Teaching for Inclusion and Democracy, funded by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA), was a research-based collaboration to identify the skills, knowledge, attitudes and values that teachers would need to create inclusive and democratic classrooms. A secondary aim was to make recommendations about inclusion in initial and continuing teacher education. A noteworthy feature was that this was a partner-driven collaboration between Botswana, Namibia and South Africa in the South, and Sweden in the North, in which both South and North partners could learn from their divergent—and common—aspirations and experiences.
By its conclusion, Teaching for Inclusion and Democracy had achieved its dual purpose of developing a discourse towards a common view of inclusive education, while at the same time building collective capacity to tackle hard problems in education and teacher education across the countries.