How-To Note: Disability Inclusive Education

This How-To Note is one in a series created by USAID to assist USAID education staff and partners with integrating four critical, cross-cutting areas into USAID education projects and activities: disability, gender, education finance, and information and communication technology for education (ICT4E). The How-To Notes offer guidance for addressing these cross-cutting areas across USAID education programming. This note is meant to be used by USAID education staff and partners of education projects and activities as a reference document and guide for putting into practice USAID’s commitment to disability inclusive education as well as for DPOs advocating for more inclusive programming.

Section 2 explains the purpose and use of this How-To Note. Section 3 offers guidance and resources so that education staff and partners can understand and be able to clearly communicate the case for investing in disability inclusive education. Citations of studies and reports with evidence that can be used to “make the case” are provided. Section 4 provides some key definitions of terminology frequently used in disability inclusive education. Section 5 begins by offering a set of guiding principles that should be reflected in all of USAID’s efforts to support disability inclusive education. It moves on to discuss how education staff and partners can integrate disability at various stages of the USAID program cycle, beginning with country/regional strategic planning and moving into the project and activity planning, design and implementation phases. Examples of good practices and links to tools and reference documents are provided throughout this document to help illustrate and operationalize topics being discussed. Section 5 concludes with a discussion of how to ensure that disability inclusion is captured in monitoring, evaluation and learning of USAID-supported education projects and activities. Finally, Section 6 contains a listing of supplementary resources that will be useful to education staff and partners at all stages of the program cycle.