The year 2017 would forever be etched in the collective memory of Nigerians as it marks perhaps the first concrete step by a national institution within the educational system to boost the access of People with Disabilities (PWDs) to tertiary education in the country.
This feat was achieved by the Registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), Prof. Is-haq Oloyede when, just a year after assuming office in 2016, he established the JAMB Equal Opportunity Group (JEOG).
The 11-member committee, headed by Prof. Peter Okebukola has the mandate of ensuring that all eligible candidates are accorded a level playing field in the Board’s administered Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).
This is to ensure that no one is discriminated against at any point in the Board’s assessment and admission process on account of disability.
The creation of JEOG is one of the Board’s policy initiatives for fostering a more-inclusive assessment outcome by the Board.
Others are the nine-key initiative, which reduces the entire operation of taking the UTME to just nine computer keys, while another is the establishment of eight other groups charged with the responsibility of fostering inclusive assessment regime in the Board’s operational processes.
Perhaps, what is more striking is that, prior to this major policy initiative aimed at fashioning a more robust vehicle for inclusive education for candidates with special needs or disabilities, which include the Blind, Deaf, Dumb, Lame, and Down Syndrome patients, it should be borne in mind that Oloyede was not under any existential or official pressure to undertake the venture of crafting a more robust framework for assessing these sets of candidates as well as admitting them into the nation’s tertiary institutions.
In this regard, candidates with disabilities were able to gain admission to 133 institutions across the country in the 2023/2024 academic session alone.
To achieve the desired results, the group of eminent members of the academia with requisite backgrounds in special education along with the leadership of relevant bodies were saddled with the management of the affairs of the disabled.
It is, therefore, no wonder that over the years, the logistics of administering the UTME to the candidates with disabilities and their subsequent admission statistics have been on the upward trend.
As part of the measures to ease the burden of sitting for the UTME by candidates with disabilities, the Board, under its current leadership, designated 11 centres across the six geopolitical zones of the country in 2021 where these candidates sat for their matriculation examination, while their transportation and lodging as well that of their guides were taking care of by the Board.
Also, JEOG had been at the forefront of crafting appropriate and stress-free modes for the UTME by candidates with disabilities.
Not surprisingly, all these measures have not only eased the taking of the UTME by candidates with special needs but also increased their enrolment statistics.
For instance, in 2014, just 44 candidates with disabilities were admitted to the nation’s higher institutions of learning, while in 2021, the figure had risen to 286.
Significantly, the Board, through the agency of JEOG, has broadened the nation’s awareness of the plight of people with disabilities by organising the first national conference in Abuja, with the theme, “Towards Increasing Equal Opportunity of Access to Higher Education in Nigeria”.
I held between 24th and 27th of September, 2023. The conference was attended by over 500 participants drawn from all strata of the Nigerian society.
Building on the successes recorded in the national conference, JEOG organised the just-concluded first Africa Regional Conference on Equal Opportunity of Access to Higher Education (ARCEAHED), held on 17th and 18th of September 2024 in Abuja, themed “Advancing the Potential of Persons with Disabilities in Educational and Economic Development”.
The conference was aimed at assessing the progress of African countries in implementing the African Union Agenda 2063 and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4, which seeks to foster inclusive and equitable quality education and lifelong learning.
Also, the conference provided a platform to share experiences on the modalities for admission and retention of persons with disabilities, while proposing practical solutions to enhancing access to quality higher education for students with special needs in African countries.
Furthermore, the conference was able to bring into focus the challenges confronting people with disabilities in accessing higher education in the country to the attention of stakeholders in the sector; analysing the problems confronting higher education, especially in relation to people with special needs with a view to providing actionable and sustainable solutions to them; and proposing changes that can be made to the current national policy on education.
Through that, the goal is to address the inequalities in the opportunity of access to higher education especially by the blind, the albino, persons with autism, Down Syndrome, prison inmates and others.
Interestingly, the ARCHEAD event also afforded the Minister of Education, Professor Tahir Mamman to unveil the commitment of the Federal Government to inclusive education, while creating the right learning environment to facilitate inclusive access for people with disabilities through the Ministerial Roadmap for Inclusive Access to Quality Higher Education in Nigeria (2024-2028) Strategic Plan.
Similarly, participants made some far-reaching decisions as conveyed in the communique issued at the end of the conference.
In the document, participants called for 100 per cent pro-rata rise of equitable space in admission for PWDs; provide adequate information about facilities that are available for PWDs in each institution at the point of advertisement for application for admission; and give adequate attention to the training of experts that will attend to individual needs of persons with disabilities, among others.
In the final analysis, the institution of inclusive education, as implemented by JAMB through the JEOG has become a veritable platform for engendering robust national discourse and strategies for boosting the enrolment rates of people with disabilities not only in Nigeria but also in Africa in general.
