Building Bridges Between Policy and Praxis: A Comparative Environmental and Policy Scan of Inclusive Education in Ethiopia and Canada

This article provides a pioneering glimpse into the environmental and policy realities of inclusive education in Ethiopia’s and Canada’s educational systems. As co-signatories to multiple international commitments toward inclusive education development and implementation, including the Salamanca Statement (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization & Spain Ministry of Education and Science, 1994), Canada and Ethiopia have demonstrated strong policy pathways that support these international goals; however, several obstacles have hindered compliance and results. These obstacles include, but are not limited to, gender bias, lack of resources, climate challenges and disasters, COVID-19, political volatility, and policy breakdown. These obstacles ignited our central motivation to complete a comparative policy and environmental scan of inclusive education in Ethiopia with Canada’s inclusive education landscape as a backdrop. By gathering and examining political and environmental facts from over the past century for each country, including decades of policy documents and correlating statistical information, we, who have been actively engaged in Ethiopian educational development for over a decade with an international non-governmental organization, propose a new responsive theoretical framework as a guidance system for integrated-inclusive education using collectivism and individualism to bridge the gap between policy and praxis.