UNICEF & Uganda's Ministry of Education — Accessible Digital Textbooks for Learners with Disabilities

Since 2017, UNICEF Uganda and the Ministry of Education and Sports have worked to make classroom learning accessible to children who are blind, have low vision, or are deaf, with funding from the Norwegian Government and the UN Partnership on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNPRPD) Fund, and curriculum-development support from Kyambogo University and Uganda's National Curriculum Development Centre.

The programme set out to adapt Primary 4 and Primary 6 textbooks in Mathematics, English and Science into audio, large-print and sign-language formats, and to equip learners and classrooms with the assistive devices needed to use them.

The work is concentrated in 20 model and inclusive schools, including St. Bernadette's Model Primary School in Hoima and Spire Road Primary School in Jinja. Assistive devices distributed include Victor Readers, Orbit Braille Readers, Blaze ET devices, text-to-speech-equipped laptops and projectors for sign-language interpretation, alongside Teachers' Guides developed and piloted in the same schools. Uganda is one of roughly ten to eleven countries in UNICEF's global Accessible Digital Textbooks initiative, which in 2024 began adding an AI-automated production pipeline, though independent confirmation that this pipeline has specifically been used for Uganda's textbooks was not found.

Reported outcomes remain modest and mostly anecdotal: in 2021, Spire Road Primary recorded four first-grade passes on the Primary Leaving Examination, two of them earned by visually impaired students, alongside reports of reduced absenteeism and improved student confidence.

At roughly 20 of Uganda's many thousands of primary schools, against an estimated 2.5 million children with disabilities nationally of whom fewer than 250,000 currently access education, the programme's reach remains a small fraction of national need, and no systematic outcome evaluation has been published.