According to the United Nations Children's Fund UNICEF, children with disabilities are 49 per cent more likely to have never attended school than children without disabilities. There are many reasons for this: schools are inaccessible to disabled children either on foot or by public transport, the children cannot get into the buildings, their parents are too poor to pay the school fees, the teaching staff do not know how to deal with the disability. These and many other reasons are responsible for the lack of schooling for children in developing countries.
Education for all is a global challenge:
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The focus must be on basic education. This includes reading, writing and maths because basic education is the basis for further and vocational education.
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Persons with disabilities must not be excluded from education. All programmes must provide an answer to the question of how this can be ensured.
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A global challenge such as education for all must above all be tackled globally. The best way to do this is through multilateral platforms and funds such as the Global Partnership for Education (GPE) or the international initiative Education Cannot Wait (ECW), which focuses on education in crisis regions.
CBM cooperates in this area primarily with the Global Education Campaign (GBK) in Germany. The GBK brings together civil society organisations for whom global education is important. In addition, CBM itself is continuously involved in consultation and participation processes of the German government.
Our demands to the federal government:
- Germany must become more involved in the GPE by consistently advocating inclusive education and making a contribution to the fund and to ECW that is commensurate with Germany's economic importance.
- Germany must focus on basic education in its bilateral development cooperation.
Germany's strategies and concepts for global education must stipulate that people with disabilities are not marginalised in their implementation.
