Educating Deaf Children in Humanitarian Aid Contexts
Worldwide, there are an estimated 4 million school-aged refugee children out of school (Richard & Bohan-Jacquot, 2020, p.19). Unfortunately, there is no data on exactly how many of those children are deaf, but we do know that one-third of the global population of school-aged children out of school are disabled, 10.3 million disabled people are forcibly displaced due to persecution, and morbidity rates are two to four times higher for disabled people in disaster situations than they are for those who are not disabled (International Disability Alliance, Handicap International, & CBM, 2019, p. 4). These statistics indicate the pressing need for a change in how humanitarian aid organizations care for, and provide aid to education for disabled people. However, humanitarian aid organizations, including those that provide humanitarian aid to education, have historically struggled to provide adequate care to people who are disabled, including to the subject of this paper: deaf children.
The issue of providing equitable access to humanitarian aid for disabled folks has been a prevalent issue in the humanitarian world since 1981 when UNHCR (the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) used their Nobel Peace Prize money to establish a Special Trust Fund for Handicapped Refugees (Mizra, 2011, p. 1528). But in part because statistics are not usually disaggregated by ability, most humanitarian interventions still fail to adequately provide for disabled people, including deaf children. Organizations often cite lack of financial, material, and informational resources when accounting for their failures to provide equitable access to disabled people in humanitarian contexts (Richard & Bohan-Jacquot, 2020, p.20).
