The Higher Council for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (HCD) and the National Council for Family Affairs (NCFA) signed a memorandum of understanding at HCD's headquarters to develop a childcare curriculum into an inclusive training programmes for girls with disabilities who wish to enrol in it. The program aims to provide participants with a certificate to practice the profession of “childcare worker”, which is granted through the Vocational Training Corporation.
The MoU was signed by His Royal Highness Prince Mired Raad Zeid Al-Hussein, Lord Chamberlain and President of the Higher Council for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (HCD), and the Secretary General of the National Council for Family Affairs (NCFA), Dr. Mohammad Meqdadi, in the presence of Dr. Nancy Al-Moumani, Director of the Jordan Office of the Canadian International University Service Association, Engineer Ahmad Al-Gharaibeh, Director General of the Vocational Training Corporation and a number of technical staff from both institutions.
Prince Mired commended the role of NCFA in providing safe and healthy childcare facilities and creating new job opportunities for caregivers, which encourages women's participation in the labour market. He also highlighted the important role in providing comprehensive training for women in the early childhood care sector, in partnership with the Vocational Training Corporation.
His Highness expressed HCD's readiness to provide the necessary technical support to develop the “childcare” curriculum using accessible formats to make it inclusive for girls with disabilities. He also directed HCD's technical team to conduct a comprehensive review of the curriculum's content- including topics, videos, images, activities, and exercises- and to identify a mechanism for converting the content into accessible formats.
For his part, Meqdadi pointed out that the MoU is a crystallization of the cooperation between the two councils in providing technical support to persons with disabilities within the “childcare worker” programme, which was prepared in a participatory approach with the ministries and institutions working with nursery services to ensure inclusion for persons with disabilities.
He explained that NCFA, pursuant to Law No. (27) of 2001, has adopted the implementation of pioneering projects related to its objectives and worked to implement the “Bukra” project, aimed at easing the burden of care on women and increasing their economic participation, in cooperation with several partners.