Abstract:
People with disabilities face particular challenges
in education and training. Most of them are depriv
ed of access
to basic literacy and numeracy skills. They also fa
ce barriers that affect access to Technical Vocatio
nal Education
and Training (TVET) institutions some of them arisi
ng from the surrounding socio-economic environment
and
from mainstream TVET institutions. The main purpose
of this paper was to assess barriers to accessibil
ity of
TVET institutions by disabled people in Kenya. The
study was carried out in the North Rift Region of K
enya.
The target population of the study consisted of the
lectures and students with disabilities in 5 publi
c TVET
Institutions. Semi Structured Questionnaires were u
sed as the main instruments for data collection. Da
ta
collected was analyzed using descriptive statistics
and inferential statistics with the aid of SPSS IB
M version 20.
One of the most striking findings was that disabled
students in TVET institutions are discriminated an
d isolated.
Findings also indicated that the disabled students
cannot access some of the school buildings; they ar
e also
barred from enrolling in TVET due to policies that
provide cut off point marks or entry behavior to co
urses they
desire to enroll in. It was also found that teacher
s had positive attitude toward the disabled student
s, contrary to
the fact that students considered teachers to be un
friendly to them. Therefore, the paper recommended
that skills
training and instructional mechanisms must consider
specific needs of youth with different types of di
sabilities
before putting them together in regular class. Bett
er coordination between the government and service
providers
could anticipate and mitigate this barrier. There i
s also the need for specialized training institutio
ns to be
upgraded and modernized, and mainstream training in
stitutions be adjusted to include training of perso
ns with
disabilities.
