Enabled Children Initiative

The Enabled Children Initiative (ECI) is an independent non-profit organization registered in the United States as a 501(c)(3), with a branch office in Afghanistan (registration number 465), that supports children with disabilities in Afghanistan. ECI has been operating in Afghanistan since 2010 and today, has grown to deliver six programs across six provinces of Afghanistan, with over 50 Afghan employees.

Our mission is to:

• Provide safe spaces for children and youth with disabilities to access their rights to education, healthcare and basic services

• Increase awareness and understanding of disability across Afghanistan

• Promote inclusion for persons with disabilities

• Support dignified lives for persons with disabilities

Our vision is of:

A more inclusive Afghanistan, where persons with disabilities are embraced and respected by their families and communities, and have equal access to education, healthcare, and employment opportunities to reach their full potential as human beings.

Our guiding principles are:

• We believe disability is not inability.

• We believe in inclusion and integration of children with disabilities, and keeping families together.

• We believe people with disabilities deserve a dignified life and equal opportunities to education, employment and other human rights.

• We believe in empowering and enabling families and children with supportive services, giving a ‘hand-up’, instead of a ‘hand-out.’

• We believe in volunteerism and making our funds go a long way. 90% of funds raised goes directly to programs.

• We believe in partnerships and collaboration, so we can learn and improve our work.

Lael Mohib is founder and executive director of the Enabled Children Initiative. Lael is in charge of strategic direction of ECI, fundraising and donor liaison, and board management. She works closely with the team in Afghanistan on public relations and communications, donor reporting, administrative and financial management, program design and implementation support, and monitoring and evaluation.

ECI has a well-established organizational and management structure in place, with clear lines of reporting, and delegation of responsibilities. We maintain daily communication and contact and utilize program management software that assists in tracking and achieving deliverables on time. For the proposed LEAP project, our Executive Director will serve as the Team Lead, with support as required from the Country Director based in Afghanistan, who is managing the program team for the proposed LEAP project. Weekly program and team meetings are already an established part of this program implementation plan, and the LEAP project will be integrated into the program implementation plan.

Improve effectiveness of a teacher training program on disability inclusion in hard-to-reach districts of Afghanistan

The problem this solution seeks to solve is a severe lack of educational opportunities for Afghan children with disabilities, due to discrimination and stigma, lack of adapted learning resources, and lack of teacher training. Our solution is particularly concerned with teacher professional development, and will be looking at the issue of how to train novice teachers in hard to reach districts to accommodate children with disabilities in classrooms in systematic ways such that it also responds to  the larger learner variability in the classroom.

Research shows that nearly 20% of Afghan children have some form of disability (Asia Foundation Model Disability Survey for Afghanistan, published in May 2020), and most of them are out of school. The 2016 Education Sector Analysis estimated that 95 % of Afghan children living with disability are not attending school. Since 2021, the situation has worsened for children with disabilities. Afghan families with disability in their household are most likely to have children resorting to hard labor to make ends meet and were four times more likely to have lost their income over the past year (Save the Children report, 2022, pg. 9-12). The occurrence of children with disabilities staying out of school has increased over the past year, with 1 out of 7 Afghan children reporting that they don't attend school due to disability (Save the Children report, 2022, pg.17). Afghanistan has very few special education schools, no inclusive education programs, and no teacher-training programs for inclusive education. Stigma, discrimination and misunderstanding of disability leads most families to isolate their child at home. 

One of the main obstacles to disability inclusion in the classroom is that teachers are not prepared. The SABER Service Delivery: The Learning Crisis in Afghanistan report published by the World Bank in 2018 showed that teacher content knowledge and pedagogical command was poor, as was their ability to assess students and implement effective classroom practices. Given that these challenges are exacerbated by the absence of in-service training in recent years, investments in teacher training is valuable—even more so when it can be linked to results.

As partner to Street Child UK, ECI is part of a consortium led by the Aga Khan Foundation that includes implementing partners Street Child UK, Norwegian Refugee Committee, Save the Children and other local Afghan NGOs (including ECI) that is aimed at reaching 90,000 out-of-school Afghan children with community-based education across 15 provinces of Afghanistan over the course of 2 years. The project will reach 3,000 classrooms and 3,000 teachers. The project is aiming to reach at least 10,000 children with disabilities, incorporating inclusive education practice and disability awareness training into the teacher training package to make classrooms inclusive in a way that will benefit all students and all ranges of learning variability. 

ECI's component of the project focuses on the inclusive education training for 30 teacher trainers and 15 disability inclusion specialists who will be dispatched to the field to train teachers. Our approach is as follows:

Training of Trainers & Specialists

The training objectives are two-fold: 1) to prepare approx. 30 IP trainers to train teachers in provincial, community-based schools on how to make their classrooms inclusive and how to effectively teach children with disabilities, and 2) to prepare approx. 15 specialists to provide on-going support and guidance to teachers in community-based schools on inclusive education practices.

