Inclusive education basic school complex for Ho

A model Inclusive-Education basic school complex, is being planned for the Ho Municipal Area.

Partners so far listed to implement the school project, tentatively planned to begin admissions in two years are, VOICE-Ghana, a Ho-based disability interest think-tank, Kekeli Foundation and Rotary UK, France and Germany branches.

Mr Bright Dey, Head of Planning and ICT at the Volta Regional Education Office in Ho, dropped the hint during a training workshop on adaptive computing for ICT Teachers.

He said the Ho project would be a reference point, as Ghana tried to implement inclusive education for all schools.

The workshop for 45 teachers, selected from the Ho Municipal Area, Ho-West and Central Tongu districts, was under the auspices of the New Horizon Foundation for the Blind (NHFB), a Ho-based NGO, with support from the Disability Rights Fund of the USA.

Mr Dey said ensuring PwDs had the opportunities to get good education, must begin from the teacher training institutions, where teachers would be imbued with the techniques of tutoring various levels and kinds of PwDs.

Mr Eric Ofori, NHFB Coordinator said the trend in the world today, based on the United Nations Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities (CRPD), was for every nation to input needs of People with Disabilities (PWDs) into all facets of state programming.

He said in education the approach should be inclusiveness and not integration.

Mr Ofori said all dealings with PwDs should be rights-based and not the sympathy theory, as PwDs had the capacities and capabilities to equal the abled in many endeavours.

“We appreciate you being sympathetic to us (PwDs), but what we need most is the opportunities to develop ourselves,” he stated.

Mr Michael Tsikudo, Head of the Special Education Desk at the Municipal Directorate of Education, said data on numbers of PwDs in schools in five of the 10 circuits of the municipal area had been collected.

He disclosed that a total of 891 pupils have learning disabilities.

Mr Anthony Adonoo, Ho Municipal ICT Coordinator said only 25 schools in the Municipal Area had ICT labs and that NGOs were the major funding partners.