Veronica Stapleton,2 Jacqui Shepherd,3 Chris Elliott,4 Manisha Maharjan,5 Dorodi Sharma6 and Charles Odol7
Abstract This article reflects on the learning from five inclusive education projects implemented under the Disability Inclusive Development Inclusive Futures programme across Bangladesh, Kenya, Tanzania, Nepal, and Nigeria (2018–26). It addresses three core themes: finding and enrolling children with disabilities, preparing schools to welcome them, and centring them in teaching. Central to project success was the involvement of Organisations of Persons with Disabilities (OPDs) in all stages, from design to delivery and monitoring, ensuring relevance, sustainability, and a rights-based focus. The projects demonstrated that inclusive education interventions are more successful when embedded in national strategies, supported by multisectoral collaboration. Despite persistent barriers, the projects demonstrated that low-cost, scalable strategies can improve educational outcomes for children with disabilities.
Keywords children with disabilities, inclusive education, Organisations of Persons with Disabilities (OPDs), low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), SDG 4, quality education.
The Disability Inclusive Development Inclusive Futures (hereafter Inclusive Futures) programme, a collaboration of ten international organisations, worked to improve outcomes for people with disabilities in education, livelihoods, and health, and address stigma and discrimination across Bangladesh, Kenya, Tanzania, Nepal, Nigeria, and Uganda between 2018 and 2026. The focus was on improving the provision of inclusive education in mainstream school settings. Project themes were agreed in consultation with national governments and other interested stakeholders, with particular emphasis given to Organisations of Persons with Disabilities (OPDs): in Bangladesh, the transition of out-of-school children with disabilities into mainstream schools; in Kenya, inclusive approaches to early years education; in Tanzania, the identification and enrolment of children with disabilities in schools; in Nepal, how to embed disability inclusion at scale in existing education systems; and in Nigeria, the development of a locally led model for mainstreaming inclusive education.
Isaya at school with his peers in Tanzania
Photo credit Michael Goima/Sightsavers
All interventions worked in close partnership with OPDs, valuing their lived experience, their specific and varied expertise, their access to local communities, and their understanding of the contexts in which they live and work. OPD members and non‑affiliated people with disabilities were involved in project concept design and development, sat on project governance committees, provided guidance, and led training delivery and monitoring activities to ensure that the voice of people with disabilities was central in every project. Strategies were identified to address inclusion beyond individual classrooms, and the aim was to influence systems change in mainstream education through integrating inclusion into national government strategies and systems.
This article synthesises learning about disability inclusion from projects across five countries, framed around three key themes: finding and enrolling children with disabilities in schools; preparing schools to welcome children with disabilities; and centring children with disabilities in teaching. It provides insights into the approaches taken and explores how the co-construction process with OPDs and governments was integral to both project effectiveness and to influencing systems change for ongoing sustainability and scale-up.
Globally, nearly 240 million children live with a disability – approximately one in ten of all children worldwide – with most of this number living in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) (UNESCO 2020). Children with disabilities are 47 per cent more likely to be out of school than children without disabilities (UNICEF 2025), are less likely to ever attend school, complete primary or secondary education, or possess basic literacy skills (UIS 2018). UNESCO’s Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report for 2020 suggests that these children remain one of the most marginalised groups of children in the world and experience high levels of educational exclusion (UNESCO 2020).
The global estimate for numbers of out-of-school children and youth is currently 272 million children according to UNESCO’s GEM data (UNESCO 2025), and this number is growing in many contexts, but particularly in sub‑Saharan Africa (UIS 2022). Out‑of-school children are at risk of missing out on friendships and exposure to social environments, losing opportunities to gain skills that would support them to be personally and financially independent, and fulfilling their potential to become active participants in their societies (Banks, Sretenov and Rotenberg 2024; Light for the World, Education International and ActionAid 2020; UNICEF 2021).
International conventions and commitments to inclusive education, such as the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) (UN 2006), and Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4) (UNESCO 2016), along with national inclusive education policies, are vital statements of intent, but civil society organisations working with relevant ministries, families, communities, district-level officials, and OPDs can effect real change in LMICs (Inclusive Futures 2023b; Miles et al. 2012; World Bank 2023). The participation of people with disabilities is enshrined in Article 4.3 of the UNCRPD (UN 2006), which requires states to actively involve both adults and children with disabilities through their member organisations at all levels. Without this involvement, policies, programmes, and interventions are rendered less effective, relevant, and sustainable (IDA 2020). While there is evidence that OPDs in LMICs are working well to advocate for their members, to develop partnerships, and to encourage participation, there is less research that evaluates the longer-term impact of OPDs on policies and interventions (Flower and Wirz 2000; Young, Reeve and Grills 2016).
