Regional News

Regional News

EENET Asia
A new regional network – EENET Asia – has been established for Central, South and South East Asia. It aims to further develop EENET’s vision of inclusive education and promote the sharing of accessible information between practitioners and stakeholders regionally. An e-group has been set up to facilitate conversations and debates. EENET Asia’s first regional newsletter will be published in mid-2005. The network is translating this into various languages (Chinese, Bhasa Indonesia and are planned so far). It will also be produced in electronic and printed versions, as not all readers will have Internet access. EENET Asia invites readers to contact them if they have any sponsorship ideas to cover printing and mailing costs.

Middle East and North Africa
Arabic EENET is a partner of the Enabling Education Network. It promotes the sharing of information about inclusive education within the Middle East and North Africa region, via Arabic language documents. It is currently hosted by Save the Children in Egypt.

The Arabic section of EENET’s website has been running for over a year. In late 2004, Arabic EENET conducted a small user survey. Most users felt the quality was good and the web pages were easy to find, download and read, but there was not enough material available. They wanted more articles about disability, gender, poverty and quality education, among others. We therefore encourage readers from this region to send articles on these issues. Users also felt that the pages would help develop networking between organisations, but would probably not do much to change policy or community attitudes. We therefore challenge readers to help Arabic EENET develop its web pages so that they do contribute to regional policy and attitude change.

In the last few years there have been great developments in the Middle East and North Africa, bringing to life the vision of inclusive education for all. The Index for Inclusion in the Arabic World was published in 2003, and is now in use in eight countries in the region. Save the Children’s work in the region is beginning to bear fruit. The Egyptian ruling party adopted inclusion as its second priority within the education section of its platform. The Ministry of Social Affairs is distributing inclusion guidelines for use in Egypt’s kindergartens and pre-schools. Activities of various Ministry offices in Morocco show that inclusion is now recognised as a priority within the promotion of ‘la vie scholaire’. The Palestinian Authority Ministry of Education, and sections of the service provider for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) are now talking about inclusion as one of their goals. A national conference was held, after countrywide consultations in Lebanon, to draw up recommendations on developing educational inclusion to put before the new government.

The very word for inclusion in Arabic was virtually unknown before Save the Children started its initiatives in 2001. Today the term, and at least some of the concepts, have become part of the daily educational debate in the region.

J.R.A. Williams, Education and ECCD Advisor, Save the Children MENA. Contact Arabic EENET: arabic-eenet@eenet.org.uk , or via EENET’s UK postal address

Researching Inclusive Education in the Caribbean
Inclusion International’s members, the Caribbean Association for Mobilizing Resources and Opportunities for People with Developmental Disabilities (CAMRODD), and the Canadian Association for Community Living were recently involved in a World Bank initiative to research inclusive education in the Caribbean. The project is part of a broader strategy to study the status of inclusive education in the Latin America and Caribbean region, and to identify areas in which the World Bank can support governments in these efforts. A workshop was held in April to discuss the research which had taken place in St Lucia, but also in Suriname, St Kitts and Jamaica.
Contact: conniel@cacl.ca www.inclusion-international.org