Intersectionality and Adult Education Exclusion in North West Nigeria: Gender, Class, Ethnicity, and Disability

This study examined how intersecting axes of gender, class, ethnicity, and disability produce compounded adult education exclusion among marginalised populations in Sokoto, Zamfara, and Kebbi States, North West Nigeria. Intersectionality as an analytical framework for understanding educational exclusion has been extensively applied in feminist scholarship in the Global North but remains largely unapplied to adult education exclusion in Northern Nigerian contexts, representing both a theoretical and empirical gap. The study employed a critical qualitative methodology combining life history interviews with 52 multiply marginalised adults, feminist intersectional focus groups, and critical ethnographic observation across eight communities. Intersectional thematic analysis guided data interpretation. Findings demonstrated that single-axis analyses of exclusion failed to capture the qualitatively distinct and compounded forms of marginalisation experienced by individuals occupying multiple disadvantaged identity positions simultaneously. A Hausa-speaking woman with a physical disability from a low-income household faced an exclusion architecture qualitatively different from and more severe than the sum of gender, class, or disability exclusions considered individually. The study maps five distinctive compounded exclusion configurations specific to the North West Nigerian context, constituting an original empirical and theoretical contribution. It further demonstrates that existing adult education programme designs, constructed implicitly around single-axis exclusion assumptions, systematically fail the most excluded. Recommendations include adopting intersectional needs assessment approaches in adult education programme planning, designing programmes with differentiated inclusion support levels, and training facilitators in intersectionality as a practical programme responsiveness tool. Keywords: intersectionality, adult education exclusion, North West Nigeria, gender, disability.