Education is the foundation for everything else. Without it, children with disabilities grow up with fewer options, less voice, and less power to shape their own lives. Yet across Southern Africa, millions of learners with disabilities are still being failed by education systems that were not built with them in mind.

Schools are often physically inaccessible. Teachers are not trained to support learners with different impairments. Assistive technology — tools like Braille materials, hearing aids, or adapted learning aids — is scarce or unaffordable. Where inclusive education policies exist, they frequently lack the budgets, oversight, and complementary support services needed to make them work in practice. The result is that learners with disabilities are either excluded from school entirely, or placed in settings where they cannot learn on equal terms.

SA-IEP works to change this. The programme pushes for education systems across the SADC region to be genuinely accessible — not just on paper, but in classrooms, in curricula, and in the resources governments commit to the task.

A significant piece of work under this programme has been SAFOD’s development of a draft Regional Inclusive Early Childhood Development and Education (ECDE) Strategy Framework. This policy document was designed to guide the SADC Secretariat, member states, and other stakeholders on how to make early childhood education services universally available and genuinely inclusive across the region. SAFOD submitted a proposal to the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa (OSISA) to support advocacy for the adoption and implementation of this strategy — working in a three-way partnership with TRANAC and the Africa Early Childhood Network (AFECN), and targeting six countries in the region.

Inclusive education was also a core theme at SAFOD’s 2022 Regional Disability Roundtable Forum in Johannesburg. The forum brought together organisations including MIET Africa and AfECN to assess progress on inclusive education, share evidence, and identify what governments and development partners need to do differently. Breakout sessions and panel discussions produced practical outcomes on how to close the gap between inclusive education policy and classroom reality.

The #Inclusive Young Voices project, run under the SA-CYD programme, also carried education as one of its core advocacy themes. Youth ambassadors in five countries were trained to advocate for their right to inclusive, quality education — directly challenging the systems that exclude them.

Education cannot be the last sector to include persons with disabilities. SA-IEP makes the case that it must be one of the first — and that the investment required is not charity, but obligation.