• 24 Jul, 2025

History
Since 2019 when the Discrimination Act 2019 came into effect in Nigeria, the media landscape has been receiving flurries of inclusive publications and stories from old and new media platforms. The only thing missing is the kind of media philosophy that can drive disability inclusion, diversity, and equality.
This drought motivated Gbenga Ogundare to set up the Media Action for Minority Inclusion (MAMI) which promotes Equality Reporters (ER).  A not for profit publication, ER reports on the interplay of policy and disability, using the human rights model.
Since 2022, our accountability journalism reports on diversity, equality and inclusion have been getting the attention of policy makers and the organizations of people with disabilities (OPDs) in Nigeria. These are our primary audience.
Besides reporting on problems, ER also initiates roundtables and discourses that yield policy briefs.

The Team
The Equality Reporters team have a combined 50 years’ experience in journalism and advocacy, starting from Independent Advocacy Project (IAP). Their demonstration of this has brought attention to accountability journalism that reports on disability as a right, and keeps stakeholders on their toes in Nigeria’s disability communities.
Gbenga Ogundare, managing editor, covered human rights and managed advocacy campaigns for about two decades before exploring the different intersections of inclusion: financial inclusion, access, disability and climate change, justice, social protection, among others.
Stakeholders in the disability community and policymakers at both the state and federal levels have engaged with his works in those areas in the last three years.
The reach and depths of these works have stimulated the consciousness OPDs, disability clusters, disability commissions, and others. These, as units or individual PWDs have reacted to the works, leading to agitations and policy refinement. 
Ogundare is also a Chevening scholar in disability and media management. The last stakeholders-media roundtable he organized brought together a number of OPDs and a presidential special assistant on disability. The dialogue generated a policy brief on better admiration of social protection for PWDs.

Elijah Olusegun, editor, focuses on diversity in media storytelling in reporting and writing investigative pieces on the intersection of governance and disability in Nigeria. 
Disability commissions and some OPDs and their leaders have faced reckoning following his reports and edited works on procurement and PWD’s rights abuse.
Elijah also focuses other reporters and freelance contributors on the rights approach to covering disability. This has created a niche for Equality Reporter, making it the only disability-focused publication that practices accountability journalism in.
Nigeria