NGO Urges Global Action for Inclusive Education for Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs)
Mrs. Ifedinma Nwigwe, Executive Director and Co-Founder of Maple Leaf Early Years Foundation, has called for global action to deploy the scheme in emergency management, particularly for internally displaced persons and refugees, as the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) emphasises the importance of inclusive education.
According to UNICEF, inclusive education entails transforming the entire education system, including legislation and policy, financing, administration, design, delivery, and monitoring, as well as school organisation.
Speaking at the 2024 The Zero Project Conference’s international conference and awards ceremony in Vienna, Austria, Nwigwe stated that inclusive education can transform learning environments by ensuring that students feel free, safe, and equal.
She emphasised the importance of creating a learning environment that is welcoming to all types of students, regardless of their social, physical, emotional, or intellectual circumstances, and that such an environment allows them to focus less on their apparent unique circumstances while allowing them to leverage other aspects of their strengths and energies.
According to her, inclusive education is important because it creates an educational environment in which students from various backgrounds and abilities can learn together rather than isolating certain groups of learners due to special needs.
She said: “It is imperative that we accommodate all children regardless of their physical, intellectual, social, emotional, linguistic, or other conditions. This is important because educational interventions are already limited in displaced settings because of their peculiar circumstances, and as a result, an inclusive environment is vital. Inclusive education has proven to increase the level of empathy in the pupils and also deepen the sense of accommodation and tolerance that strengthen the human support systems; it builds up the bank of emotional intelligence in the children while also boosting their confidence and ability to compete irrespective of their peculiar conditions. I say this because due to the type of trauma and other difficult conditions that they have been exposed to, inclusivity in educational programmes is the only means of ensuring that every pupil feels a sense of accommodation.”
Nwigwe praised the management of educational processes in many of Nigeria’s displaced persons environments, claiming that the country has taken a proactive approach to incorporating inclusivity into the education of distressed citizens.
“In many of the interventions we have made with the National Commission for Refugees Migrants and IDPs, and the National Commission for People Living with Disabilities, inclusive education has been integral to every intervention we have made, and the results have been commendable. We are always intentional about ensuring that all children living with disabilities, for instance, are fully accommodated and provided with tools and motivations that facilitate learning in a plural environment without making them feel different,” she stated.
This, she stated, has aided the healing process for both displaced people and those with disabilities because, according to her, “psychosocial support from being around children whose abilities may differ from theirs makes a significant impact on their journey of self-reliance and healing.”
She revealed that, thanks to her interventions and the support of the Nigerian government and its agencies, her organisation has been able to establish holistic and safe learning environments for children, particularly those who feel different due to their disability, allowing them to easily integrate into their surroundings.
The NGO, she revealed, provided school feeding in internally displaced persons camps through its Transitional Learning Centre intervention to improve the comfort and disposition of the beneficiaries.
NGO Urges Global Action for Inclusive Education for Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs)