The ways in which disability intersects with gender or socioeconomic inequalities also increase the chances of marginalisation; for example, children with disabilities in refugee camps are often overlooked and not included in school enrolment programmes (Buscher 2018; Inclusive Futures 2025d). Women and girls with disabilities are more likely to experience discrimination in terms of income, employment, and education than their male counterparts, and are at greater risk of sexual and physical abuse and gender-based violence (Jones et al. 2012; Phasha and Nyokangi 2012). Girls with disabilities are particularly disadvantaged in accessing education because of school-level barriers and social biases around gender and disability, including increased vulnerability and lack of accessible water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) facilities (Inclusive Futures 2023a; Wapling 2016). Poverty and disability are inextricably linked, and children with disabilities are most likely to live in the poorest households (UNESCO 2020; UNICEF 2021), coupled with a higher prevalence of disability in women than men in LMICs and the resultant layering of disadvantage and marginalisation (Emmett and Alant 2006; Mitra, Posarac and Vick 2013).
Barriers to including children with disabilities at the school level include inaccessible classrooms (UNESCO 2020), lack of appropriate transport (Thompson and Rakib 2024), large classes, a scarcity of specialist staff, minimal training of teachers in inclusive education, lack of accommodations in assessment practices, low expectations (Bani Odeh and Lach 2024; UNICEF 2022; World Bank 2019), and shortage of assistive technology (WHO and UNICEF 2022). While there are no ‘magic bullet’ interventions that have been identified to improve educational outcomes for children with disabilities (Hunt et al. 2025), there is substantial evidence about the importance of teacher preparedness to welcome them into school and to adapt their teaching to accommodate the needs of all children (Mendoza and Heymann 2022; UNESCO 2017).
Against this backdrop of persistent challenges and international commitments, the Inclusive Futures programme sought to identify practical, scalable approaches. To synthesise insights across countries, a structured learning review was conducted. The learning review’s purpose was to draw out practical insights that could inform inclusive education practice at local, national, and global levels. In order to get the best representation from all projects, partners, and countries, this was done at the intersection of the end of an innovation phase (when two innovation projects led by Sightsavers in Kenya and Nigeria were closing) and the start of a scale phase (when projects in Nepal, Bangladesh, and Tanzania were starting or scaling up). This also allowed experience and knowledge from innovation to feed into scaling projects. At the time of the review, all of the projects were ongoing and due to end in December 2025. For this article, evaluative data for the projects that have already finished (Kenya and Nigeria) have been used to illustrate points made. No evaluative data were yet available for the other three projects.
The review began with an initial workshop collaborating with consortium partners, project management teams, and OPD representatives from all five countries to identify areas of interest. Further activities then involved the following: a desk review of key project learning reports; reflective discussions with project management, implementing teams, and OPD partners; and key informant interviews. A final verification workshop with OPD partners, government education officials, teachers, and caregivers distilled the learning down to three complementary themes, as explored in Section 4.
Individual project learning was captured through stringent monitoring and evaluation frameworks, parallel research projects, detailed narrative reporting of practical experiences of delivery and adaptations, and the development of contextspecific learning products. The approaches used varied but were always participatory and involved OPDs; for example, in Kenya, a compendium of learning was produced incorporating participatory analysis from the different stakeholders, such as OPDs, who analysed what worked for them. Syntheses across the programme were then consolidated in some 69 education publications relating to these projects (Inclusive Futures n.d.).
The review identified three themes (as described in detail below) which informed three reports (Inclusive Futures 2024, 2025a, 2025b) outlining key learning across the different project interventions and identifying some of the core strategies that improved the inclusion of children with disabilities, but that may also be applied elsewhere. This section of the article explores these three areas with a focus on how co-construction and working with key stakeholders, such as OPDs, were central to the effectiveness of these projects in practice. Specific examples from the different countries and projects are used as illustrative evidence to indicate the nature of a variety of interventions and collaborations with stakeholders.
