Challenges Facing Census of Persons with Disabilities in Nigeria: Implication for Programme Placement

This paper examines challenges facing census of persons with disabilities in Nigeria and its implication for program placement. The authors discovered that it will be very difficult for a country like Nigeria to conduct censuses for persons with disabilities on regular bases because of its cost implication, and high level of illiteracy among persons with disabilities. The authors maintain that many census officials can't reach their destination in the process of carrying out census of persons with disabilities; because of the in-ability to access roads in some remotes areas in Nigeria as a country. They said that corruption among census officials is another serious problem for census of persons with disabilities, where these officers are sometimes bribed into inflating scores or do not carry out head counts but come up with unrealistic figures. Also the authors discovered that, in most cases government ends up using inexperienced census officers who are not demographers or population experts or have nothing to do with persons with disabilities to carry out a head count of these individuals. Finally, they said that other basic variables that sometimes jeopardize successful head counts are related to organizational, Physical and Altitudinal factors.