20.02.2020

CBM wins big at the Zero Project Awards

CBM has just been felicitated at the prestigious Zero Project Awards in Vienna at the United Nations in the category ‘Innovative Practice 2020 on Inclusive Education and ICT’.

A project funded by CBM has just been felicitated as one of the best inclusive educational projects in the world. An international jury of experts in development cooperation selected the top projects among 436 nominated projects from 79 countries. The Zero Project is an initiative of the Essl Foundation, which promotes the rights of people with disabilities globally. Supported by the UN, the Zero Project is also a platform to present particularly innovative and effective solutions for successful inclusion. This year’s focus is on inclusive education.

"We are very pleased about this important recognition of our work," says CBM CEO Dr. Rainer Brockhaus. "But it is also an award for the commitment of our partners, who work on the ground every day to ensure that people with disabilities have better opportunities."

“Every day we see that together we can achieve changes for more Inclusive Education.”
Deborah Tigere, CBM Project Manager and Country Director

In 2018, CBM began converting three special schools in the Zimbabwe towns of Gweru, Harare, and Kadoma into Inclusive Education centres, in partnership with the Jairos Jiri Association, our long-time partner and the largest disability NGO in Zimbabwe. The centres are truly inclusive, teaching children with physical, visual, and hearing disabilities alongside children without disabilities from early childhood onwards. As of 2019, the centres teach 440 children with disabilities.

In a country like Zimbabwe, disability usually means exclusion, lack of prospects and living in poverty. Many schools do not accept children with disabilities at all and are unequipped to teach them due to a lack of experience. These inclusive education centres have been working hard to change this for many years. They are support institutions for both children with and without disabilities and are a model of inclusion throughout the country.

Each Inclusive Education centre has a specific focus – physical, visual, or hearing impairments – and offers its students accessibility devices and features such as hearing aids, white canes, Braille machines, Braille learning materials, ramps, and handrails. The schools employ a large number of people with disabilities in teaching and other staff positions. The students come from all over the country to visit these three institutions. Many of them also live on-campus.

Additionally, the schools support vocational and life skills to help integrate students into employment or into higher education following graduation. To date, over 200 children have been integrated into mainstream secondary schools, 40 into universities, and 80 into employment.

The centres also serve as an education platform on disability inclusion for local governments, schools and companies while working closely with the community. Thanks to the success of this project, the Zimbabwe Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education along with a consortium of small foundations have now begun drafting a national Inclusive Educational strategy.

The aim is to replicate this successful inclusive approach across the Zimbabwe school system, and for our project to reach 800 children with disabilities by 2021.

This photo shows an old Ugandan woman with an eye patch being helped by 2 people (a man and a woman)

Presenting our proposal - ‘Vision 4 Africa’: Joining Forces to Tackle the Blindness Crisis

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