate foundational reading and numeracy skills.

What are the barriers to inclusive education? Physical barriers are often the first thing that comes to mind. Those are often resolved by assistive devices like wheelchairs or ramps, but invisible barriers are often more of a challenge to address. Those include attitudinal barriers like stigma, so that children with disabilities are often shunned by community members or hidden by families because of gross misconceptions and fears. Children with disabilities are also twice as likely to face sexual, physical or mental abuse, and they are much more likely to be bullied.

Children with disabilities also face important institutional barriers such as a lack of inclusive education policies, teacher training modules or adapted education programs.

In addition, inclusive education initiatives tend to consider children with disabilities as a homogeneous group rather than offer adapted strategies to meet the needs associated with various types of disabilities, physical, intellectual or developmental.

It should also not be forgotten that girls with disabilities are especially vulnerable to violence and that gender norms contribute to reduced access to quality education. This was shown in a recent report published by Humanity and Inclusion, formerly Handicap International, on the education of girls with disabilities in West Africa.

How can we overcome these barriers? Humanity and Inclusion recommends a twin-track approach that includes both mainstreaming inclusion in the education sector and focusing on targeted support for learners with disabilities. Mainstreaming refers to the full integration of disability inclusion in the education system and national education plans. Humanity and Inclusion is currently working in 27 countries on 45 inclusive education projects to help transform education systems. This involves working on education policy, having early school screening and formal teacher training programs, and even building parents' capacity.

Mainstreaming is only half the solution. There must also be targeted support for learners with disabilities to achieve meaningful outcomes. Humanity and Inclusion has a wealth of experience demonstrating the efficacy of a targeted approach that focuses on disability-specific supports and community-based services, by working with more than 400,000 children with disabilities a year. This experience shows that it is essential to provide specific supports, such as appropriate assistive devices, adapted personal support and accessible learning tools. This helps us make sure that children with disabilities stay in school and reach their potential.

An example of community-based services is the establishment of mobile teachers, whose role is not only to support individual children with disabilities in schools, but also to guide and support teachers. This approach works. Rates of completion are higher. According to a school inspector from Togo, the number of pupils with disabilities is increasing in junior and senior secondary school, and school exam success rates are rising. These pupils now feel valued and are much more confident.

Another example of a multisectoral approach to community-based services is from Cox's Bazar refugee camp in Bangladesh, which houses over a million Rohingya refugees. Humanity and Inclusion works with multidisciplinary teams, which include mobile health units, education professionals, speech and language therapists and physiotherapists who can promote early learning both at home and in the learning centres, as well as greater community acceptance. This approach has really benefited young children with physical disabilities, as well as those with autism, Down's syndrome, and other developmental disabilities.

To close, I'd like to share a few recommendations. There are five in total.

First, we have to ensure that all education programs focus on this twin-track approach of providing support to children with disabilities and transforming education systems towards inclusion for all learners, which is in compliance with the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

Second, we need to increase funding for educational programs that are focused on or include a dedicated objective on inclusive education. This should include stronger disaggregated data collection methods and tracking of budgets.

Third, we must include inclusive education training as a core part of continuing teacher training programs and ensure that it is properly funded.

Fourth, it is important to invest in long-term support for national and local actors, including local communities so that they can take ownership of inclusive education intervention and scale and sustain them in the long term.

Fifth, we must support the design and implementation of coordinated cross-sectoral strategies and thus work with various departments in the areas of education, social protection, health and equality.

Thank you for inviting me to speak to you on behalf of Humanity and Inclusion Canada.

[The Chair, Liberal, Fayçal El-Khoury]

Thank you, Ms. Delorme.

I now invite Susan McIsaac or Tracey Evans to take the floor.

[Susan McIsaac, President and Chief Executive Officer, Right To Play International]

Good morning and thank you, Chair.

I thank you for this invitation to be a part of this and for your attention to this important issue of inclusive education for all children.

For over 20 years, Right To Play has used play, one of the most transformative forces in a child's life, to protect, educate and empower children to rise above adversity. Through working with children, teachers, parents and communities, we have learned a great deal about the power of play in improving inclusive and quality education for children.

