By Sunday Ani
The Executive Director and Co-founder of Maple Leaf Early Years Foundation, Mrs. Ifedinma Nwigwe, in far away Vienna, Austria, has called for a concerted global action on the imperatives of inclusive education for the internally displaced persons and refugees.
She made the call recently at an international event organised by ‘The Zero Project Conference’
in Vienna, Austria.
This is coming at a time when the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has continued to
emphasise the need for the deployment of the scheme in emergency management, especially
for the internally displaced persons and refugees.
According to the global body, inclusive education involves transforming the whole education
system, including legislation and policy, systems for financing, administration, design, delivery,
and monitoring of education, as well as the way schools are organised.
Speaking at the event Mrs. Nwigwe said inclusive education could transform learning
environments by ensuring that the pupils have a sense of freedom, safety and equality.
She emphasised the importance of making the learning environment conducive for all
categories of pupils, irrespective of their social, physical, emotional, and intellectual conditions,
adding that such an environment makes them think less of their apparent peculiar conditions,
while ensuring they leverage on other aspects of their strengths and energies.
She noted that inclusive education is important because it provides an educational setting,
where students from different backgrounds and with different abilities, learn together without
keeping certain categories of learners in isolation because of their special needs.
“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,” Mrs. Nwigwe stated.
She commended the management of the educational processes in many of Nigeria’s displaced
persons’ environments, and said the country had been proactive in incorporating inclusivity in
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 said, has helped the healing process for both the displaced people and those living
with disabilities because, according to her, the “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 through her interventions and the support provided by the Nigerian
Government and its agencies, his organisation has been able to plant holistic and safe learning
spaces for children, particularly, those who feel different because of their disability, enabling
them to integrate easily in their environment.
The NGO, she further revealed, provided school feeding in internally displaced persons’ camps
through its Transitional Learning Centre intervention, as a means of enhancing the comfort and
disposition of the beneficiaries to learning.
According to Nwigwe, the Zero Project Conference (#ZeroCon24), is a global meeting place to
innovate for disability inclusion. “More than 1,000 people from 100 countries attend the annual
conference at the United Nations Offices in Vienna, and more than 10,000 persons join online or
watch the recorded sessions on Youtube on demand,” she said.