Making educational research count for children with disabilities in Malawi, Kenya and Uganda

This project aims to address the exclusion of disabled children in Africa from quality education. It will do so by establishing a wide network of partners from a variety of sectors including UK and African universities, NGOs, educational managers and coordinators, practitioners and government staff in Kenya, Malawi and Uganda.

Foremost, the project will build on the current collaborations between the University of Birmingham, the University of Cambridge, the International NGO Sightsavers and specialist education communities in the three target countries, Kenya, Malawi and Uganda.

The project will draw on existing primary research to address a number of issues around the current educational support available for children with visual impairment, focusing on Malawi, Uganda and Kenya. The ultimate goal is to strengthen the capacity of our local partners allowing them to set their own research agendas and inform the development of effective education systems. In order to successfully target this implementation gap, the key aspects to be addressed are:

- Insufficient measures to implement research findings designed to develop new practices in the classroom;
- Lack of evidence available to local stakeholders, (including lack of information in an accessible or understandable format);
- Constraints posed by insufficient capacities of local actors to interpret research findings and their transferability;
- Challenges posed by the isolation from a wider academic community involved in education research.

The above points will be addressed with reference to existing research in a series of eight interactive work packages involving all stakeholders, ensuring a reciprocal flow of knowledge between all parties.

The key output will be to establish an innovative online community which will enable the free flow of information in the form of webinars, podcasts, topical forum discussion, the submission of publications and blog posts. Stakeholders will be encouraged to continue to contribute to this community after the initial 12-month period, establishing a space where ongoing future research can be discussed and developed. The intention is that the research outputs from this international online community will influence policy in the area of the education of children and young people with visual impairment and across a broader disability agenda in Africa.

Our goal is to make a difference to the lives of children and young people with disabilities in the East, Central and Southern Region of Africa. We will do this by working closely with practitioners and stakeholders who have direct and indirect contact with children with disabilities in Kenya, Malawi and Uganda. Sightsavers has a strong mandate to develop and sustain 'demonstration' projects with a view to modelling good practice in educational provision for children with visual impairment. Research into role of the itinerant teachers has identified the important role specialist teachers have in sensitising communities and identifying children with visual impairment for clinical assessments and corrective treatment over the past 30 years in the region (Lynch et al., 2011a, 2011b). There are, however, questions about the level of impact they have on supporting the educational inclusion of children with severe visual loss and blindness and to what extent they can make a difference to these children's lives at school. Governments are becoming more aware of the costs of maintaining this cadre when there are other important agendas where there is a need for increased spending (e.g. education of other marginalised groups, girl education, etc.) With the introduction of new policy on special education and inclusive education and recent discussions about Post-2015 MDGs, this is an excellent opportunity to use the Knowledge Exchange Opportunity to share some of the changes in practice since the research was conducted and to be able to learn about experiences within their own country and, more broadly, in the region.

This project aligns with two of ESRC's strategic priorities: Management, Health and Wellbeing and Social Diversity and Population Dynamics as well as its delivery plan by 'ensuring researchers have the necessary skills, methods, data and opportunities to collaborate internationally' and for two UK universities 'to play a significant role in international collaborative responses to global issues'. It therefore has the potential to make measurable difference in practice particularly as we are targeting beneficiaries who are often excluded from dissemination to improve their knowledge and understanding of research conducted in the three countries.

We plan to build the capacity of in-country researchers' skills and their expertise in the area of education, disability and development at the three targeted institutions as well as address ways to meet the needs of those stakeholders (e.g. those working in non-government organisations) to implement changes in their own working practices. We also plan to address those areas of enquiry that are important to our 'user-groups' and create activities that are in line with their expectations as well as meet Sightsavers' new strategy to expand its mission to serve children with other disabilities as well as its core target group of children with visual impairment across all countries where it plans to set up new programmes or restructure existing ones.

Furthermore, we wish to make sure that this collaborative process will influence the way practitioners support children with disabilities in the medium to long term. This knowledge exchange opportunity will seek to find ways of encouraging the cross-fertilisation of ideas between the research community and end-users at country and regional level.

It is our strong intention to encourage the participants to share their own practices with their peers through the online portal and to encourage them to reflect on their practice in light of the evidence from the different research shared with them, the organised working groups and online discussions will lead to a body of new knowledge that will enable participants to plan their own research in their own locations. We will post practitioner and academic publications onto the portal for ongoing discussion and research planning after this project has ended.