The progress report of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Research for 2019 does not include all the results achieved in the implementation of the plan of action for implementing the inclusive education development program for 2011-2020. It is thus hard to identify the achieved objectives and the subsequent steps. The data from the published reports are different or these contain partial information about the achieved results. This points to a difficulty in communication at the central level. Also, insufficient resources are provided for inclusive education at the local level, says the monitoring report on the implementation of the action plan for 2019-2020 for implementing the inclusive education development program for 2011-2020, which was compiled by the Center “Speranţa” in cooperation with the Alliance of Organizations for Persons with Disabilities of the Republic of Moldova.
“Of the 37 sub-actions in five intervention areas, 20 were implemented by the end of 2019, which is about 54%. Another 16 sub-actions are in the process of being implemented, but are overdue as they were to be put into practice by the last month of 2019 or earlier,” Gheorghe Zastavnetski, project coordinator at the Center “Speranţa”, stated in a news conference at IPN.
He recommended compiling the annual report on the implementation of the action plan separately from the general progress report of the Ministry of Education so that the persons or the institutions interested in this area know what results were achieved and where increased effort should be made. It is recommended formulating numerical and reference progress indicators so as to facilitate the monitoring of the made progress, incorporating the costs for the planned activities and reporting the costs incurred for implementing the plan.
Ludmila Iachim, executive director of “Motivaţie” Association, presented the monitoring report on the action plan for reforming the disability determination system for 2019. The collected data show that only three of the nine actions were fully implemented. As to the achievement of indicators, 43% of these were achieved, 26% are close to being achieved, 9% are overdue, while 22% weren’t achieved.
Four of the nine monitored permanent actions do not indicate the numerical result indicators. There is no data about the financial resources used to implement the planned actions. In the case of particular actions, the reported progress indicators differed from the set indicators. These are the conclusions reached after monitoring the actions.
To implement the reform, Ludmila Iachim recommends consulting the persons with disabilities and the organizations representing them in the decision-making process on the optimal solutions for reforming the disability determination system, developing or improving the institutional management centered on quality and satisfaction of beneficiaries and ensuring of sign-language interpretation at the meetings of the disability determination commission during the assessment of the file in the presence of persons with hearing impairments.
The monitoring reports were produced in the framework of the project “National Partnerships and Local Involvement for Inclusion of Persons with Disabilities” that is implemented with support from East Europe Foundation in concert with the Center “Partnership for Development” with funds provided by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation and the Government of Sweden.