Thank you.
I'm Nujeen Mustafa, a Kurdish girl from Syria. I was born with cerebral palsy and I use a wheelchair.
Growing up, I lived in a fifth-floor apartment in a building with no lift. I did not attend school, because school, and education in general, was not accessible to people with disabilities.
Disability in general, and psychosocial disabilities especially, are surrounded by stigma. This was—and still sadly is—true for my country of Syria. People with disabilities were not seen as a group worth investing in, and this outlook resulted in their being excluded from education.
Luckily for me, my family did not share that opinion. With their help, books and TV, I was able to overcome most of the challenges that had put me in that situation. I learned how to read and write in Arabic and even a second language.
You see, my life was not perfect, but I loved it. However, the war changed everything.
When you are being bombed, you realize a few things. You cannot move and seek shelter as quickly as everyone else. That means your loved ones would have to stay with you and endanger their safety. The only option you have is staying, witnessing and enduring the horror that's happening around you. I was one of the lucky ones who had a strong brother who could carry me down five flights of stairs. This was not the case for everyone.
The fact of the matter is that if you are a person with a disability and you are in a conflict, your life is at a greater risk, regardless of what type of disability that might be.
The war finally forced us to flee Syria and go on a 3,500-mile journey from Syria to Germany, which included the dangerous crossing of the Mediterranean on a dinghy boat. You might imagine that the situation would improve once you reached the other side, but this was sadly not the case. I came face to face with the fact that nobody had thought of people with disabilities when establishing and setting up humanitarian action on the ground, from the lack of accessibility to basic services, such as restrooms, to the lack of accessibility to education and rehabilitation services.
Now that we have highlighted the problem, I would like to suggest a few steps that could be taken to ensure that people who have disabilities are no longer overlooked.
Meaningful inclusion and integration of people with disabilities in the efforts targeted towards education should be a prerequisite for the funding of humanitarian actors in a crisis.
Stable and continuous communication with people with disabilities and their representative organizations is crucial to achieving real, true and meaningful inclusion and integration.
There is also a need for increased investment in raising awareness of disability-inclusive education among humanitarian staff. Therefore, it is necessary to provide them with the proper tools, knowledge and experience that would enable them to best integrate people with disabilities in initiatives related to education in areas of conflict and areas of humanitarian crises. This could be done through specific courses, for example.
A monitoring mechanism should be established with the purpose of achieving specific goals within a certain time frame, tracking progress and holding parties accountable for their commitments to disability inclusion in all facets of their work, including education. Failing to meet these goals should result in meaningful consequences, such as withdrawal of support.
I hope that Canada can play a leading role in the efforts to build a more disability-inclusive approach to education in a humanitarian-crisis situation and encourage its partners to follow suit because what's at stake here are people's lives and their futures.
Thank you.