At Right To Play, we firmly believe that taking an inclusive approach means addressing the multiple and sometimes overlapping barriers to education faced by girls, refugees, children in need of psychosocial supports and, especially, children with disabilities. Addressing the learning needs of the most marginalized children improves the education quality and learning for all. Inclusive education is when all learners are present, participating and achieving. With regard to disability-inclusive education, we believe in providing real opportunities for children with disabilities to learn and play side by side in the same school, for the benefit of all.

According to the WHO, one billion people, or 15% of the world's population, experience some form of disability, yet children living with disabilities often remain invisible. In lower- and middle-income countries, as many as 33 million children with disabilities are out of school, largely due to stigma and fear.

Right To Play has been addressing these challenges head-on by building community awareness to tackle stigma, providing inclusive education training for teachers and implementing strategies to support children with disabilities to enrol in and complete school. We are also working to rehabilitate classrooms, build ramps and provide assistive devices like wheelchairs, auxiliary crutches and orthopaedic shoes to support children's access to education. Over the last few years, we have also strengthened our internal capabilities by adapting and testing our unique play-based approaches to specifically include children with disabilities, providing an entry point for learning where traditional approaches have historically excluded them.

Play can also promote inclusion and dismantle stigma. An example of a popular game we lead is called “co-operation station”. Two groups of children are asked to assemble a simple puzzle. One group is blindfolded and the other must keep their hands behind their backs. At first they struggle, but then the group merges and co-operates to assemble the puzzle. The activity builds understanding, as children can appreciate the special skills each person brings to the table. It encourages empathy by changing attitudes that can exclude people with disabilities.

These types of play-based interventions are most effective, however, when coupled with teacher training and engagement with community leaders and coaches. In Mali, our projects are working to improve the skills and confidence of teachers in delivering play-based disability-inclusive education. In Burundi and Tanzania, we are improving access to education by raising community awareness around disability. At the start of the school year, community coaches and junior leaders lead door-to-door campaigns to encourage enrolment of children with disabilities, including referrals to specialized services for those children with the highest need.

While we still have a long way to go to realize the right of all children to receive a quality, inclusive education, examples such as these and the others we have heard today make me hopeful that it is, in fact, possible.

Before I conclude, I want to leave the subcommittee with four recommendations for your consideration.

One, Canada can continue to build on its demonstrated leadership in global education by raising the bar on quality, inclusive education for all. This means ensuring that its policies and programs seek to address multiple and overlapping barriers to access, including gender, refugee status, psychosocial well-being and disability.

Two, Canadian investments in global education must also support teacher professional development to give teachers the confidence and skills they need to deliver gender-transformative, disability-inclusive education. This includes proven methodologies like play-based approaches.

Three, the international community, including donors, ministries of education and NGOs, must set specific targets to ensure that all learners with disabilities are reached in all educational programs.

Finally, four, Canada can and should increase budgetary allocations to international development assistance more broadly, with specific increases to inclusive global education in next year's federal budget.

I look forward to the results of this study, and I am hopeful that this subcommittee will offer its strong support for inclusive education globally.

[The Chair, Liberal, Fayçal El-Khoury]

Thank you, Ms. McIsaac.

Now, I would like to invite either Mr. Danny Glenwright or Ms. Sarah Moorcroft to take the floor for five minutes, please.

[Danny Glenwright, President and Chief Executive Officer, Save the Children Canada]

Good morning.

Thank you, Chair. Thank you to the subcommittee for inviting us to speak with you today.

As you noted earlier, my colleague Sarah Moorcroft, our senior education adviser, is joining me.

Save the Children works to address the rights of children in more than 120 countries. My comments today will be through the lens of our global experience on disability-inclusive education. Particularly, they are on the global crisis for children with disabilities and their right to quality education in low- and middle-income countries, and what we need to do to respond.

I will speak to three urgent issues. The first is an ongoing deprioritization and depletion of inclusive education funding. The second is an increase in conflict and climate crises. Last are the discriminatory attitudes towards people with disabilities.

