"I have parents of children with disabilities who come to my school. We try for 1-2 weeks but I meet with the parents and we cry together because I have to turn them away because there is nothing I can do."

– School Principal, Phnom Penh, Cambodia

The Need

• There are an estimated 1 billion people with disabilities worldwide

• 80% of people with disabilities live in developing countries

• Today, in the wake of the Khmer Rouge's brutal reign, approximately 1.6 million Cambodians (10% of the population) live with disabilities

• The typical top-down and short-term approach to aid for countries like Cambodia often means members of local communities are not given the agency to identify problems or be a part of sustainable solutions

• Development projects in Cambodia only rarely reach people with disabilities

• Primary and secondary school teachers are not yet sufficiently equipped with the knowledge and concept necessary to create inclusive classrooms

Identify Problem

2016-2018

DSI conducted needs assessments with our key Cambodian partners and in-country disability stakeholders across 2016–2018. These assessments helped identify a critical need for culturally-relevant teacher trainings on disability topics. Disability services in Cambodian primary and secondary government schools are virtually non-existent. Many teachers do not yet have the tools or strategies to serve children with special needs or to create inclusive classrooms. Cut off from educational opportunities, children with disabilities in Cambodia today are much too likely to become caught in a cycle of poverty and lifelong cultural exclusion. However, as our partners showed us, Cambodia is poised for change. In-country momentum to expand capacity in inclusive education and education for children with disabilities continues to grow, from individual teachers up to the government level.

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“I want the specific strategies to deal or teach this child, and real practice, not only the theory because at the moment I feel it’s hard to teach her as I don’t have enough skills to help her learn.”

– Classroom Teacher, Kandal Province, Cambodia

Check out some of our Cambodian Disability Curriculum partners: 

Build Solutions 

Model &

Pilot Module:

2019-2021

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Answering this call for assistance, in 2019 DSI assembled an Advisory Working Group of professionals with expertise ranging from international development, to disability rights, to inclusive education, to public health. This group began by studying what our Cambodian partners have told us about local needs, capacity, and learning norms. Then they determined the most appropriate training model to use and began carefully building our first Disability Curriculum training module: “Helping Children with Disabilities Learn.”

The project follows the "Training of Trainers" model. Working alongside our in-country partners, DSI will help teach 20 Cambodian "Master Trainers": 1) the content of our first training module; and 2) how to successfully pass this content on to other groups of teachers across the country.

Our Advisory Working Group is creating and embedding diverse resources that range from sample inclusive lesson plans and scripts to use during training sessions to careful evaluation tools so that we can measure how well our training materials work for our Master Trainers, both during and after training sessions.

Adequate funding will allow us to pilot our "Helping Children with Disabilities Learn" module in Cambodia in 2021.

Learn more about our: Advisory Working Group

Step Back

& Scale

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2021-2025

DSI will work carefully with our partners and our Advisory Working Group to revise our first module after implementing and learning for the pilot monitoring and evaluation data. After that, we will create and train Master Trainers on additional modules on more specific disability topics. In the meantime, we will continue checking in with and evaluating Master Trainers involved with our first module. We intend to unveil at least three additional modules from 2022-2024, while empowering our in-country partners to take more responsibility and leadership over the continuation of the project. This will smooth the way for us to hand over primary control of the project to our partners in Cambodia.

At that point, we will consider adapting and scaling the project into one of the numerous disability organizations in other countries that have reached out for our assistance and partnership with DSI.