By Valentine Oforo, Dodoma
THE Dodoma-based Institute of Rural Development Planning (IRDP) is implementing a helpful project meant to care and building enabling learning environment for the special needs students who have enrolled at the facility.
The humanitarian initiative which focuses to attain rolling out of inclusive education at the institute is being executed under the financial patronage from the Higher Education for Economic Transformation (HEET) project , as well as from the Institute’s internal sources.
Giving an exclusive interview to 'Semamedia' the IRDP Rector, Professor Hozen Mayaya expressed that the institute which operates under the shadow of the Finance Ministry has decided to implement the project in order to ensure the students with special needs are getting their statutory rights to get better education like others.
To further cementing the project’s implementation, Prof Mayaya informed that the state-owned institute has already included demand to recruit professional staffs for training the physical challenged students in its scheme of service.
“In our document pertaining to the institute’s scheme of service, we have requested to recruit tailor-made professionals for mentoring the students with special needs, and we have already dispatched it to the President’s Office-Public Service an Good Governance, awaiting for approval,” the Don informed.
Through the project, he detailed that the Institute is working to identify the students with different forms of disabilities in order to stand a chance to assist them as per their relevant physical impairments.
“The vision is to ensure the institute becomes a better and friendly sky for sheltering and providing equal quality education to all enrolled students, being in irrespective of their physical status,” he expressed.
Giving more details over the development, Dr Sagumo Malenda, the Inclusive Education (EI) Coordinator under the HEET Project at the institute expressed that there over 27 students with special needs at the fast-growing varsity.
According to him, the group incorporate those with hearing impairment, different forms of physical disabilities, poor vision as well as albinism.
“During the first phase, the IRDP received about 7m/- from HEET project for caring for students with special needs, the amount which was spent to run a vital exercise to identify them, at both campuses of Mwanza and Dodoma, as well as giving them some basic assistance,” he unveiled.
He added, among others, the project base to supply the group with necessary equipment on health and education, as well as infrastructures.
“For instances, the project aims at ensuring the hostels for accommodating students and all academic blocks and classrooms comprises with friendly infrastructures for supporting the students with special needs,” he insisted.
The Institute of Rural Development Planning (IRDP) is a corporate body established by the Parliamentary Act No. 8 of 1980.
The Act provides a legal framework for the Institute to be established as an important national center for provision of training, research and consultancy services in the field of Rural Development Planning and Management with main objective of alleviating qualitative and quantitative shortage of skilled manpower within the framework of sustainable capacity building directed towards reducing poverty and attaining sustainable development.
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