Two hundred and forty million children—that's one in every 10—live with disabilities. The link between poverty and disability is inextricable. We know that 80% of people with disabilities live in low- and middle-income countries. According to the World Bank, 20% of the world's poorest people have some kind of disability. With more conflicts globally such as in Gaza, Ukraine and Yemen, we're seeing increases in disability due to blast injuries from explosive weapons. Even after a conflict ends, children are 50% more likely to suffer blast injuries that cause disabilities, because they pick up unexploded devices while playing. Trauma from conflict and a constant fear of conflict also severely affect injured children's development, learning and future potential.

As my colleagues have shared today, almost half of all children with disabilities have never attended school. This number is higher in many countries such as Ethiopia, where more than 90% of Ethiopian children with disabilities are out of school today. Why is this? It's partly because many of our education systems are on the brink of collapse due to significant decreases in global education funding. Additionally, as I mentioned, we're seeing a rise of climate and conflict crises, which frequently close schools and disrupt learning.

Earlier this year, UNESCO found that there's a $97-billion U.S. annual funding education gap for education financing. Many countries are far off the target for sustainable development goal number 4, with its target to ensure inclusive and equitable education for all. As well, the aftermath of COVID-19 has led to significant cuts in public funding for education. Contributions from donor countries like Canada have declined. Without proper resources, education systems are overcrowded and under-resourced. Children with disabilities are the first to suffer. Without proper resourcing, there are no effective systems to screen for children with disabilities. There's no support to families to provide rehabilitation and assistive learning devices, or to ensure strengthened and accessible school grounds, latrines and classrooms that support children's learning as well as their emotional, psychosocial and physical needs.

Look again at the case of Ethiopia and the conflict in northern Ethiopia. We know the education system in Tigray was not operational in 2021, which made it impossible for 1.3 million students to even go to school. When the conflict spread to the Afar and Amhara regions, more than 4,300 schools were either damaged or destroyed. That meant that an additional 1.9 million children were unable to continue their education in those two regions.

A crisis is not neutral. Education for children with disabilities is deprioritized or forgotten during a crisis. Already out of school, these youth are invisible in education, emergency and recovery plans. They're seen as a curse, misfortune, and cause of shame for their families and their communities. Teachers see them as a nuisance. Ministries see them as too expensive, with little return. We know, of course, that none of this is true, but these discriminatory attitudes silence children with disabilities and impede their rights. This situation is unacceptable.

As Canadians, we have the power and means to act, and we must. We must prioritize investment in global education with and for the most marginalized children, particularly in low- and middle-income countries and in fragile places, some of which you've already heard about today. Education is life-saving. It's the pathway to peace and security for all of us.

Canada has long been a leader in global education. Now we need to revitalize our strategy for resilient, inclusive education to ensure that no child is left behind. Today, we'd like to recommend that Canada renew and scale its global education funding so that we continue to focus on inclusive education agenda for the most marginalized, one that is grounded in an intersectional approach, and so that we target emergency areas most impacted by climate and crisis.

I'll leave you with final words from Maysoon, a 15-year-old girl from Sudan who uses sign language. She has sadly witnessed countless verbal and physical abuse towards deaf children in her 15 years. She says, “Children should know their rights and how to advocate for them. You must provide children with education and the means to protect themselves from violence and harassment, especially those with disabilities.”

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Fayçal El-Khoury]

Thank you, Mr. Glenwright.

I would now like to invite either Mr. Michael Messenger or Ms. Tiyahna Ridley-Padmore to take the floor for five minutes, please.

[Michael Messenger, President and Chief Executive Officer, World Vision Canada]

Thank you, Chair and committee members, for inviting World Vision to contribute to this important conversation.

I'm joined by my colleague Tiyahna Ridley-Padmore, who brings a policy background in education and social inclusion.

For over 70 years, World Vision has operated as a relief, development and advocacy organization delivering programs and insights in stable and fragile contexts. With our programming and a support network of supporters here in Canada, we work across many sectors, including education, to respond to the needs of the world's most vulnerable girls and boys.

We're pleased to provide testimony in support of this important study.