Data about the number and location of children with disabilities were often incomplete and difficult to access in existing Education Management Information Systems (EMIS). OPDs possess the strongest grass-roots networks for identifying children with disabilities and are often best placed to provide long-term support to them and their families. Along with local leaders, they knew where these children could be found, even when government data systems did not. Combined with information from social welfare officers, this created a valuable network of information that formed the foundation for identification efforts. In Bangladesh, social services, OPDs, and other organisations were able to set up pop-up disability identification camps to run in areas where government-run assessment centres were not available. Inclusive Futures project monitoring data showed that over 3,000 children with disabilities across the education projects were supported to access health care or assessments.
To address discrimination and reduce stigma, it was important to engage a diverse range of local leaders to promote disability inclusion across the community. Coalitions were formed with OPDs, village heads, religious leaders, and educators to co‑create and deliver trusted, locally led inclusive education messages. Disability leaders shared personal experiences and rights-based information, fostering community-wide support, which proved successful in leveraging local knowledge for effective outreach in remote areas. For example, in Tanzania where 97 per cent of the population identifies as Christian or Muslim, an interfaith approach in community outreach, alongside local political leaders, enabled the integration of inclusion messages as part of religious guidance to help reduce stigma and discrimination.
Through direct engagement with parents and caregivers, the projects were able to address barriers to identification and enrolment, building trust through tailored outreach and support groups. The establishment, or strengthening, of existing peer support groups empowered caregivers and encouraged advocacy. Reaching children with complex disabilities (or high support needs) was particularly challenging, but in Bangladesh, over 150 children were supported to receive an education at home and to prepare for school. Over half of these children later enrolled into mainstream school. Home-based education was made possible through connecting caregivers with OPDs and local schools, to discuss the concerns that families had about engaging with education, and to tailor learning for children with multiple and complex disabilities at home but with a view to future school enrolment. Outreach activities were combined with individual follow-ups to maximise impact, and home visits focused on families of children with severe or multiple disabilities who were less likely to reach community meetings. This tailored approach demonstrated that even children with complex needs could be reached through flexible, family-centred strategies.
Supporting schools and families to understand the services that were available for learners with disabilities was central to addressing systemic barriers. Relevant services and referral pathways across education, health, and welfare were mapped, with school staff trained to link families with any additional support. The project in Tanzania strengthened Education Support Resource and Assessment Centres (ESRACs) linked to schools, bringing together multisector teams including government doctors, social welfare officers, and education officials. These centres assessed the multidimensional needs of children with disabilities, recognising that educational inclusion often requires health and social support.
Mass media was leveraged to communicate messages about inclusive education to a broader population and to give specific details to parents of how they could register their children with disabilities with the relevant support services. An OPD representative from Nigeria explained that initially many parents were not confident that there was merit in educating children with disabilities. Outreach, with personal stories from OPD members, demonstrated that there was merit, and that many people with disabilities were valued members of the local community who contributed to the local economy. The parents of children with disabilities in Nigeria heard these examples, and it was a major factor in increasing school enrolment, which increased from 44 to 99 in two years (Inclusive Futures 2024).
Using this range of strategies, manageable approaches to identifying children in local communities were identified in systems where identification and location of children with disabilities can be very weak.
4.2 Theme 2: Preparing schools to welcome children with disabilities
Once children with disabilities had been identified, it was important to support schools as they prepared to welcome new enrolments. At school level, targeted strategies included the following: building teacher capacity; using inclusive tools to support every child; using data and evidence to meet inclusive learning needs; and boosting investment by using existing available funds.
OPD partners met with School Management Committees in Nigeria, which included school staff, religious leaders, caregivers, and student representatives, to present the benefits of inclusive education and share their own personal experiences. This helped to challenge negative attitudes and to develop an understanding of inclusive education and what it means. Schools were supported to understand the needs of children with disabilities and given practical strategies for becoming a more inclusive school.
Many teachers explained that they did not know how to teach learners with disabilities as this had not been part of their training. Inclusive teacher training was designed and delivered in partnership with government education departments and OPDs, tailoring content and duration to align with government standards in different countries. Through the co-design process, the capacity of education service providers, such as school inspectors, was developed, enabling them to support inclusion when they interacted with teachers during school visits. Delivery methods included cascade training, intensive school-based training, and remote sessions. Working closely with a range of stakeholders, the project was able to develop relevant, contextspecific approaches to teacher training.
