Disabled People & Education in Afghanistan

Setting the scene

This brief review explores the status of disabled people in terms of education in Afghanistan. Given the absence of effective special education services in the country, a number of NGO's have assumed the responsibility for providing special education support for visually and hearing impaired people and more recently care at community centers for those with mild intellectual disability. These services were often provided by trained professionals within the special school based system.

This paper argues for a more political approach to disability with emphasis on tackling the disabling barriers in society including a restructuring of education and higher education policies towards inclusive education for disabled people at all levels. The role of disabled people is essential in such a restructuring process including the issue of definitions and who is considered to be disabled.

The latter aspect is central to the development of disability perspective on education in Afghanistan as the way disability is defined and understood will influence the measures taken to deal with it. In other words, definitions of disability have political implications on the provision of services for disabled people. The way in which the language (i.e. definition) influences the lives of people with impairments can be seen in special education in Afghanistan. It can be argued that special education needs definition in Afghanistan is misguided and compounds implicit oppression theory which neglects the importance of social factors in the creation of learning difficulties, other impairments and more importantly creating the disabling barriers in society.

Therefore, the need to examine the ways in which existing policies and interest of professionals may contribute to legitimizing inequality in the education of specific groups of impaired people. One example is policy research which often lacks awareness of how disability is socially produced and so failed to challenge notions of disability as a social problem located within society. There is need for changing the research relations between researchers and those researched.

Educational provisions for disabled Afghans

Education policy in Afghanistan has no reference to special education of disabled people including higher education policy. In late 2002 the Ministry of Education supported by UNICEF drafted the Policy for the Rehabilitation and Development of Education in Afghanistan. This policy in its First Item states a compulsory primary education for all regardless of gender, ethnicity, language or religion. There was no reference to compulsory education for disabled children unfortunately. Instead, there was indirect emphasis on the prevention of impairment by various educational strategies. This includes awareness raising of the negative consequences of terrorism, drug addict, war/conflict and discrimination all of which may be considered causes of impairment. No educational intervention for disabled children was yet mentioned.

In a post-conflict society such as in Afghanistan, services for disabled people have been initiated and maintained by foreign organizations as mentioned earlier. Much focus was given to those disabled by war, especially physically disabled people. The exception is blind education which was started by the International Aid Mission in the late 1950s in Kabul and continues until now. Despite its early origins, educational support for blind people in Afghanistan remained limited and concentrated mainly in Kabul and few other big cities.

Special education services in Afghanistan are delivered by specialized teachers and aim at providing disabled school age children with academic skills, enabling them to read, write and continue their education in accord with their needs and abilities. Special education provisions in Afghanistan include early detection services which are essential to the admission of children into special education programs (i.e. diagnosis by medical professionals for children as having mainly physical or sensory impairment). There are no services for other categories of disabled people or for those in remote areas, especially disabled girls. Further, vocational training services are also associated with special education services in Afghanistan, but they are limited in scope and scale.

Currently, there are few organized special education programs in the country. This includes the SERVE deaf school in Jalalabad and other places under their CBR program. The Hearing Impaired Foundation Afghanistan (HIFA) in Kabul also offers education and vocational training for deaf children and youth including an ideology unit. The International Aid Mission (IAM) on the other hand runs the only government school for the blind in Kabul. Finally, the Comprehensive Disabled Afghan Program (CDAP) runs special education classes in its community centers in five provinces. SERVE and CDAP also support special classes for children with mental disability within their CBR program in a few locations.

2003 study on integration in education

In 2003, a study was conducted by the Civic Voluntary Group - GVC to investigate the level of integration in special education provision in Afghanistan. Its findings revealed that a policy of encouraging integration does not exist in the country and that there are problems encountered in attempts to integrate pupils with visual, hearing and physical impairments into compulsory education. Only 1.11 per cent of the total population in need had access to pre-school special education services.