I visited Peru last year, and there I met Wilmer. He was a young man who had suffered a spinal injury while swimming when he was a young teen. He fought for his life for 15 days in a coma. He spent three months in the hospital and required a tracheotomy to breathe. The accident took a tremendous physical toll on him, leading to lifelong physical disability. He was unable to walk. He had limited use of his hands and arms, and had to rely on others for many of his basic needs.

Wilmer faced more than just physical disability. He told me, when we talked, about his struggle with mental health, suicidal ideation, social stigma and economic exclusion. Along with learning how to navigate a body that required different things, Wilmer also had to learn how to live in a society that was persistently telling him that he was somehow now of less value.

In places where we work, for many children and young people like Wilmer who navigate disabilities, the commonality is not disability itself but rather the obstacles and barriers, physical and invisible, that societies impose on them. Wilmer's story is just one example of the need for our communities, civil society and decision-makers to create enabling environments where all children and youth, especially the most vulnerable, can access equitable outcomes and enjoy a high quality of life, and education is key.

In Wilmer's case, through World Vision's Youth Ready education and life skills program, he received customized support, training and mentorship, and seed capital. This enabled him to start a successful welding business. Today, he proudly owns a growing small business that supports his family.

Wilmer's story is one of many, and I feel proud that we were able to provide support through education, but I'll be frank. At the same time, at World Vision, like many organizations, we have a long way to go. For every young person we've worked with to improve access to life-saving and life-sustaining support, there are countless children and youth with disabilities we've left behind, perhaps because we didn't bring an inclusive lens in understanding the communities with which we work or because we didn't adequately take into account the particular needs of children who would benefit from inclusive approaches to education.

I remember visiting Zambia and talking to a disability activist. After I was telling him about how proud I was that we were doing better in reaching the most vulnerable in communities, he challenged me by asking how we were reaching children with intellectual and developmental disabilities who were so stigmatized in that community that they were often hidden away from our community workers. Our usual approaches, even though they were community-based and community-supported, simply didn’t look hard enough to ensure that we were really taking an approach of inclusion.

With that, I have three messages for you today.

First, from our experience, children and youth with disabilities possess invaluable expertise regarding their own experiences and needs, and we need to listen to them. Speaking for the international development sector, it is crucial that we continue to actively seek out opportunities to engage and collaborate directly with young people on the margins to create and implement solutions that are responsive to and informed by their lived experiences. We have to listen and act grounded in their reality.

Second, inclusion extends beyond mere rhetoric. Motions like the one you're studying are critically important, and we value them, but the mere mention of including people with disabilities is inadequate. We need to integrate people with disabilities into the fundamental framework of our programs.

Disability is also complex, and we can't assume that one size fits all. Individuals with disabilities are not a monolith. Achieving meaningful inclusion of children and youth with disabilities in education requires us to demonstrate empathy and acknowledge the intersecting and intersectoral challenges and realities they encounter.

Let me finish and close with two recommendations. These are based on the transforming education summit and the disability inclusion call to action, which we endorse.

First, what gets measured gets managed. We urge Canada to set medium-term and long-term targets to ensure that all learners with disabilities are reached. This includes improving the collection, monitoring and use of disaggregated social identity data in strategies to ensure that all children and young people can access quality, equitable and inclusive education and lifelong learning.

Second, meaningful inclusion requires meaningful investment. The motion focuses on prioritization of inclusive education. We also call on Canada to progressively increase specific funding for disability-inclusive education. We suggest moving toward making it at least 5% of our education budgets.

Our awareness of disability has increased dramatically in recent years, revealing that more children are affected by visible and invisible disabilities. Concurrently, the world is grappling with escalating crises, rising displacement and increasing demand for mental health and psychosocial support services. We can't keep standing by watching as our goal of creating a more fair, just and equitable world by 2030 slips farther away.

Canada can step forward to ensure that all children are given the chance to live life to the fullest, to be protected and to achieve their full potential.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today.

[The Chair, Liberal, Fayçal El-Khoury]

Thank you, Mr. Messenger.

Thanks to the witnesses for their testimony.

We will now go to questions from members of the subcommittee.

For the first round, I would like to invite Mr. Lake to take the floor for five minutes.