Capacity was strengthened in Nepal through a phased approach to training, as teachers were reluctant to take on additional work. They were gradually supported to become more confident in identifying children who might have different learning needs, making classrooms accessible, and using inclusive learning plans to support children with disabilities. A cascade approach was used in Tanzania to align with the national education system, so a small selection of trainers from teachers’ colleges were trained alongside government education officers. These ‘master trainers’ then cascaded the training to 48 head teachers, who cascaded it onwards to over 700 teachers throughout their schools, allowing many teachers to be reached with relatively low investment.
To support schools to embed inclusive approaches into existing systems, it was important to manage record-keeping and strengthen existing data systems. In Nigeria, school administrators, leaders, and teachers were trained to carry out screening for children with disabilities using the Washington Group Child Functioning Module, which supported schools in a first step to gathering information to support children’s different learning needs (Washington Group on Disability Statistics n.d.). These interventions had impact. The number of children with disabilities who attended more than 50 per cent of available school days increased by 15 per cent (from 62 per cent to 71 per cent) during the two-year project period. There was also a 20 per cent increase (from 65 per cent to 78 per cent) in the proportion of children with disabilities who transitioned to a higher grade. Once children with disabilities had been identified, it was vital that schools were prepared and supported to accept and nurture them.
To ensure that children with disabilities remained the focus of all interventions, the content of teacher training was designed to equip teachers with the attitudes, knowledge, and skills to instruct local children with disabilities in the same classroom as their peers. Content was focused on inclusive pedagogy, disability rights, classroom management, and the use of Individual Education Plans (IEPs). In Nepal, training was co-delivered with OPDs for teachers in more than 150 schools. Universal Design for Learning principles framed the training, building teachers’ skills to present the curriculum in a more accessible way and teaching them to develop visual and tactile learning materials to support literacy, numeracy, and early development (Inclusive Futures 2025c).
Establishing or strengthening the mentoring networks of inclusion partners around teachers was critical to sustaining and reinforcing disability-inclusive training. In Nepal, mentoring became an important focus for supporting in-service teachers to develop their inclusive education practices, even though this had not been part of the original project design. Volunteer mentors from OPDs, retired teachers, social workers, community leaders, and government education officials used an inclusion observation checklist to support teachers.
School-Based-Inclusion Teams (SBITs) were established in some countries. These fed into existing governance systems, such as School Management Committees but had terms of reference that related specifically to making schools more inclusive. As well as representation from the headteacher, senior teacher, and teachers with responsibility for inclusive education, the representation of caregivers and OPDs was central. In Tanzania, SBITs also involved local government officials to respond to the needs of children with disabilities in school, to make inclusion plans for the school, and to prepare inclusive budgets.
In other ways, children with disabilities were encouraged to participate in the activities of the school by working alongside their non-disabled peers in inclusion clubs and student councils. In Bangladesh, each of the 45 government primary schools in the project had a representative student council where up to 50 per cent of the representatives were children with disabilities.
Teachers in the project countries are placed under tremendous pressure in the classroom, managing large numbers of children (typically 45–60 plus in Kenya) in under-resourced settings, and they need support to ensure inclusion. The investment in Learning Support Assistants in Kenyan classrooms, to offer additional or tailored support to individual children, supported teachers to keep classes learning together.
5 Conclusion
The learning across five countries offers both common conclusions relevant to SDG 4 targets and context-specific insights for local implementation. The evidence synthesised indicates that disability-inclusive education cannot be achieved solely through policy adoption or individual isolated projects. It requires the integration of inclusive approaches into national education systems, funding mechanisms, and data management frameworks, combined with local participation, ownership, and leadership (World Bank 2023; Inclusive Futures 2023b).
True partnership with OPDs, from project inception, ensured that inclusive education became and remained a priority for the disability movement itself – experience, understanding, and skills were built through the projects, and approaches developed aligned with OPD priorities. This created the foundation and buy‑in from OPDs necessary to lead ongoing efforts to scale within and beyond the project life cycle.
This approach generated sustained demand from OPDs for the right to education that lasts beyond donor funding cycles and fluctuations in development assistance. The potential for continuing work beyond the life of the projects is optimised (IDA 2020) but also signals the need to prioritise investment in OPDs to ensure their own capacity and sustainability (Cote 2020). There remains a need to follow up with longitudinal research into the long-term impact and effectiveness of these partnerships (Flower and Wirz 2000; Young et al. 2016), and three of the projects (Nepal, Tanzania, and Bangladesh) have ongoing evaluations which will provide further evidence of educational outcomes for children with disabilities.
