Review of the Current Status of Ensuring Inclusive Education in Ethiopia

Abstract

As a crucial strategy for guaranteeing equitable access and high-quality education for all students, inclusive education has attracted attention in both rich and poor nations. Ethiopia began implementing inclusive education comparatively sooner than other developing nations and established the "Special Needs Education Program Strategy" in 2006, which was updated in 2012 to become the "Special Needs/Inclusive Education Strategy." The Ethiopian government has continued to prioritize inclusive education for youngsters with disabilities, but there are still difficulties in reaching this aim. This review paper offers a thorough analysis of the present state, obstacles, and prospects for inclusive education insurance in Ethiopia. Using numerous sources, such as electronic databases and academic repositories, the review article analyses a diverse selection of peer-reviewed papers, publications, and literature up to September 2024. Reports from the Ethiopian Ministry of Education and the grey literature were also taken into account. According to the results, the obstacles to implementing inclusive education varied from the lack of a required national inclusive policy to the low income of the families of children with disabilities. Among the obstacles identified were attitudinal barriers, knowledge barriers, policy barriers, economic barriers, infrastructural barriers, insufficient stakeholder cooperation in education, misconceptions regarding inclusive education, a scarcity of skilled instructors, inadequate financial distribution, subpar school infrastructure, and the absence of a mandatory inclusive policy.