The Mirage and Reality of Special Education in Developing Countries

Introduction

Special education refers to distinctively designed learning instructions to meet educational demands of children with disabilities (Paige & Hallahan, 2015). By distinctively designed learning, this chapter refers to adapting to the educational needs of children considered disabled in curriculum contents, methodology and delivery of learning instructions to meet the unique needs of specific learners (Paige & Hallahan, 2015). This form of education is pegged on individualized instruction giving characterized by corrective feedback with the aim of reinforcing strengths and alleviating mistakes and explicit and systematic instruction issuance. The coming into force of the universal human rights declaration in the late 1940s resulted to the rise of special education as an agenda in many conferences worldwide. The access to special education for free was a right in the declaration (Kiyuba & Tukur, 2014). This right further became legally binding following the convention on children’s rights of 1989, which many countries signed to show their support. Two additional conferences of 1990 namely the world summit for children and the Jomtien conference initiated a 10-year goal to realize global primary school education for children with special needs worldwide (Kiyuba & Tukur, 2014). An assessment after the elapse of the timeline revealed slow progress towards this realization at the Dakar special education conference in 2000 (Kiyuba & Tukur, 2014). Consequently, millennium development goal (MDG) 2 on universal primary education was reset with a 2015 deadline (United Nations international children’s emergency fund, UNICEF, 2013). This was later revised to sustainable development goal 4 on the provision of quality education. Although there has been significant rise in the access to special education for children with disabilities through building of related schools towards the realisation of MDG 2 and SDG 4, this is just a mirage. Kiru (2018) expressed concerns that the coverage, high quality and accessibility of special education lags behind in support of this illusion. Similarly, a number of authors expressed concerns that though policies on improving special education in developing countries exist, there are no implementation frameworks to enforce them, which heightens the gaps between what is actually implemented in learning institutions and intentions of formulated policies (Taub, 2006; Ajuwon, 2008; Alquraini, 2010; Mapunda, Omollo & Bali, 2017).

The reality is that children with disability often realize low levels of education compared to the others. Additionally, the children with special education needs do not like school and sometimes feel left out especially in inclusive educational systems (McCoy & Banks, 2012; Nyika & Mwema, 2020). Steen, Steenbeek, Wielinski and Van Geert (2012) who compared the understanding rate of scientific concepts between students with and without special needs echoed similar sentiments. Usually, the former enrol late and leave school early with lesser qualifications (World Health Organization, WHO, 2011; Croft, 2012). Approximately 67 million children worldwide are out of school and out of this number more than 33% are children with disabilities. Additionally, the chances of the 33% going to school is twice or thrice lower compared to children without disabilities (Akingkugbe, 2012). This statistic could even be higher based on UNICEF statistics that reported 75 and 101 million primary school aged children as not school-going in 2006 and 2007, respectively with the trend being upwards (UNICEF, 2013). The organisation went on to highlight the issue of exclusion of children with special needs claiming that 97% of them do not have basic reading and writing skills. This situation is worse in developing countries as Filmer (2008) highlighted in a study evaluating 11 low-income countries. The author claimed that disability was the main cause of non-school enrolment in the regions compared to other reasons. UNICEF (2013) supported these claims citing that school attendance for children with disabilities is about 1-5%. Similarly, Mprah, Opoku, Owusu, Badu and Torgbenu(2015) confirmed that children with disabilities in Africa barely have basic education. This reality is propagated by a number of factors including limited resources, inaccessible location of schools for the disabled, limited human capacity and negative attitudes of teachers towards children with disability (Akingkugbe, 2012; Mprah et al., 2015).