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Barriers to Education for Children with Disabilities in Lebanon

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Barriers to Education for Children with Disabilities in Lebanon

Barriers to Education for Children with Disabilities in Lebanon

26th March 2018

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Under the law, all Lebanese children should have access to education free from discrimination. Lebanon’s Law 220 of 2000 grants persons with disabilities the right to education, health, and other basic rights. It set up a committee dedicated to optimizing conditions for children registered as having a disability to participate in all classes and tests.

In reality, the educational path of children with disabilities in Lebanon is strewn with logistical, social, and economic pitfalls that mean they often face a compromised school experience—if they can enroll at all.

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Basmah, a 9-year-old girl with Down Syndrome, puts on her own backpack every day as she gets in the car to accompany her siblings to school—but despite her enthusiasm, no school has accepted her because of her disability. Human Rights Watch interviewed 33 children or their families, who said they were excluded from public school in Lebanon on account of disability, in what amounts to discrimination against them. Of these, 23 school-age children with disabilities in Beirut and its suburbs, Hermel, Akkar, Nabatieh, and the Chouf districts, were not enrolled in any educational program.

In the cases Human Rights Watch investigated, most families said children with disabilities were excluded from public schools due to discriminatory admission policies, lack of reasonable accommodations, a shortage of sufficiently trained staff, lack of inclusive curricula (including no individualized education programs), and discriminatory fees and expenses that further marginalize children with disabilities from poor families.

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There is no clear data on the total number of children with disabilities in Lebanon or on how many children with disabilities are in school. According to Rights and Access, the government agency charged with registering persons with disabilities, there are currently 8,558 children registered with a disability aged between 5 and 14 (the age of compulsory education in Lebanon). Of these, 3,806 are in government-funded institutions, with some others spread among public and private schools. But many of those registered do not attend any type of educational facility. Furthermore, these figures are low, given that the United Nations children’s agency (UNICEF), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the World Bank estimate that at least 5 percent of children below the age of 14 have a disability. Based on this statistic, a conservative estimate is that at least 45,000 children ages 5 to 14 in Lebanon have a disability. This discrepancy raises concerns that tens of thousands of Lebanese children with disabilities are not registered as such and many of these may not have access to education.

According to the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which Lebanon ratified in 1991, children with disabilities have the right to education, training, health care, and rehabilitative services. The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which Lebanon has signed but not ratified, promotes “the goal of full inclusion” while considering “the best interests of the child.” Law 220 mirrors this principle in requiring the best interest of the learner when it comes to inclusive versus special education.

As detailed by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, inclusive education has been acknowledged as the most appropriate means for governments to guarantee universality and nondiscrimination in the right to education. Inclusive education is the practice of educating students with disabilities in mainstream schools with the provision of supplementary aids and services where necessary to allow children to achieve their full potential. It involves the recognition of a need to transform the cultures, policies, and practices in schools to accommodate the differing needs of individual students and an obligation to remove barriers that impede that possibility.

Report by the Human Rights Watch

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