By Deborah Ariyo
The Executive Director of the Festus Fajemilo Foundation, FFF, has called on the Lagos State government to review the state’s policy on inclusive education policy in order to ensure that people with disabilities are fully involved.
Making the call at a One-Day Capacity-Building Workshop for Organisations of Persons with Disabilities” in Lagos, the Executive Director, Festus Fajemilo Foundation, FFF, Afolabi Fajemilo declared that the policy was due for review five years after it was instituted.
He said as a global trend, inclusive education is cheaper, promotes unity, togetherness, and builds self esteem of people with disabilities.
“We need to examine this policy to see what is working and what is not working and this time around, persons with disabilities need to be actively involved in the review and implementation of the guidelines.
Fejemilo said according to their 2020 mapping and assessment of all the inclusive schools in Lagos, there were a lot of gaps the state government needs to address.
“Lagos state is the first state that is taking lead in terms of provision of inclusive education and with the highest number of inclusive schools; they have 47 at the primary and secondary level. So we have been in this project, tagged: “United for Inclusive Education,” since 2020.”
On the workshop, Fejemilo explained that it was to develop the capacities of people with disabilities in inclusive school monitoring.
“We are building their capacity on monitoring and evaluation of inclusive education in Lagos state and we are doing that in conjunction with members of School Board Management Committee, SMBC, because one of our objectives in this project is also to build partnership among key stakeholders in education.
“In this project, we are all working in different areas such as creating awareness, training government officials on inclusive budgeting towards ensuring that there is adequate budget for inclusive education implementation in Lagos state.
“For us at Festus Fajemilo Foundation, we are mobilising citizen participation in inclusive education because articles of United Nation Convention Rights of Persons with Disability says, ‘nothing for us without us’, so we want the involvement of persons with disability in whatever programme we are going to design.”
Fajemilo who recalled that the state government has a policy since 2015 on inclusive education, lamented that organisation of people with disabilities and people with disabilities are not actively involved in participation, as well as in monitoring how the policy is being run in the various inclusive schools.
He said it is expected that in 2022 people with disabilities will join members of school based management committee to go into the inclusive schools and carry out assessment, observation and see how things are run.
Fajemilo said his foundation has been able to expose them to the policy in the state, various legal framework national and international that speak for the right of persons with disabilities to education.
He also hinted that since 2020 the foundation has been working with persons with disabilities in different areas to ensure that there is human capacity, technical development in terms of their organisation level to make sure that they have the requisite knowledge, the capacity to engage the government in terms of advocacy to be actively involved in implementation and monitoring of inclusive education in the state.
On his part, a representative of the Lagos state school-based management committee from Koshofe, local government education authority (LGEA), Richard Adeyemi gave kudos to the Lagos state government for pioneering the programme in Nigeria.
Noting that the state has been trying to ensure that the inclusive education spread across the whole 20 Local Government Areas and the 37 Local Council Development Areas, LCDA, he said: “As school-based management committee, SBMC, members, our role is to support the government, the government has brought us close to make sure things go well, in as much as we all know and agree that government alone cannot do it.
“For 2022, we have set up an agenda, a workable action plan for other states to join.
In her presentation entitled: “SBMC Roles In Strengthening Inclusive Education”, Mrs. Hilda Twins said SBMCs are important agent for the realisation of inclusive education if their activities are properly harnessed and controlled.
Twins also recalled that in compliance to the Global trend on Inclusive Education, Lagos State became the pioneer State that started Inclusive Education in Nigeria, thereby setting the pace for other States to follow.
She said by September, 2006, additional 29 inclusive Units were established to give the total of 31 Inclusive Units in Lagos State and 3 more in September, 2021 making it a of 34 Inclusive Units at primary level.