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Paper short abstract

Despite legal reforms, 70% of Nigerian children with disabilities remain out of school. This paper examines how fiscal constraints and governance practices limit inclusive education's transformative potential, while exploring how advocates and communities navigate these challenges.

Paper long abstract

Nigeria has approximately 18.3 million out-of-school children, with children with disabilities among the most persistently excluded. Despite ratifying the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) in 2010 and enacting the Discrimination Against Persons with Disabilities Act in 2018, an estimated 70% of children with disabilities remain excluded from formal education, and over 85% of schools lack basic physical accessibility. These patterns raise critical questions about the material and political costs of inclusion.

This paper examines inclusive education in Nigeria as both a rights-based commitment and a governance challenge shaped by resource politics. Drawing on federal and state policy documents, education budget data (2018-2024), Nigeria's delayed CRPD State Party Report (2021), civil society reports including the State of Disability Inclusion Report (2024), the analysis applies frameworks of intersectionality, reasonable accommodation, and vertical equity to trace how global inclusion norms translate into domestic implementation.

The findings demonstrate significant structural gaps. Public education spending remains at approximately 0.35% of GDP, far below UNESCO's 4-6% benchmark, while disability-specific allocations remain weakly defined. Although 23 of Nigeria's 36 states have enacted disability legislation, fragmented institutional coordination has resulted in inclusion functioning largely as symbolic compliance rather than redistributive intervention.

At the same time, the paper documents adaptive responses by civil society and sub-national actors, highlighting tensions between technocratic governance and grassroots mobilisation. Situating Nigeria within broader Sub-Saharan African patterns, the paper questions whether inclusion frameworks can deliver equitable development futures when the price of inclusion remains politically contested and fiscally constrained.