The recently completed national policy on disability has emphasized the rights for all disabled people for inclusive education, the need for enacting education laws, the need for specialist teachers training and public awareness for educating the public. The policy recommended the set up of educational programs in order to address preventative and ongoing family health care, early detection and assessment of impairments, family programs to teach parents about their child's impairment and appropriate home care, and pre-school opportunities, both in urban and rural areas. Not least to mention the need for introducing appropriate special and inclusive education at high education institutions. Key actions were also proposed with roles and responsibilities of partners identified. The full text of this policy is available at: www.disabilityafghanistan.org

Future of Special/Inclusive Education

In Afghanistan, only recently has the education system became responsive to the individual differences of pupils, at least at the policy level. This was mainly highlighted and emphasized by the new disability policy 2003. Legislation on disability doesn't exist until now and the internal policy on education makes no reference to disabled people.

During the last number of years there has been a progressive development in training of professionals dealing with special education. This has been done in an informal way and at NGO's level as there is no special education training at university level in Afghanistan. However, attention to these issues is increasing in school based work and institutional needs.

Despite these developments, many obstacles remain. Three main issues would seem to be particularly important as limitations to special education teacher training in Afghanistan. The first relates to current approaches employed to deal with special education issues, particularly if viewed from the perspective of a social model advocated in this paper. As argued earlier, the individualistic medical approach is said to have exacted professional control over disabled people lives and maintained their dependency and passivity. The second limitation concerns the content of training organized workshops (i.e. complicated statistics and psychometric information). In other words to what degree training focuses on practical skills compared with theory and academic jargon. A third and final limitation to special education in Afghanistan is the relevance of special training to broader policy issues and social change (i.e. to what extent such training contribute to the emancipation of disabled people through advocacy and lobbying activities).

It is at this point that special education should be addressed in Afghanistan from different perspective such as the social view of critique of exclusion and discrimination. In this alternative paradigm, emphasis should be placed on facilitating the development of the clientele approach where users of services are involved in the whole business of services provision. This goes in line with a right perspective in special education which would emphasize empowerment, participation and social change. A central theme in such approach is given to the role of research in the emancipation of disabled people.

Conclusions

Existing special education services for disabled people in Afghanistan can be characterized as institutional in nature. They are largely located in the big cities and controlled by professionals who deliver them predominantly in accord with the medical model of disability. Most of those now benefiting from special education are deaf and blind people through day 'care' institutions, or residential centers with the exception of a few classes in ordinary schools in the community. The huge number of potential beneficiaries compared with the total currently served implies that an enormous amount of work needs to be done. Despite its origin as a form of inclusion, special education in Afghanistan to some extent can be considered as segregating practices to many disabled people.

The lack of effective organizations of disabled people together with the inaccessibility of resources - information and policies, etc - makes the development of special and inclusive education very slow. A large number of disabled people continue therefore to be excluded from their right to education and this makes the experience of disability difficult for all parties concerned.

The concern in this account is to bring forward ideas related to the social model of disability, especially with regard to future disability studies and inclusive education.

References

Abberley, P. (1987), ‘The Concept of Oppression and the Development of a Social Theory of Disability’, Disability, Handicap and Society, Vol. 12(1), pp. 19-55.

Civic Voluntary Group (2003) The Situation of Disabled Children in the Education System in Afghanistan: a study for the city of Kabul. Kabul: GVC.

Coleridge, P. (1993) Disability, Liberation and Development. Oxford: Oxfam publication.

Oliver, M. (1990) The Politics of Disablement, Basingstoke: Macmillan.

Stone, E and Priestley, M (1996) ‘Parasites, Pawns and Partners: Disability Research and the Role of Non-Disabled Researchers’, British Journal of Sociology, 47, (4), 699-716.

UN (1994) The Standard Roles on the Equalization of Opportunities for Persons With Disabilities. New York.

Wardak, A, Faiz IM, and Turmusani, M (2003) Disability policy development in Afghanistan: towards barriers free society. Expert Meeting towards a Comprehensive and Integral International Convention on Protection and Promotion of the Rights and Dignity of Persons with Disabilities. June 2-4, UNESCAP, Bangkok.

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