On 27 November 2018, the founding assembly of the Inter-Regional Coalition to Deal with Issues of Children with Disabilities took place. The coalition was formed in the scope of the “For Quality and Accessible Inclusive Education and Social Support” funded by the “Commitment to Constructive Dialogue” project financed by the European Union.
Representatives of 33 coalition member organisations participated.
The goal of the coalition is to contribute to the establishment of inclusive education in Armenia and advocacy of children with disabilities, increasing CSOs’ influence in the processes of developing and implementing public policies in this field.
“Protection of rights of children with disabilities and solution of problems related to ensuring inclusive education in Armenia must be implemented through systemic and not just episodic solutions. Each of you carries out field work in this area every day and so you know the existing problems very well. In this sense, it is very important that you reveal a number of problems, turn them into public policies and try to give them solutions, at the same time monitoring the Government’s programmes,” Karen Zadoyan, the President of the Armenian Lawyers’ Association and the “Commitment to Constructive Dialogue” Project Manager, said.
Naira Arakelyan, the Executive Director of the “Armavir Development Centre” NGO, stressed that on that day the present civil society organisations united their efforts to solve the many problems existing in the field of protection of the rights of children with disabilities and reach systemic changes for the establishment of inclusive education in Armenia.
“Together, we want to contribute to increasing the efficiency of oversight over inclusive education reforms implemented by the government in our country through the coalition, as well as forming and developing cooperation between regional CSOs, the government, and other state agencies, increasing CSOs’ role and participation in the processes of pubic policy development,” she said.
Then, Naira Arakelyan presented the coalition’s rules and regulations and memorandum. The board was formed, and the upcoming joint actions were discussed.
The parties of the coalitions agreed to cooperate in the following directions: implement public oversight projects in centers implementing inclusive education, reveal the existing problems, publicize the results and focus on them the attention of state agencies, develop the CSO-Government cooperation platform for developing and introducing a social inclusion, support and cooperation concept in Armenia, implementing projects aimed at increasing the public’s awareness of inclusive education processes, developing cooperation between coalition member organisations, cooperate with the interested local and international organisations of the sector, etc.
The founding members of the coalition, the “Armavir Development Centre” NGO, “Martuni Women’s Community Council” NGO, the “Hope-98” Vayots Dzor development NGO, and “Young Journalists’ Association” NGO, are jointly implementing the sub-grant project “For Quality and Accessible Inclusive Education and Social Support” in the scope of the “Commitment to Constructive Dialogue” project funded by the European Union.
The main goal of the project is to improve the quality and effectiveness of the educational services rendered by the public education institutions offering inclusive education and the social services rendered by community-based support centres in the RA Armavir, Gegharkunik, Kotayk and Vayots Dzor marzes, increasing CSOs’ influence on public policy development and implementation processes in these sectors.
The “Commitment to Constructive Dialogue” project is implemented with the financial support of the European Union by a consortium of civil society organizations, which are the “Armenian Lawyers’ Association” NGO, Agora Central Europe o.p.s (an NGO from the Czech Republic), the “Armenian Center for Democratic Education-CIVITAS” NGO, the “International Center for Human Development” Public Organization, the “SME Cooperation Association” NGO and the Union of Communities of Armenia.
The overall objective of the project is to enhance the influence of CSOs and their coalitions (networks) on the public policy process. This will enable the organizations (that already work in target coalitions) to gain new resources, unite civil society experts and encourage them to participate in the formation of local and national policy agenda, identify the common problems and priorities and to apply to the government with constructive and strategic policy initiatives.
In the scope of the project, sub-grants have been/will be provided to CSOs and CSO coalitions, aiming at public policy development and achieving tangible results in the 9 target sectors: justice, human rights, public finance management, business, education, social sector: social inclusion of children with disabilities, agriculture, economy, energy.
