Universal Accessibility in Schools and Anganwadis: Inclusion of children with disabilities
Samarthyam, an organization of persons with disabilities specializing in accessibility, gender equality & disability in partnership with UNICEF, conducted capacity building on accessibility audit for schools and anganwadi centres. The initiative will help schools and angawadi centers to be more inclusive and accessible to all children and specifically to children with disabilities as required by the Right to Education Act in India. The government school education department formed a team of professionals to work closely with Samarthyam to develop the training module, roll out capacity building initiatives and monitor results in the targeted districts.
State Level Accessibility Audits training was conducted for 28 District Coordinators (inclusive education, civil work, community mobilization) under GoUP flagship intervention on Inclusive Education – SAMARTH. The training was conducted by national trainers accredited by Government of India to create resource pool of Master Trainers from 9 districts: Baharaich, Balrampur, Chandauli, Chitrakoot, Fatehpur, Gonda, Shrawasti, Siddharth Nagar and Sonebhadra. The state team developed access audits action plan to conduct access audits of 17,717 schools and 16,527 Anganwadi centers. Observations from the access audits of schools and Anganwadi Centers was used for the development of templates for Gram Panchayat Development Plan for retrofitting in the school and Anganwadi infrastructure. The involvement of core trainers from the sub-national level greatly increased the ownership and empowerment of the inclusive education programme at sub-national levels. In addition blended training programme were also developed. The training course was conducted from 30 October to 18 December 2022 and there were total 202896 enrolments. 158539 persons completed the course and 158471 certificates were issued.
UNICEF also established a partnership with Samarthyam specializing on disability-inclusive education to support the Home Based Education (HBE) initiative in the state. Under this initiative, a five-module blended training programme and separate handbooks for teachers were developed. The training course was conducted from 16 October to 18 December 2022 and there were total 173765 enrolments. 135210 persons completed the course and 135143 certificates were issued. Capacity building of concerned stakeholders on HBE is to be started by May 2022.
Author:
Bureau of Indian Standards, Government of India
Indian Roads Congress, Government of India
Transport Research Board, USA
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