Accessible Digital Textbooks — UNICEF and Rwanda Education Board Deliver 55 Inclusive Learning Materials for Students with Disabilities

Rwanda has prioritised inclusive education under its national strategy, but children with disabilities have historically had little access to curriculum-aligned learning materials designed for their needs.

Since 2019, UNICEF Rwanda and the Rwanda Education Board — part of a Government of Norway-funded initiative under the UN Partnership on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities also covering Kenya and Uganda — have used the PubCoder authoring platform to produce Accessible Digital Textbooks combining text, images, sign-language video, audio narration and interactive activities for upper-primary students; in parallel, UNICEF partnered with Humanity & Inclusion to adapt the physical environment of inclusive model schools.

The programme delivered 55 accessible digital textbooks aligned to Rwanda's national curriculum, distributed to schools through the national education cloud, and adapted the physical accessibility of 30 inclusive model schools.

Rwanda's results are reported as production and distribution milestones by UNICEF and PubCoder rather than validated by an independent study of student learning outcomes, and school- or student-level reach figures are not broken out publicly, unlike the parallel Kenya pilot.