At the Global Disability Summit 2025, education partners reemphasized their commitment to ensuring quality education for girls and boys with disabilities.

Participants spoke with one voice about the criticality of putting children with disabilities at the center of education policy and programming.

Following the World Bank’s lead, the UK government committed to making all education programs inclusive by 2030.

As partners prepare to deliver on their commitments, the Global Partnership for Education and Sightsavers reflect on how international agencies and donors can take concrete action to accelerate progress towards inclusive education in a changing world.

Inclusion benefits everyone

Education is a fundamental human right, yet for many of the 240 million children with disabilities around the world it remains a distant reality.

Children with disabilities are consistently left behind, being almost 50% more likely to have never attended school and 42% less likely to have foundational reading and numeracy skills than their peers without disabilities (UNICEF, 2021).

When girls and boys with disabilities also face additional discrimination related to their gender, socio-economic situation, status as a refugee, or other life experience, the barriers to participation in education can be even higher.

Girls with disabilities are the most excluded group of children from primary school to higher education settings (Women Enabled International).

Educating children with disabilities supports girls and boys to develop skills and abilities that enhance well-being, allows them to contribute to their communities, and increases their earning potential as adults.

For example, providing assistive technology to meet the learning needs of children with disabilities increases their later lifetime income by more than US$100,000 in low- and middle-income countries (ATScale).

To create inclusive learning environments, teachers should be trained to use inclusive pedagogies and to teach students with varied backgrounds and abilities (UNESCO 2020).

When teachers are trained to support different learning needs, the quality of education is enhanced for all learners.

How can education actors make systems more inclusive by 2030?

Inclusive education requires collaboration across sectors and among different stakeholders. There are multiple pathways to integrate disability inclusion into the broader education agenda through strengthening systems.

Education actors including policy makers, civil society, communities, families, persons with disabilities and their representative organizations all have a role to play.

They may want to begin by adopting some of the recommendations below:

1. Embed inclusion from the start

Inclusion must be intentional. Inclusive development requires thought at every stage to mainstream disability inclusion into planning, policy-making, financing, practice and reporting. When inclusion is embedded into strategies and programs, the impact can be substantial.

Under its GPE 2025 strategy, GPE supported partner countries to ‘hardwire’ gender equality, which has led to 90% of partnership compacts (countries’ plans to transform their education systems) including a priority reform that takes gender equality into account (GPE, 2024).

As development agencies update their strategies ahead of the 2030 Agenda deadline, they should ensure that approaches that include children with disabilities are expressly integrated into strategic objectives, guidance for country-level work, results frameworks, and asks to donors.

2. Support the collection and uptake of data and evidence

Governments require accurate data to identify inequities in education access, participation and learning.

Data on students with disabilities, both in school and out of school, must be collected systematically, and disaggregated by factors such as gender, displacement/refugee status, and geography. This allows a more nuanced understanding of the barriers faced by different groups of students and enables evidence-based, targeted interventions.

Education management information systems (EMIS) should be strengthened to incorporate data on children with disabilities. This disaggregated data should be used to plan education reform, inform individualized education plans and targeted initiatives for learners with disabilities, as well as enable more equitable resource allocation.

International agencies must support efforts to strengthen education data systems in partner countries. They should also use disaggregated data to inform their own programs, integrate data on children with disabilities into results frameworks, include disability specific targets, and build the evidence base of what works to make systems more inclusive.

3. Support equitable financial allocations

The huge financing gap for education makes it imperative that limited resources are used strategically and reach the most marginalized. Inclusive schools help improve the efficiency and ultimately the cost-effectiveness of the entire education system. (UNESCO, 1994).

The costs of making systems inclusive are often less than expected, and a significant portion of expenditure benefits all learners (GPE, 2024). For example, accessible infrastructure and an inclusive curriculum benefit all children.

Decisions about how to allocate limited financial resources (whether domestic or international) should not only assess the cost of each intervention, but also whether results are distributed fairly (DfID, 2015).

International agencies can also support governments to design, implement, and evaluate equity-based budgeting, and ensure that the lessons learned and evidence gained from these experiences are disseminated widely.

Disability markers, such as the one by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development - Development Assistance Committee (OECD-DAC), can be used to track the extent to which aid is inclusive.

By adopting a disability marker, international agencies can support a robust and transparent system to track and report on education expenditure, and to assess how equitable these investments are (IDDC, IETG).

4. Engage diverse voices to promote mutual accountability and monitoring of inclusive education

Governments and international organizations should adopt a learning mindset, engaging continually with organizations of people with disabilities (OPDs) and others to strengthen approaches to inclusion.

They should encourage engagement in national and international education platforms, such as local education groups, and take steps to make processes inclusive for persons with disabilities, who are often best placed to advise on the barriers they face to access quality education.

In Zambia, Sightsavers worked with the Zambia Federation of Disability Organisations (ZAFOD), to empower children with disabilities to access education. Through community engagement, Sightsavers supported communities in Chinsali to identify children with disabilities and encourage them to enroll in their local school, exceeding the target for enrollments.

The project also helped local stakeholders develop skills to advocate for the rights of children with disabilities. That led to an increase in the number of local organizations for people with disabilities from 3 to 23 in Muchinga Province who, through their advocacy, ensured newly constructed classrooms were accessible.

The journey to inclusion is different for every country. For more ideas about how to strengthen inclusive education in every context, please see the joint recommendations made by more than 20 organizations ahead of the 2025 Global Disability Summit.