While many barriers to education do exist, particularly for children with disabilities, these projects show that existing outreach and identification systems for out-of-school children can be strengthened by working with OPDs (Inclusive Futures 2023b) and local communities, and that barriers to school attendance can be mitigated (Bani Odeh and Lach 2024). Co-construction provided the time and framework for OPDs to build direct relationships with government counterparts. OPD members sharing their lived experience directly challenged negative stereotypes among government officials, fundamentally changing how these officials approached partnerships with OPDs in inclusive education.
The programmes also highlight persistent challenges, as evidenced in the literature, that there are continuing disparities for children with developmental (Genovesi et al. 2022), multiple, or complex disabilities (Olusanya et al. 2024), girls with disabilities (Emmett and Alant 2006), and those living in refugee settings (Buscher 2018) or in poverty (Mitra et al. 2013), which reinforces the need for a continued focus on intersectional inequalities.
Despite ongoing challenges of limited specialist staff, inadequate teacher training, insufficient assistive technology, and entrenched stigma, the results of these interventions show that low-cost, evidence-informed strategies can be adapted and adopted. Involving whole school communities in promoting inclusive attitudes and understanding stigma was key to developing an inclusive and welcoming ethos. In all projects, partnership with government education departments and OPDs to design and deliver inclusive education training was key, tailoring content and length to align with government standards (SDG 4.9), as opposed to adapting generic international Inclusive Education (IE) toolkits which have limited application (Singal, Lynch and Johansson 2018). While one-off initial teacher training was a key catalyst, it was clear that ongoing mentoring schemes were necessary to empower teachers to create classrooms where every child, including those with disabilities, can learn and thrive (Mendoza and Heymann 2022; UNESCO 2017).
These findings point to three priorities for future work. First, consolidating the lessons learned through national policy frameworks and budget so that inclusive education is not treated as an add-on but as a core principle of education sector planning. This also requires cross-sectoral/ministerial collaboration to enable children with disabilities to access education. Second, investing in robust monitoring and evaluation to build a stronger evidence base on the long-term impacts of OPDs, teacher training, and inclusive assessment tools. Third, amplifying the voices of children with disabilities and their families so that policy and programming decisions reflect, and are informed by, lived experience.
Achieving the vision stated in SDG 4 of ‘inclusive and equitable quality education’ requires sustained political commitment, adequate financing, and genuine partnership with OPDs and communities. By embedding these approaches into mainstream education systems, governments and their partners can move from small‑scale projects to systems change and ensure that no children with disabilities, irrespective of type of disability, gender, or socioeconomic status, are left behind.
1 This issue of the IDS Bulletin was supported by UK aid under its flagship Disability Inclusive Development (DID) programme. The DID programme was delivered through two separate programmes. The eight-year consortium intervention, Disability Inclusive Development Inclusive Futures (Inclusive Futures) programme, led by Sightsavers and the International Disability Alliance, ran from August 2018 to March 2026. It has reached more than 19 million people and generated almost 300 learning and evidence resources to inform policy and practice on disability-inclusive development. The evaluation programme, the Programme for Evidence to Inform Disability Action (PENDA), was delivered by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. The opinions expressed are the authors’ own and do not reflect the views of the funders.
2 Veronica Stapleton, Deputy Technical Director, Inclusive Education, Sightsavers, UK.
3 Jacqui Shepherd, Global Technical Lead, Inclusive Education, Sightsavers, UK.
4 Chris Elliott, Head of Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning, Sightsavers, UK.
5 Manisha Maharjan, Project Manager, Humanity & Inclusion, Nepal.
6 Dorodi Sharma, Director, Inclusive Development and Engagement, Keystone Human Services International, Bangladesh.
7 Charles Odol, Technical Advisor, Inclusive Education, Sightsavers, Kenya.
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© 2026 The Authors. IDS Bulletin © Institute of Development Studies | DOI: 10.19088/1968-2026.159 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited and any modifications or adaptations are indicated.
The IDS Bulletin is published by Institute of Development Studies, Library Road, Brighton, BN1 9RE, UK. This article is part of IDS Bulletin Vol. 57 No. 1 March 2026 ‘Building Disability-Inclusive Futures’; the Introduction is also recommended reading.