Inclusive education for all 

Through the Inclusive Education for Children project, Sense International aimed to advance the rights of learners with disabilities to access quality inclusive education through advocacy and collective action to ensure the National Education Sector Strategic Plan (NESSP) promotes inclusive education for all learners with disabilities. This was to be achieved through establishing and building capacity for advocacy of inclusive advocacy committees and collective advocacy and influencing at national and county levels. This came in the backdrop of gaps in participation of county government structures in policy formulation 

The key outcome of this Project is the development of the NESSP that was launched in the month of October 2019.  The  NESSP  being  a  plan  for  five  years  ought  to  have  been launched early in the year 2018, since it runs from 2018-2022. The project was designed mid-way to midwife the delivery of NESSP. However, delays were still experienced until the launch of the NESSP in the month of October 2019, when the evaluation was ongoing. Prior to the launch, Sense International developed a simplified   and summarised    version of the NESSP document after stakeholders’ validation and dissemination done to the county stakeholders.  The  simplified  version  was  important  since  the  main  document  is  quite bulky and thus the summary would encourage the stakeholders to read the provisions in the document. 

One of the key wins for SENSE is how it has gained a lot of popularity within the education sector, and more specifically advocating for inclusive education for children with disabilities. The Ministry of Education, Directorate of Special Needs Education consults the team in all matters concerning children with disabilities. 

Beyond Voice, the  project  will seek to address gaps  in  terms  of  participation  of  the  county  government structures  in  policy formulation.  There is need for continued work with the county governments in order to enable them develops endurable policies. The  NESSP  document  is  owned  fully  by  the  Ministry  of  Education which  has committed to  fund  65  per  cent  of  the  total  budget  requirement  for  the  five  years. Civil society organisations who work in the inclusive education sub sector are informed by the priorities set out in the NESSP. Further to this is that a monitoring and evaluation framework is in place to keenly monitor the implantation of NESSP with progress and performance evaluated against a comprehensive set of indicators. The annex contains the multiyear action  plan  which  outlines  the  sequence  of  activities, expected  output  and  Output Indicators  (OVI)  per  activity, resourcing  per  activity  as  well  as  responsible  entities. Besides the multiyear action plan, the annex also contains  the  logical  framework  which  will  help  to  evaluate  the  plan  from  the input level to the outcome.