Has JAMB missed the opportunity to transform accessible testing in Africa for good?

These were the words of Sophia, a visually impaired student, who had participated in the special arrangement provided by JAMB for candidates with disabilities.

In 2017, the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) established the JAMB Equal Opportunity Group (JEOG) to address the longstanding exclusion of candidates with disabilities from Nigeria’s Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME). At a time when computer-based testing (CBT) was expanding rapidly, JEOG was the first serious attempt by the Nigerian government to acknowledge that standardised assessment systems have disadvantaged students with disabilities, especially those with visual impairments, for far too long.

JEOG: A Landmark Step Towards Inclusion

Among other initiatives, JEOG was a laudable attempt for Nigeria to meet its obligation under the 2006 UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), particularly Article 24 on inclusive education. Since inception, JEOG has administered the UTME to over 2,600 eligible candidates with disabilities. Candidates are hosted for two to three days at selected federal universities, where professors and subject specialists read questions aloud, and candidates respond using laptops or traditional Braille tools and answers are manually marked with pens.

According to Professor Peter Okebukola, Chair of JEOG, more than one-third of these candidates have secured admission to higher education institutions. The initiative has been referenced in several African countries as a promising model for inclusion. Yet, nearly a decade on, with students with disabilities still constituting less than 1% of enrolled students in Nigerian higher education, the question remains: has the reform been really transformative, or merely claimocratic?

Limits of Parallel Accommodation

Under the leadership of JAMB Registrar, Professor Is-haq Oloyede, the Board has framed disability inclusion as a matter of equity and that no eligible Nigerian should be prevented from taking the UTME or accessing higher education because of disability. At the maiden national conference on equal access to higher education in Nigeria, JEOG announced a gradual migration towards a fully customised CBT mode for blind candidates, including options for fully Braille, fully CBT, or read-aloud formats. A pilot was proposed to test this transition.

However, JEOG currently operates largely as a parallel system, which appears to reproduce the segregative origins of special education in Nigeria. Candidates with disabilities are separated, camped, and examined under special arrangements, precisely the situation lamented by Sophia at the beginning of this piece. While this may temporarily address the lack of concrete efforts to close the admission gap between disabled and non-disabled students in Nigeria, it does not fundamentally transform the exclusionary infrastructure of high-stakes testing in the country.

“Why am I sleeping over? Because I’m writing JAMB? If others without disabilities can write theirs in one day, why not just equip me to write mine too in one day and go back home?”

The Missed Structural Opportunity?

JAMB currently accredits close to 1,000 CBT centres nationwide. None of the facilities is systematically required to meet accessibility standards as part of the accreditation process. Accessibility does not appear to have been embedded as a core criterion for approval. How many of these facilities are even wheelchair accessible?

If even 10–15% of computers in every accredited CBT centre were equipped with screen readers, magnification software, alternative input devices, and trained accessibility officers, inclusive testing would no longer be exceptional or makeshift, as we see in the JAMB "special" centres for students with disabilities. The transformative step would have been to embed accessibility into every CBT centre’s infrastructure, accreditation standards, and staff training protocols.

The Future of Accessible Testing in Africa

This moment is particularly critical as both the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) and the National Examinations Council (NECO) are now transitioning to CBT. JAMB, as the most advanced CBT administrator in the country, was uniquely positioned to pilot nationally distributed accessible testing models and share institutional learning, successes and failures alike, with other examination bodies across West Africa.

To be clear, JEOG is an important initiative that has been missing in the Nigerian Higher Education architecture for decades. It is widening participation and demonstrating that the system can adapt when it is willing to. But for JAMB to be the transformative, inclusion policy champion it claims to be, it must fundamentally move away from the segregative logic that underpins the colonial missionary system of special education, which parented the dual track system of education, where students with disabilities are still shut out of the mainstream schools and, by extension, the wider society.

The broader question, therefore, is not whether JEOG has enabled thousands of candidates with disabilities to access higher education, but whether Nigeria has leveraged this decade of experimentation to build a digitally inclusive assessment architecture that others in Africa could emulate.

We may not have entirely missed the opportunity. But the window for systemic reform is narrowing.

Abass Bolaji Isiaka, PhD

Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of East Anglia and Founder of EvriCampus, a research-informed initiative working to improve accessibility and inclusion in African higher education.

Image Source: The Cable