Fundación ICAL

We have created an educational solution we have called inverse inclusion. It is about bringing comprehensive education to a majority of students with hearing and/or mild cognitive disabilities in the same environment with students without disabilities. All of the students belong to low income and high psychosocial risk contexts. We involve their families in the process, to strengthen the students’ socio-emotional and citizen skills, enhancing their human development and increasing their chances to fulfilling the life-projects they dream with.

The main problem we give solutions to is the access to education of children with disabilities, taking into account that, in Colombia, the 80% of the people with disabilities is born in poor families. This means low access to good quality services as well as the lack of access to opportunities. This situations directly affect their development, communication skills and human potentialities.

Today, our direct beneficiaries are our 170 students and their more than 300 parents. Almost 60% of the students have a disability and the other one not. 52% live in rural areas and 48% in urban ones from more than 10 municipalities of the Cundinamarca department, Colombia.

We count with a team of professionals between teachers, psychologists, logo-therapists, phonoaudiologists, social workers and others that support the Foundation’s mission with all the children; building the reasonable accommodations for each student’s case and needs.

Via our solution, we have tackled traditional barriers linked to the education of children with disabilities from poor socioeconomic contexts. We have directly involved the participation of the students’ parents and other relatives in their educational process. Bringing awareness and classes about the necessary actions to support the students’ autonomy and skills development.

We have worked on our mission for 60 years, attending more than 2700 children with and without disabilities in the country.

We have always used the participative method to formulate our projects and programs. For the proposal we present here, we have based all the action/solutions on the data given by students and their families. It has been reached from classes and workshops, as well as from surveys, interviews and monitoring activities lead by our social work and psychology professionals. The near and frequent interactions we have with our beneficiaries has strengthened confidence relationships in which it is possible not just to identify needs but to build solutions together. We deeply know the different situations and characteristics of the homes of each student. We are always open to listen to new ideas and perspectives from the ones we want to support.

Our theory of change: in the same educational scenario, attention focused on the comprehensive and inclusive education for children and adolescents with and without disabilities, which involves their families in the process, strengthens their socio-emotional and citizen skills, enhancing their human development and increasing their chances to fulfilling the life-projects they dream with.

The inverse inclusion attention model we have created includes all the necessary educational and socio-emotional methods to support the reasonable accommodations for each student, according to their specific conditions. All the tools bring solutions for the human and social development of children and adolescent with and without conditions such as deafness and mild cognitive disabilities. Some of the methods we have are: verbotonal (for the oralist communication development of deaf children), bilinguism (Colombian sign language), logogenia and logodáctica, and others. We also integrate the parents of the deaf students in the Colombian sign language learning; as well as in the learning of strategies to support their children human development (taking into account that traditional limitations –linked to lack of information- use to be replicated at the homes of people with disabilities).

We find our main impact in the graduates’ successful life projects: their ability to do and reach what they planned before they finished their educational process with us.

Other indicator to measure our impact is the level of satisfaction of our beneficiaries with our method, qualified by both the students and their parents.    

According to Nesta’s Standards of evidence, we are at Level 2.

We follow the ISO9001 system criteria in the development and self-evaluation of our actions, as we count with this quality management certification. In addition, we are evaluated by the quality standards from the government organization called ICBF (Colombian Institute for the family welfare).

We count with an important indicator: the 82% of our graduated students has engaged in academic or work activities. This is a positive percentage compared to the occupation rate (76%) of the population with disabilities at the national level, as well as to the national occupation rate of the deaf population (34%).

Othe indicator to take into account is the level of satisfaction of our beneficiaries with our method, which is over 90%.  

Summarizing, we are tracking and measuring our solution’s impact via:

• Following our graduates’ stories.
• Following quality standards from both the ISO9001 Certification and the ICBF education local standards.
• The indicators we constructed and defined in our 2020-2025 strategic planning, called “Together for inclusion”.

Inverse inclusion model: comprehensive education for low-income children with disabilities (58%) and without it (42%) in the same educational environment.

The research question we propose is: How could we strengthen and enhance our educational solutions and business model by integrating evidence into our theory of change?

The potential deliverables would be: Present indicators analysis and a list of defined evidence based indicators (previous and new) to follow, useful to evaluate our impact, according to the present post-pandemic social reality.

The successful outcome of this project would be an external perspective and evaluation of what we internally evaluate as our impact, as well as the list of evidence we should be reviewing, to enhance and complement our impact self-evaluation. We would be very thankful to have a guided and more accurate approach to evidence that supports our theory of change, to integrate it to our Foundation’s educational solutions and strategic planning.