Inclusive Education for Learners with Disabilities in the MENA Region: A Policy Analysis of Persistent Challenges and Emerging Practices

Abstract

Across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), the right of learners with disabilities to an inclusive education is widely affirmed in law and national vision yet unevenly realised in practice. This policy analysis examines the gap between these ideals and the classroom realities that persist across the region, and it asks what emerging practices are beginning to close it. Drawing on peer-reviewed regional scholarship, we organise the evidence around a multilevel framework spanning policy, school, classroom, and family–community levels. We identify five recurring challenges: a durable policy-implementation gap in which progressive laws outrun the systems needed to enact them; a shortage of adequately prepared teachers and the ambivalent attitudes that shortage sustains; deficits in accessible infrastructure, resources, and assistive technology; cultural attitudes and stigma that shape family and community responses to disability; and weak data and fragmented, country-by-country progress that make regional learning difficult. Against these, we document a set of emerging practices with a growing evidence base: structured teacher professional development, the tailored use of assistive and technology-enhanced learning, deliberate family and community engagement, and the articulation of national inclusive-education frameworks, of which the United Arab Emirates model built around the concept of People of Determination is the most developed. We argue that the region's central task is not to invent new ideals but to build the implementation capacity, teacher pipeline, and data infrastructure through which existing commitments can be met, and we offer a policy framework and recommendations to that end. The analysis is limited by the uneven coverage of the underlying literature, which is concentrated in the Gulf states and thin for parts of North Africa.