The Nigerian Access to Works Scheme policy framers did more than borrow a leaf from the UK older policy document. The rip-off may not stick.
By Adewale Hassan
Over four years, the NCPWD allocated N90 million to fund an Access to Work Scheme (AWS), an idea that only captured the imagination of its exponents. No framework to kick-start its operation and ensure accountability. Then early February the commission launched one—a dummy some OPD stitched up under former Executive Secretary James Lalu’s watch. The iteration has since generated mixed reactions in Nigeria’s disability community. The commission’s new boss Gufwan Ayuba met the policy buttoned up when he came last year. And it so impressed him at the Lagos recent launch he couldn’t help gushing about it as a ‘game changer’.
It’s not clear how long the drafting lasted. But ER learnt The Albino Foundation (TAF) got funding from Sightsavers International to develop the framework alongside Sheu Adebayo, a World Bank’s consultant in the commission. The partners corralled no fewer than 18 OPDs in Abuja to validate the draft last April.
Among those ER interviewed, only SCIAN’s President Abdulwahab Matepo confirmed he noticed its cluster’s contribution to the policy. NAB’s President Stanley Onyebuchi said TAF never invited or consulted the blind community during the policy design and planning. Albino Association of Nigeria’s President Bisi Bamishe also denied participating. (JONAPWD didn’t return a request for verification.)
ER interviewed members of the community, too. Some with expertise in disability policymaking, assistive technology, sustainability, and other areas didn’t make the TAF list, either.
All these fly in the face of the framework’s Guiding Principle (V): PWDs were consulted in the design, planning, and implementation of all components of the National Access to Work Scheme for Persons with disabilities.
Sightsavers said the call to participation was not its own to be made. “For clarity, Sightsavers provided technical and financial support for the development and launch of the framework through our partner TAF Africa,” said Esther Bature, the NGO’s country advocacy coordinator. She directed a request for clarification on the PWD participation to TAF. Jake Ekpelle, its founder, didn’t respond to the ER request. Neither did the NCPWD( its media director had an accident so unavailable).
The framework’s final document couldn’t have revealed any more clearly the manner of its design and development. “I think it is a copy-and-paste version of the Access to Work programme of the UK government,” Opeolu Akinola, Accesstech CEO, told ER after the launch. What the disability policy scholar and assistive technology (AT) expert said hit right on. Even with all their penmanship, TAF and others couldn’t deny it. “The Access to Work Scheme has been implemented in the UK since 1994,” they wrote in their preamble.
The Nigerian rip-off compares with the UK’s original in the major objective: government and the organized private sector defraying disability costs in AT acquisition and work environment adjustment (reasonable accommodation). It also apes the UK’s in the programme strategy, implementation, and management. But TAF and its team could not paper over the contrast. It jumps out at the first read, indicating a disability idea transplanted from the UK will have a hard time thriving in an environment like Nigeria’s.
According to Akinola, there are three fundamentals of AT interventions schemes that ensure success. “Local availability or affordability of the technology; local capacity to provide training and maintenance of selected solutions; and suitability of the technology to meet local demands,” he said. A 2022 Federal Ministry of Health’s publication on the priority Assistive Products List identified similar problems.
The AWS framework drafters, however, missed these and other local perspectives to the scheme; or the team lacked resource persons with expertise in those aspects. Adebayo didn’t respond to ER on whether most of the assistive devices will come in as imports.
According to the health ministry report, high-end prostheses then, for instance, came from Europe or North America. And the prices ranged from US$3,000 to US$4,700. Mid-tier ones came from India or China, and their prices ranged between US$100 to US $695.6. That was three years ago. So the affordability problem will escalate as long as Nigeria’s PWDs depend on imports.
A handful of local producers—among whom Gufwan himself, with his three-wheeler fabrication plant in Jos, ranks—cater to the low-end market demand. Their products, though, don’t match up to international standards. (Many corporate employers participating in the scheme might not want to patronize such products—after cost-benefit analyses and safety considerations.)
Back in 2022, these local producers sold a prosthesis for between $2 and $15. The market percentage has not been determined yet. But the UN said by 2030, two billion people around the world will need assistive devices, up from the current one billion. For now, Nigeria’s AT market size stands at over $880 million, according to the commission’s 2022 report on assistive technology investments.
Relying more on imports, the PWDs will sure ramp up higher costs buying the devices. The government and private sector employers will refund them, even for maintenance. But that depends on two things: available funding and application figures. The latter rises and falls with the rate of disability. A disability research body pegs Nigeria’s disability rate at 18 percent now.
It’s difficult to ascertain how the rate shakes out in the OPS. But the Nigerian Disability Business Network said no fewer than 1000 PWDs currently work in the private sector the scheme covers. It also covers the self-employed in the informal sector which takes more than 45 percent of Nigeria’s economy. Getting the figures of potential applicants for planning now becomes a task on its own. The government may resort to guesstimates to allocate resources to the scheme.
Not that the government is really willing to prioritize disability, and vote huge sums for PWDs’ access to work. The NCPWD budgets, the scheme’s only source of funding, over the years reveal the government has yet to put its money where its mouth is. The commission’s 2025 budget stands at N1.1 billion for capital expenditures. Of this, N20 million goes to AWS. The amount is about 70 percent of the 2024 vote for the scheme. The years 2022 and 2023 got N10 million and N30 million respectively.
This is where the original idea of access to work scheme in a high-income country diverges from its dummy in a low-income country. Annual spending on the UK scheme has been rising: the 2022-23 spending spilled over £180 million (for 47, 230 PWDs)—and that amount was £30 million higher than the 2021-2 spending. This is in spite of country’s $1.2- billion AT market serving 16 million PWDs who don’t have to import their devices.
It’s for this contrast many in Nigeria are already wondering—if the AWS isn’t just another pretty document. The scheme never got up to a good start in February. Following its validation last April, and publication the following month, the framework could boast of no launch pad almost nine months after. The launchers simply dived into exposition of the application process, the online platform, its database, and others. Nothing else to test it in real time let alone begin operations. All that might take another financial year to set up. To account for money spent (N90 million budgeted so far for the raw idea), the NCPWD has a role to play. The policy’s section 5.5 on evaluation says the commission will “publish a comprehensive annual program and financial report on the scheme”. It hasn’t published any in the last four years. A source there said ER might have to reach out to former ES Lalu for such details.
To Matepo, it all still looks good. Every policy document in Nigeria does—until the implementation. “We hope the same fate won’t befall this one, too,” he told ER.
Brimming with appreciation, Kemi Odusanya, a Lagos NAB’s official and broadcast journalist, have no fear of any bugbear. “In this part of the world, we prefer to wait for things to manifest before taking the lead,” she said. With the scheme launch, the private sector, she believes, won’t hesitate to engage qualified PWDs.
It’s too early to go overboard with the policy’s feel-good factor.
Odusanya and her counterparts in the media need refreshable braille devices to make their job easier and their role competitive. A unit of the digital device sells for about $3000, which is in the region of N3 million. No tax exception for whoever buy it—the blind broadcasters or their employers. What AWS N20 million vote can cover in a refund for, say, three of the devices is no big math. When operation eventually starts, the awardees (applicants) or their employers are in for long waits.
The delay might dampen the morale of an OPS that naturally withdraws from offsetting employees’ disability costs. With that, the framework’s failure to factor in the home-spun essentials will come full circle. This puts the NDBN under strain as it tries to take up the slack in the long queue of PWDs loitering outside the work space.
