Members of Parliament (MPs) have poked holes in education for children with disabilities, indicating that there is no single public school to cater to special academic needs for such children.
They raised the issue on Wednesday, December 23, 2020 during a plenary sitting of the Chamber of Deputies that adopted the law governing education in Rwanda.
MP Eugene Mussolini, who represents persons with disabilities said that the special needs education for children with disabilities should be catered for from primary to tertiary levels.
"This law does not make any provision for the construction of public schools to care for the special education for children [with disabilities],” he said.
The law provides that primary education is mandatory and free, for all, in public schools.
However, it does give special attention to children with disabilities.
MPs argued that this situation makes effective education for children with disabilities difficult to achieve, saying it was undermining efforts to bridge inequality between children with and those without disabilities.
MP Pierre-Claver Rwaka said that there is a need for policymakers to give attention to children with disabilities.
He added that the country heavily relies on charity organisations for the education of children with disabilities, an arrangement he said was unsustainable.
"The government does not have any public school that supports the education of children with disabilities,” he said, suggesting that it should be considered in the proposed ministerial order determining modalities for the provision of education to students with disabilities.
In addition, Rwaka decried the lack of specialists in education for children with special needs, recommending that the government puts more efforts into training such specialists.
Damien Nyabyenda, Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education, ICT, Culture and Youth which scrutinised the bill, said that as the education for children with disabilities is provided for in the law, it is giving the Government a responsibility to take greater care of it and build specific public schools for that purpose if need be.
Meanwhile, MPs had earlier raised the same issue when Prime Minister Edouard Ngirente was, on December 1, 2020, presenting the government’s activities in the education sector to the bicameral parliament
Rwaka said that the parents of children with disabilities were challenged by the cost of their education and that government-owned schools would ease that cost.
PM Ngirente told legislators that the government has been supporting private schools that offer education to children with disabilities, indicating that there are seven schools that receive such children for primary and secondary education levels.
However, he said, the government would consider the idea to have public school for the children with disabilities.
In 2018, there were 17,133 pupils with disability in primary schools, and 4,202 students with disabilities in secondary schools, according to the Rwanda Statistical YearBook 2019 produced by the National Institute of Statistics of Rwanda.