Inclusive Education: Children With Disabilities Are Missing From Govt Data — Selekere

The Intellectual Disability Cluster of the Right-in-Action (RIA), the Engraced Ones Prayer Support and Advocacy Initiative, the Down Syndrome Foundation of Nigeria and RIA by Maria Autism Foundation have called for the inclusion of persons with intellectual disabilities in the implementation of educational policies in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT).

In an interview with LEADERSHIP Friday, the programme manager, RIA by Maria Autism Foundation, Becky Beke-Akpo Selekere, said Nigeria needed reliable data on children with intellectual disabilities to properly assess the effectiveness of its inclusive education policies.

She said the government should integrate disability-specific questions into existing data collection systems, including the national school census, community health records, primary healthcare registers and local government enumeration exercises.

According to her, community health workers and local government education officers could be trained to identify and document children with developmental and intellectual disabilities during routine community engagements. She also called for collaboration between government agencies and organisations working with persons with disabilities to identify children who may not ordinarily be captured through government channels.

“The data exists in communities. What is missing is the structured, consistent mechanism to collect and centralise it,” she said.

Selekere said the absence of reliable, disaggregated data made it difficult for the government to determine whether its inclusive education policies were achieving their objectives.

“Honestly, it cannot. Any claim that inclusive education policy is working without disaggregated data to support it is not evidence,” she said.

She noted that Nigeria currently lacked a reliable system for determining how many children with intellectual disabilities were enrolled in school, had dropped out or had never been enrolled.

She said a functional disability-in-education data system should capture information on disability type, age, gender and location at the school, community, state and federal levels.

According to her, public schools should include disability-disaggregated enrolment and attendance information in annual school census reports, while local government education authorities and community health workers should document out-of-school children with disabilities.

She recommended that the Universal Basic Education Commission and the Federal Ministry of Education coordinate the collation and publication of the data, while the National Commission for Persons with Disabilities should provide oversight. She also advocated the involvement of organisations of persons with disabilities and civil society groups in validating the data.

Selekere warned that the absence of disability-specific data could deepen the exclusion of children with disabilities from education planning, budgeting, infrastructure development and teacher training. “When a child is not counted, the system is not simply unaware of them. It is actively organised around their absence,” she said.

She added that without accurate data, children with intellectual disabilities could remain excluded from policies and interventions designed to improve access to education. “Disaggregated data by disability type, age, gender and location is not a technical detail. It is the difference between a child existing in the eyes of the state and not existing at all,” she said.