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Disabled children embattled by education policy
IRIN News
October 13, 2006

http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=55945

HARARE - A new report shows that Zimbabwe's education policy for children with disabilities is skewed, with 67 percent of disabled children having no access to any form of schooling.

"Clearly, children with disabilities are the worst disadvantaged, and experience the most difficult barriers in accessing education," said a recently published report by the National Association of Societies for the Care of the Handicapped (NASCOH).

Zimbabwe's record of 93 percent literacy among its school-going children has ranked among the best on the continent, but a sizeable proportion of the country's roughly 200,000 disabled children have slipped through net.

Maria Chisunga is convinced that God has cursed her. Both her sons have been confined to their three-roomed home in the Mbare township of the capital, Harare, since they were afflicted by polio during infancy.

"I don't know what crime God is punishing me for. I live with the sorrow of seeing my relatives, friends and neighbours avoiding me because I happened to bear disabled children," said Chisunga, 38, a sole breadwinner who survives by selling tomatoes on the street.

Her husband, who has threatened to divorce her for cursing the family, has always opposed educating the children - a 16-year-old who cannot walk or talk and his deaf-mute 12-year-old brother. "It would be sheer waste of money to send the children to school because there is nothing they would bring into the family," is the husband's excuse.

Even if Chisunga did send her sons to school, education has been considered a privilege for the able-bodied, said NASCOH, although "it is children with disabilities who need education most" because they face the "twin evils of poverty and discrimination".

According to the society, all children with disabilities received inadequate formal education - a situation compounded by a general lack of specialised schools, and made worse in rural areas where such children often spent their days "idly in the company of caregivers who are non-responsive and likely to regard them as a burden".

Physically and mentally challenged children face numerous obstacles, from stigmatisation in their communities and sexual abuse to prohibitive school fees and transport costs, in an economic environment where inflation is hovering at an annual rate of 1,000 percent and unemployment is over 70 percent, resulting in dwindling government spending on social welfare.

"Inflation has pushed up the cost of school uniforms, stationery, public examination fees and bus fares, further compounding the constraints to access of education faced by children with disabilities who are generally poor," said NASCOH.

Although the society preferred an inclusive type of education, in which children with disabilities attended schools that also enrolled nonchallenged students, the environment was not conducive to such a policy said Theresa Makwara, acting coordinator of the Zimbabwe Parents of Children with Disabilities Association (ZPCDA).

"Lumping children with different capacities is not workable, given our present setups in schools. Almost all the general schools lack facilities, such as toilets that accommodate wheelchairs ... Most school heads are insensitive to the needs of children with disabilities because they did not receive special training, while teachers allocated to the needy pupils are discriminated against and ostracised by their colleagues, who seem not to understand them," Makwara told IRIN.

Even though the job of specialised teachers is more demanding, they received the same salaries as their counterparts, a situation that led to low morale and high turnover, with many taking their skills to such countries as Britain where the pay and working conditions were better.

"There are a few vocational schools for the children, some of them offering boarding facilities which are extremely expensive. In addition, the schools are located in isolated areas and most of the buses that are meant to ferry the children are constantly breaking down," she said.

The government was not allocating any money to challenged learners, who needed expensive learning equipment such as Braille, hearing aids, wheelchairs and tape recorders, despite its commitment to do so, and it was proving difficult to source money from donors.

Many parents had withdrawn their disabled children from school after learning that they had been sexually abused, Makwara said.

A 2004 report by the Save the Children Fund of Norway indicated that 87 percent of children needing special care in Zimbabwe were being sexually abused, more than half of them were found to be HIV-positive, and 47 percent were mentally challenged, said the report.

"The marginalisation of children with disabilities in the education system is worsened by the fact that a significant number of them are orphans whose parents died of AIDS, while we also have cases of teenage parents who cannot fend for their affected children and are sometimes disabled themselves," said Makwara.

James Elder, head of the media and advocacy unit at the UN Children's Fund in Zimbabwe, which is helping to source grants and scholarships for affected children, said the organisation did not condone the exclusion of children with disabilities from schools. "Instead, we support a range of school-based initiatives to include and work with children with disabilities," Elder said in a written response to questions from IRIN.

He commented that it was a "mark of a country's moral maturity when the most vulnerable are accorded equal opportunities in society". 

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