Why PWDs not fully included in electoral process – INEC

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has said that lack of dis-aggregated data of People Living with Disabilities (PWDs) in the country, was largely responsible for the commission’s inability to fully capture them in all electoral processes in the country.

The National Commissioner and Chairman Outreach and Partnership Committee (OPC), INEC, Dr. Adekunle Ogunmola said this on Tuesday in Abuja at the public presentation of the Data for Inclusion of PWDs, organized by the Inclusive Friends Association (IFA).

He commended the IFA, and other organizations that deals with issues relating to PWD’s welfare, for their efforts towards gathering of some data of PWDs in some states.

According to him, INEC is building on the effort of the IFA to organize a national strategy in both Northern and Southern Zones, with other PWDs as well as Disability Desk Officers across the 36 states and the FCT to strategies on ways to undertake general data collection across the country.

“The Commission has been consulting with different stakeholders to build a broad national consensus towards addressing the crisis of voter access to Polling Units in Nigeria, expansion of voter access polling units and reform of the electoral legal framework through the quick passage of the Electoral Act Amendment Bill into law.

“I want to commend the efforts of the IFA and that of our other partners at deepening the participation of the PWDs in the electoral process through the mainstreaming of their issues in our operations. The public presentation of the data for inclusion report today bears eloquent testimony to this commitment to make election process more accessible to the PWDs,” he said.

Speaking earlier, the Executive Director of the IFA, Ms Grace Jerry, said that IFA and its partners deployed a combination of manual and electronic methodology to collect the disaggregated data of PWDs across 13 states.

She said that the manual methodology was deployed through a specialized checklist, where the data of PWDs was collected by LGA supervisors and entered carefully into the checklist to aggregate the disability status, location, polling unit details, type of disabilities.