The intellectual Disability cluster of the Right-in-Action – the Engraced Ones – Prayer Support and Advocacy Initiative, Down Syndrome Foundation of Nigeria, RIA by Maria Autism Foundation, in Abuja, and called for the inclusion of persons with intellectual disabilities in the implementation of educational policies in the FCT. In this interview with NATIONAL ECONOMY, Becky Beke-Akpo Selekere, program manager of RiaByMaria Autism Foundation (RBM), a non-profit autism support organisation based in Gwarinpa, Abuja, Nigeria shares the perspectives of her organisation on inclusivity issues as they concern intellectually disabled persons in the FCT. Selekere drives the design, coordination and implementation of RBM’s programmes, working across clinical therapy, advocacy, community engagement and inclusive education to ensure the organisation delivers meaningful, consistent impact for children with autism and their families. She brings a background in law to her work, thus grounding her in rights-based work and approach to advocacy and inclusion at RBM, where she is also actively involved in the Rights in Action Project, a partnership within the Intellectual Disability Cluster working to advance inclusive education and disability rights in the FCT. Selekere is a passionate advocate for systemic inclusion, early intervention and the belief that every child deserves to be seen, understood and supported to reach their full potential.
What do you think that the FCT or Nigeria at large can actually do to know how many children with intellectual disabilities are currently out of school?
Nigeria needs to start by embedding disability-specific questions into existing data collection mechanisms rather than waiting for a standalone system to be built from scratch. The national school census, community health worker registers, primary health care records and local government enumeration processes all already exist. The question is why disability disaggregation is not a mandatory part of any of them. A practical starting point would be training community health workers and local government education officers to identify and document children with visible developmental and intellectual disabilities during routine community visits. Beyond that, partnering with organisations like RBM that already have community presence and clinical knowledge would allow the government to reach families who would never self-report to a government office. The data exists in communities. What is missing is the structured, consistent mechanism to collect and centralise it.
Without reliable data, how do you think that the government can say that its inclusive education policies are working?
Honestly, it cannot. Any claim that inclusive education policy is working without disaggregated data to support it is not evidence. It is optimism at best and a deflection at worst. A policy that cannot be measured cannot be evaluated, and a policy that cannot be evaluated cannot be improved. Right now Nigeria has inclusive education commitments on paper but no reliable way of knowing how many children with intellectual disabilities are in school, how many have dropped out, how many were never enrolled, or whether the schools that claim to be inclusive are actually providing meaningful support. Without that baseline, progress cannot be tracked, accountability cannot be enforced, and resources cannot be directed to where they are most needed. Data is not a bureaucratic luxury. It is the foundation of honest governance.
What would a functional national disability-in-education data system look like to you and your organisation, and who should be responsible for maintaining it?
A functional system would need to operate at multiple levels simultaneously. At the school level, every public school should be required to report enrolment and attendance data disaggregated by disability type, age, gender and location as part of the existing annual school census. At the community level, local government education authorities and community health workers should be trained and resourced to identify and document out-of-school children with disabilities during routine community engagement. At the state and federal level, the Universal Basic Education Commission and the Federal Ministry of Education should be responsible for collating, publishing and acting on that data annually. The National Commission for Persons with Disabilities should have a formal oversight role. And organisations of persons with disabilities and civil society organisations, including those working specifically on intellectual and developmental disabilities, should be involved in data validation to ensure that what is being counted reflects the reality on the ground. Responsibility cannot sit with one body alone because it will be deprioritised. It needs to be distributed, mandated and tied to reporting obligations.
There are worries that the absence of disaggregated data by disability type, age, gender and location is itself a form of exclusion of children with disabilities. What is your take on this?
That worry is entirely justified and it deserves to be stated plainly. When a child is not counted, the system is not simply unaware of them. It is actively organised around their absence. Policy is written without them in mind. Budgets are allocated without them in the numbers. School infrastructure is designed without accounting for their needs. Teacher training does not include them. And when outcomes are measured, their exclusion does not show up as a failure because they were never included in the baseline to begin with. This is what makes the data gap more than an administrative problem. It is a structural injustice. A child with an intellectual disability who is out of school and uncounted is invisible to every system that should be protecting them simultaneously. 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. For RBM, this is deeply personal. The children we work with every day are exactly the children most likely to be missing from national data. And until they are counted, the full weight of policy, funding and accountability will never fully reach them.
