TAF Africa Partners with INEC to Register Nigerians With Disabilities Before 2027.

In Alheri village in Yangoji, deep in the Kwali Area Council of Nigeria’s Federal Capital Territory, INEC officials spent Thursday pressing fingerprints into a BVAS machine for people the electoral system has long left off its rolls: Nigerians living with disabilities and leprosy, most of them women.

The turnout was the point. TAF Africa, a disability rights organisation, partnered with the Independent National Electoral Commission to carry the Continuous Voter Registration exercise directly into the community rather than wait for residents to travel to a distant centre. The goal is concrete: get people their Permanent Voter Cards so they can vote in the 2027 general elections.

The scale of who gets excluded is the story behind the story. TAF Africa’s assistant programme manager, George Dominic Anwayi, put the number of Nigerians living with disabilities at more than 30 million, a bloc larger than the population of many African countries, and one he argues cannot be treated as an afterthought. “People with disabilities also have the right to participate in the electoral process,” he said, adding that the registration window closes this month.

This grassroots approach is deliberate. Voter registration in Nigeria has historically assumed a citizen who can travel, queue and navigate a centre without support, quiet barriers that disenfranchise disabled and marginalised people long before any ballot is cast. Taking the BVAS to the village removes the first and largest of those barriers. TAF Africa says it has run the same playbook elsewhere, including at an internally displaced persons camp in Kaduna State, where disabled residents were helped to register and collect their slips.

INEC framed the partnership as inclusion by design. Nwanna Perpetual Ezinwa, assistant director of the commission’s Gender and Inclusivity Department, said an earlier visit sensitised residents to the process before this week’s registration, crediting TAF Africa with providing the platform to reach them.

The test now is durability. Registration is only the first step, and a Permanent Voter Card means little if the polling unit on election day is unreachable or inaccessible. But for the women lined up in Alheri this week, the machine capturing their fingerprints was a small, tangible correction to a long exclusion.