I'm sorry. I would like to invite either Ms. Lindsay Glassco or Mr. Peter Simms to take the floor for five minutes, please.

[Lindsay Glassco, President and Chief Executive Officer, Plan International Canada Inc.]

Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the Subcommittee on International Human Rights.

I am here today with my colleague, Peter Simms, who's Plan Canada's senior education adviser. It's a true honour to be here along with our fellow witnesses to share our message of the necessity of prioritizing and investing in disability-inclusive education.

Plan International Canada is part of a global federation working in 80 countries. We focus on children's rights and gender equality for girls in all their diversity. Plan delivers $200 million a year of education programming, working directly with those who are most marginalized.

Across the countries where we work, we see the children with disabilities stigmatized and facing violence, abuse and maltreatment. We also see children with physical, intellectual or sensory impairments continually denied their right to education.

Education systems around the world are failing children with disabilities, with disastrous consequences. We know that today around 240 million children around the world have a disability. We also know that almost the same number of children are out of school, but these are not unrelated statistics. Half of out-of-school children in the global south have a disability and the problem of out-of-school children is, to a significant extent, a problem of a lack of inclusive education.

Children with disabilities face significant barriers, both in and outside of school. They are less likely to enrol in school, less likely to meet learning standards and less likely to complete any stage of education. Their absence from school also means that they miss out on school meals and they miss out on health campaigns, such as vaccine programs, and consequently they face higher health risks.

In short, children with disabilities are excluded from the short- and long-term benefits of education. Their needs are clearly not being met.

Plan International prioritizes the rights of women and girls in its programming. We see that gender is a significant barrier to education for children with disabilities. Even for those in school, girls with a disability are 10% less likely to finish primary school than boys with a disability. Disability intersects, exacerbates and is itself a product of wider inequalities, most notably poverty, gender discrimination and the existence of conflict or crisis.

Let me tell you the story of Munira, a girl from Borno in northeastern Nigeria. One day she was walking to fetch water, like all girls do, and was hit by a car. Her leg had to be amputated, leaving her with a lifelong mobility issue.

For girls like Munira, going to school was already a challenge, because she lives in a community where ongoing conflict and repeated insurgent attacks on schools are terrorizing children and making parents afraid to send them back to class. In fear, many families choose not to give their daughters an education. Not getting an education, we all know, exposes girls to greater risk of gender-based violence and early and forced marriage.

The fear of Munira's parents to send their daughter to school was now compounded by the fact that their daughter had a disability. They didn't think a girl with disabilities could make use of an education, and they chose to keep her out of school.

Munira discovered an accelerated learning program through an awareness session held by Plan International. She tentatively inquired whether she, a girl with one leg, could join. You can imagine that she was thrilled when the answer was a resounding yes.

With Plan's support and with funding from the Canadian government, Munira returned to school, with classes tailored to fill the gaps in her education and with accessible facilities to ensure she could attend and learn. Munira's story is illustrative of the challenges girls face in crisis situations and how those challenges are multiplied for girls with disabilities.

Plan International integrates disability inclusion into all of its education programming, but I have to confess that it could do so much more. Disability rarely exists independently of other vulnerabilities, including age, gender, extreme poverty, conflict and fragile contexts. Understanding the intersectional nature of disability is central to ensuring that we are able to bring about lasting change.

In conclusion, Plan International recommends, like all the other witnesses here, increased investment to make sure that children with disabilities are not left behind. Investment is vital to address the needs and uphold the rights of children with disabilities.

We also recommend new approaches in disability responses that are truly inclusive and address the intersectional nature of disability, including gender inequality. This involves engaging people with disabilities in defining solutions and ensuring that they are at the table.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Fayçal El-Khoury]

Thank you.

Now I would like to go to questions and answers with the members of the committee.

I would invite Mr. Mike Lake to take the floor for seven minutes, please.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Wetaskiwin, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Let me start by saying a huge thank you to all of the witnesses here today. I have known many if not all of you for a long time. I have found that, as we have driven this conversation, there has never been any lack of willingness to have the conversation and to take on tough questions.

Today I am going to start with Anne and Julia, because you're the one organization here that is specifically focused on disability and inclusion.

