MAMI, Experts Initiate Agenda for Disability-Inclusive Social Protection

Funmi Ogundare 

The Media Action for Minority Inclusion (MAMI), a disability and policy foundation, recently brought together experts in disability and social protection for a roundtable themed ‘Living Cost Crisis: PWDs Survival in Administration Proclaiming Equal Opportunities’.

The programme developed five action plans that addressed poor targeting excluding disability from social protection policies.

In his remarks, the Senior Special Adviser on Disability and Equality to the Presidency, Abba Issa Mohammed, emphasised on  leadership failure, saying that since the Discrimination Act 2018 took effect, the government has doubled down on positioning disability in Nigeria, Africa, and as far as the UN.

“If anything, we don’t need to blame the government; we need to blame ourselves, and hold our people (PWDs) in leadership positions responsible.”

The programme featured a panel session where panelists disagreed with Mohammed.

In his presentation, Theophilus Adawodu, Project Manager at the Disability Rights Fund, described the projections as ‘tokenistic’.  Whether social protection policies work for the disability community or not, he insisted that the buck still stops with the government.

“I think the government needs to be more intentional; its political will needs to be well demonstrated to ensure PWDs enjoy whatever good intention the government has.”

He cited Ghana among other countries where social protection policies specifically provide 25 per cent of a PWD’s salary as an allowance.

“Now here the cost of living is high even for those without disabilities. Imagine that for PWDs who have to pay double or three times that amount to access public services,” he stated. 

He noted that the world is now shifting to a care economy for disability, and observed how much good data collection can help Nigeria in planning for this shift.

In his paper on ‘the State of Disability in Social Protection Policy Formulation and Implementation’, Lukman Salami, a lawyer and Chairman of Joint National Association of Persons With Disability (JONAPWD), Lagos State chapter, said disability for now, has not earned its place in most of the policies, despite the government’s claim of inclusion. 

He wondered how disability can ever feature when PWDs and experts in disability have no part in the policy cycle.

A World Bank Technical Assistant to the National Commission for Persons with Disabilities, who was among the drafters of the National Social Protection Policy in 2014, Adebukola Adebayo insisted the problem is that of governance structure of Nigeria’s disability space; not so much of lack of disability-specific policies. 

According to him, social protection policies abound in social care, social insurance, social assistance, and labour market intervention for vulnerable Nigerians.

“But the truth is we cannot implement social protection policies when we don’t have an appropriate governance system in place to drive all of this,” the social protection policy expert said, referring to the competition and duplication of efforts among MDAs implementing disability policies. 

“At what point do we engage with the SSA and at what point do we engage with the NCPWD, and at what point do both of them come  together to advance disability issues in Nigeria?”

For its effort in targeting disability, the World Bank, Adebayo said, has been working with the NCPWD to unbundle the Discrimination Act 2018 into implementable policies. He also suggested setting up of interagency collaborative mechanisms to ‘drive, implement, and monitor’ disability inclusion in social protection policies.

The Convener, Gbenga Ogundare, Executive Director of MAMI, assured the panelists the foundation will make the report of the deliberation available to relevant institutions and agencies for further policy action.