Intersectionality of Gender, Poverty, and Disability in Shaping Educational Trajectories of Nigerian Children with Disabilities

This doctoral study applies intersectional theory to examine how the simultaneous experience of gender, poverty, and disability shapes the educational trajectories of children with disabilities in Nigeria, generating an original analytical framework for understanding educational exclusion as a product of interlocking systems of disadvantage rather than isolated risk factors. Existing Nigerian special education research has examined these variables largely in isolation, missing the emergent effects that arise at their intersection and producing knowledge that incompletely represents the experiences of the most marginalised disabled children, particularly girls in poverty. The study employs a mixed-methods design across two phases. The quantitative phase analyses a nationally representative household survey dataset covering fifteen thousand households to extract a subsample of children with disabilities, applying multilevel regression with interaction terms to model how the joint effects of gender, poverty, and disability type predict school enrolment, attendance, and progression. The qualitative phase conducts forty-five life history interviews with adolescents and young adults with disabilities across all six geopolitical zones, analysing narratives using intersectional analysis. Integration of findings generates an original explanatory model of how intersecting disadvantages accumulate across the educational lifecycle. The study makes original contributions to disability studies, the sociology of education in Africa, and intersectionality theory applied to Global South contexts. Keywords: intersectionality, gender, poverty, disability, educational trajectories.