The language that we use in the sustainable development goals talks about the hardest to reach. It talks about leaving nobody behind. When we talk about the hardest to reach and people left behind, in your experience—I'm going to focus specifically on developmental intellectual disability—how hard to reach are people with developmental intellectual disability? How much further are they left behind typically?

[Julia McGeown, Director, Inclusive Education, Humanity and Inclusion Canada]

Thanks for inviting us to this panel.

I think you're right to start with that question because, typically, they are the most disadvantaged, the most likely to not be enrolled in schools, not accessing schools and, even if they are in schools, they might not be able to access a quality education even when there, which is something else that I think we should highlight.

In terms of the percentage of children with the most severe disabilities or the most complex needs who are able to access education, it's the smallest number—I think it's under 1% or something, typically. It's very low. It's a very small percentage. I think, and I'd have to check all the statistics, that there used to be a statistic that 90% of children were out of school with disabilities, and that's now gone down, as many of you mentioned today. It's often about 50% these days, but when it comes to children with more complex developmental needs, I think in the recent UNICEF study in terms of looking at the different types—and that was looking more in terms of functional difficulties—they were seeing high proportions of children. It was getting close to 90%, or 95% even, of children out of school when they had more complex needs, and it is a lot in low- and middle-income countries, so it is a vast challenge.

I think it's a challenge that has been able to be addressed, as we said, in some contexts, and I think that we need to.... It's really worth mentioning the fact that this is often the most neglected group of children, particularly in terms of the support that's given, so I think it's worth mentioning that.

There are also a lot of good things we can say about what has been achieved in some places and what can be done to support children with these types of needs, as we mentioned.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Wetaskiwin, AB]

As we're talking about potential solutions, again in the big picture, I'm going to look at Right to Play.

When I think about potential solutions, the world is focused significantly on education. It might not be enough. Obviously, we have to do a lot more on education broadly, but I think there is more than $4 billion toward Global Partnership for Education and over $1 billion toward Education Cannot Wait, just to name two big organizations globally that are working on these issues.

It strikes me, from personal experience, from my son's experience in school, that when he was included in the classroom, it helped everybody else to be better. That wasn't why we included him in the classroom; it was all about Jaden, but ultimately what we learned was that every other kid was better off for having him included there.

Right to Play does amazing work. I think you do amazing work at trying to reach harder-to-reach kids. What do you find to be the benefits for the kids without disability when you include people with disabilities in Right to Play programming?

[Tracey Evans, Director, Global Partnerships, Right To Play International]

The benefits definitely are multi-faceted, both for the children who are being included and for their peers, and we have a lot of evidence globally to support that.

In terms of their peers, we see a lot of social emotional growth, increased empathy and also ability to work with and engage with people with different types of disabilities. What we're trying to mimic in the classroom by promoting an inclusive environment is what both children with disabilities and their peers are going to face when they go out into the wider world. I think the challenge is that the barriers we face in segregated education systems are not reflective of the eventual reality that both individuals with disabilities and the rest of society are going to have to engage with.

A classroom provides a safe, inclusive environment in which everyone can learn how to interact with one another, not just children with and without disabilities but boys and girls, refugees who are learning in different contexts. The education system provides a nice environment in which to do that, and we firmly believe that play, specifically, opens doors to foster that kind of engagement and allows children to learn these life skills in a way that makes sense to them.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Wetaskiwin, AB]

I have a very short period of time on this one, so I will go back to Humanity and Inclusion.

Do you have any advice for the other CEOs around the table, as they're thinking about the work that they already do, the really important work that they do, on how they might maybe work with Humanity and Inclusion to take action on something that we all agree is a pretty significant issue?

[Julia McGeown]

I think that, first and foremost, it's quite likely that whatever you do for children with disabilities is going to benefit all children, so don't see it as a separate thing. Oftentimes they will invite us to come and work with them but then have it as a siloed thing as part of their overall education program. This should be embedded across all of the aspects of the program, not just maybe a little section on disability-inclusive education for teacher training or something, or accessibility, which might be what people assume, or counting the number of children with disabilities in the classes, or something around data collection but not across the board.