To achieve the training objectives, ECI will conduct the following trainings:

1)  An initial training at the beginning (year 1) of the project, duration approx. 1 week

2)  A refresher training during year 2 of the project, which will also serve as a practical workshop, duration approx. 1 week

Continuous Support following Trainings

ECI will provide follow-up support (virtually) throughout the project in order to provide individualized support and guidance based on the specific inclusive education needs of the community-based schools in each province. This will provide a continuous source of support to Specialists throughout the du- ration of the project, to ensure continuity and implementation of learning objectives. 

Role of Enabled Children School as a Resource Hub

ECI’s Enabled Children School is Afghanistan’s only special education school that caters to children with all types of disabilities (sensory, physical and intellectual) of primary age. The school employees 18 staff with a combined 70 years of experience in teaching children with disabilities. Our teachers and administrative team have developed a unique approach to teaching children according to their specific needs, including adapting the national curriculum and exams, implementing a family-based approach to holistic rehabilitation that includes psychosocial counseling and physical therapy, and utilizing experiential teaching techniques to better engage children with disabilities. 

Throughout the duration of the project, the Enabled Children School will serve as a resource hub for the community-based classrooms located across the provinces. The school will be on standby to provide support, guidance, trouble-shooting and problem solving for specific cases, practical advice and solutions, and assistance with referrals, etc. ECI's designated Training Coordinator will serve as a point of contact and link between the trainees and the Enabled Children School. This will help ensure no child gets left behind and a source of support is always available.

The level of research we have conducted includes foundational research and formative research. Though we have not conducted research on the effectiveness of this specific solution proposed here, we have conducted research on the approach taken to inclusive education and special education at our Enabled Children School, which includes an on-going research project conducted by a US-based university. We also conduct internal research (on-going monitoring and evaluation of programs) on the effectiveness of our approach, including with parents of students enrolled in our school, caretakers, teachers and educators. 

Our internal research has primarily shown positive outcomes for students in terms of their learning outcomes, their behavior, and their participation in their families and communities. Our research with families/parents has shown positive behavior change toward their child with a disability and a decrease in discriminatory practices and negative perceptions of disability, as well as parents’ stronger effort and commitment to pursuing education for their child.

This teacher training program we are about to undertake will impact learning outcomes for 90,000 Afghan children. We need our solution to be informed by evidence so we can make sure our approach is effect. As this is a two-year program, we can use the information to course correct if needed. This is also a unique solution—we do not know of other examples of teachers in hard-to-reach areas of Afghanistan being trained on disability inclusion at this scale. There is not much evidence around such training interventions. As a medium-sized organization with limited resources, ECI has not been able to include budget for any evaluation of the solution, so this will be a golden opportunity to provide an evidence-base for the solution. It will help us step back and look at the program and identify where are the levers that can be pulled to cause the biggest increases in quality of disability inclusive education in the short span of 2 years. 

• What are effective ways to create inclusive classrooms in an environment like Afghanistan where discrimination, lack of access and lack of resources are persistent barriers?
• How can a training approach be maximized for desired outcomes in this context?
• What measures can be taken to ensure inclusive education trainings are beneficial to and inclusive of students of all learning variabilities? 
• How can implementation fidelity be measured and maintained while cascading a training on disability inclusive education from Teacher Trainers to novice teachers?

Desired outputs could include one or all of the following:

• Creation of a toolkit which provides materials to help ECI implement the project, for example, training, monitoring and assessment tools, implementation frameworks, etc.
• Analytical repository of best practices that have worked in similar contexts. 
• Guidance on how to measure and maximize impact. This could include existing classroom observation tools which assist in observing inclusive teaching practices.

The outputs will have a direct and immediate bearing on the design and delivery of disability inclusive education trainings in the upcoming Education Cannot Wait funded multi-year resilience program in 15 provinces of Afghanistan (Uruzgan, Herat, Nangarhar, Badghis, Kunduz, Sari  e Pul, Kandahar, Nimroz, Paktia, Faryab, Paktika, Helmand, Badkshan, Takhar, Ghazni) . The outputs shall feed directly into the implementation, including the activity plan, training plan, coaching plan and monitoring and evaluation plan of the disability inclusive education training component. As the upcoming project is a 2-year project, depending on the timing of the LEAP sprint, the delivered outputs shall feed into these plans either in Year 1 or in Year 2. As ECI would put these outputs into action in coordination with 6 other organizations, it shall contribute to the strategic development of the disability inclusive education space in Afghanistan with shared capacity across the education cluster to ensure that all children are on the path to become expert learners.

Short term outcomes:

• Changing instructional practices at scale to address the issue of learner/learning variability in 3000 classrooms causing effective inclusion and improved learning among 10000 children with disabilities in Afghanistan
• Foundational evidence base created for this solution

Long-term outcomes:

• Expansion of project to reach more learners/classrooms 
• Building upon the established evidence base to increase impact, through further research and studies
• Increased capacity of ECI and the larger Afghanistan education cluster to systematically respond to learner variability in government schools and community based schools