The issue of poor access and affordable health care for persons with disabilities came up once again on Wednesday, December, 17, 2025 for national discourse with stakeholders and members of the Association for Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities of Nigeria (AIDDN), calling on the government and corporate Nigeria to correct the anomaly.
Held at the Centre for Management Development (CMD), Magodo, Lagos, with the theme ‘“Advancing Inclusive Health Financing: Empowering Persons with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities for Equitable Access to Quality Health, speakers including policy makers, health financiers, service providers, researchers, civil society organizations, parents and caregivers harped on the need for government at all levels to ensure that persons with disabilities have access to adequate health care.
In her welcome address, President of the association, Mrs. Joko Omotola explained that the theme became necessary because the barriers to health care for people with disabilities are not only about cost, but they are also about design, attitudes, data gaps, and the absence of meaningful participation in decision-making, positing that financing mechanisms that fail to take these realities into account will only deepen exclusion.
According to her, quality health services, means designing benefits and payment systems that cover essential supports, ensure continuity of health care across the lifespan, fund community-based and rehabilitative services, and make reasonable accommodations standard practice.
” Quality health service we are canvassing also means, investing in training for health workers, accessible infrastructure, assistive technologies, and systems for coordinated care.
It also means building financial protection that prevents families from falling into hardship because of disability-related health needs.”
The association helmsman, while acknowledging that technical solutions alone are not enough to solve the problem, noted that true inclusivity requires participation and power-sharing; saying that Persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities must be partners in policy design, budgeting, monitoring, and evaluation, while caregivers, advocates, and community leaders must be resourced to participate meaningfully.
In her paper, the guest speaker, Mrs. Rose Mordi, National President of Down syndrome Foundation of Nigeria expressed regret that seven years after the Disability Act was signed into law, it has not been implemented.
She identified some of the problems confronting people with intellectual disabilities to include, lack of adequate data, inexperienced and untrained caregivers and health providers, bureaucratic bottlenecks, lack of family support, lack of rehabilitation centres dedicated to persons with disabilities, lack of policy implementation and inadequate empowerment amongst others.
Mrs. Mordi noted that for Nigeria to get it right, the government must give priority attention to health as well as start implementing the Disability Act which takes care most of the problems of persons with disabilities.
In their separate remarks, Chief Mrs. Ipaye Oluwatogun Janet who runs a Cerebral Palsy Centre, Babatope Oloruntoba of Nigeria Educational Research and Devel Council ( NERDC), Afolabi Fajemilo, the Executive Director of Festus Fajemilo Foundation and Mr. Onome Otueroro, Edo State Chairman of Association for Intellectual and Development Disabilities of Nigeria, all noted that something must be done to enable their group have good access to health care.
According to them, some of the persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities are graduates, but unemployed, just as they lamented that some of them die not because of their disabilities but due to lack of access to quality health care.
The well attended forum, received goodwill messages from Lagos, Edo, Abia, Ogun, Abuja, Gombe, North East geopolitical zone, Down Syndrome Foundation of Nigeria, the Spinal Cord Injuries Association of Nigeria, Cerebral Palsy Centres, amongst others.
Source: News Tap