Actually, the best way of including disability-inclusive education is literally at all levels, embedding it everywhere. Until you do that, it's not going to be true disability inclusion. I'm not saying that everybody might do this, but there can be a sort of disability-washing mentality around ticking the box for doing disability inclusion but not doing it throughout the whole program.

That is my biggest piece of advice, and that inclusion does cost money. You can't allocate a really tiny amount of funding, 2% or something, for disability and expect that your entire education program is going to be fully inclusive—it will be a touch, an absolute drop in the ocean. To go back to the funding point, in being mindful to do it well, it actually should be given a sufficient budget allocation.

[The Chair, Liberal, Fayçal El-Khoury]

Thank you, Ms. McGeown.

Now I would like to invite Ms. Anita Vandenbeld to take the floor for seven minutes, please.

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

Thank you very much.

I have several questions, but I would like my first question to go to you, Ms. Glassco. You spoke specifically about gender and about the particular discrimination against girls with disabilities. One of the things you mentioned was the higher proportion of these girls who face gender-based violence and early and forced marriage. I was wondering if you could elaborate a little bit on the differences in gender, and specifically whether it is also important to have not just education for these girls, or for gender non-conforming individuals, but also sexual health education.

[Lindsay Glassco]

Indeed, gender is a huge issue. Multi-country estimates show that girls with disabilities are more likely to be out of school than boys with disabilities, and they face all of these other significant barriers, some of which you referenced. One of them is health care and access to sexual and reproductive rights. There are a whole variety of other access issues they are facing in terms of health care specifically.

Girls with disabilities and girls in general, as you mentioned, experience heightened rates of gender-based violence. They are also facing communication and cultural barriers, due to stigma, in reporting incidents and accessing referral services where they do exist. This is all compounded in special education institutions, where girls with disabilities are often more isolated from their support networks. There are likely to be significant ramifications for survivors, related to mental health, motivation and access to school. Even if the infrastructure is there, the barriers presented to them in terms of their ability to have access and speak out verbally, and the cultural implications, are huge, so they just don't do it.

This stigma and these cultural barriers are seen at the community level. They are seen at the family level and they are seen with the parents. Parents are reluctant to send their daughters to school. Of course, when there are economic hardships or the crisis situation I spoke to earlier, these are all barriers that girls are basically confronted with daily.

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

Thank you very much for that.

My next question is for Ms. Delorme.

One of the things you mentioned that struck me was about early learning. When we talk about education, we usually think about grade school. We are not necessarily looking at preschool or early learning. I wonder if you could elaborate on that.

[Anne Delorme]

I will let my colleague Julia help me along with that, please.

Go ahead, Julia. Thanks for being here with me.

[Julia McGeown]

It's a good question, and sometimes early years education is different in different contexts, of course. There's a mix, a good hybrid mix, between ECD, or early years learning, and formal education marrying up with pre-primary and primary education. These days, in many countries in Africa and Asia, pre-primary education is often in the same school as primary education, so we're talking about sometimes starting four-year-olds or five-year-olds within the same formal setting as the primary. Then there are some settings where it might be even earlier.

Obviously, we're talking more about how to help transition between non-formal settings and community-based education initiatives, because often it's those children who drop off the radar, especially children with disabilities in the early years. Maybe early ECD providers and health care providers might be able to track those children. They get to three years old or four years old and then they're off the radar, and it's a really key stage to keep hold of them and track them. Otherwise, they get to six years old or seven years old, ready for primary, and we can't find them anymore. We often find early intervention is also key in terms of development, so if you do everything early on, you have better and longer-term outcomes. However, it's also about being able to continue with those children and support them through the transition from the early years services through to primary education. Children with developmental disabilities in particular can really benefit from that, but so can all children with disabilities and without, in fact.

Another really quick point is that children with and without disabilities merge really well together at that age group. I've seen it myself in those early settings. They don't notice that the child has different needs; they absolutely don't bat an eyelid. You can really promote inclusion in these younger age groups, which can be a really good model for older groups, where that might be more of a challenge. You can really promote inclusion in society by having inclusive early years settings where children are able to play and get along with each other.