Nigeria's Education Access Divide: Philanthropy Steps In Where Policy Falls Short
As the Tonto Dikeh Foundation pledges free JAMB registration for 1,000 students, visually impaired candidates expose systemic barriers that contradict official promises of universal access.
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The registration hall in Port Harcourt buzzed with anticipation as students lined up to receive what many considered a lifeline: free access to Nigeria's university entrance examination. The Tonto Dikeh Foundation's pledge to cover JAMB registration costs for 1,000 students across Port Harcourt, Lagos, and Abuja represents the latest private intervention in an educational system where access remains a luxury rather than a right.
Yet even as philanthropic gestures fill gaps in educational access, a parallel crisis exposes deeper structural failures. Visually impaired candidates preparing for the 2026 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) have revealed a stark contradiction: despite JAMB's public commitment to nationwide free registration, they faced unexpected fees and encountered registration materials devoid of accessible formats.
The Philanthropy Patchwork
The Tonto Dikeh Foundation's scholarship initiative addresses an immediate financial barrier that prevents thousands of Nigerian students from even attempting university admission. According to The Nation Newspaper, the foundation's intervention targets students in three major urban centres, acknowledging the economic reality that JAMB registration fees—though modest by some standards—represent an insurmountable obstacle for families navigating Nigeria's protracted economic challenges.
This pattern of celebrity and private foundations stepping into educational access gaps has become increasingly common across Nigeria. The University of Ibadan recently witnessed another example when a student with an exceptional CGPA received a substantial cash reward, an incident that trended across social media platforms. While such gestures generate headlines and provide individual relief, they underscore a troubling dependence on private benevolence to address what should be systematic public provision.
The foundation's choice of cities—Port Harcourt, Lagos, and Abuja—reflects both strategic thinking and inherent limitations. These urban centres concentrate large student populations, maximising impact per naira spent. Yet this geographic selectivity inevitably leaves rural students, who often face the most severe access barriers, beyond the reach of such interventions.
Broken Promises, Invisible Barriers
While some students celebrate philanthropic support, visually impaired candidates confronted a different reality during the 2026 UTME registration process. According to Legit.ng, these candidates not only faced registration fees that contradicted JAMB's stated policy of free nationwide registration, but also discovered that examination materials lacked accessible formats entirely.
The discrepancy between policy and practice reveals institutional failures that extend beyond mere financial access. For visually impaired students, the absence of braille materials or screen-reader-compatible digital formats transforms registration from a bureaucratic hurdle into an exclusionary barrier. This represents not just administrative oversight but a fundamental violation of educational equity principles that Nigeria has formally committed to through various policy frameworks.
The contradiction between JAMB's public commitments and the lived experiences of disabled candidates raises questions about implementation capacity and institutional accountability. When examination bodies announce universal policies without ensuring the infrastructure to deliver them, they create a gap between promise and reality that most severely affects Nigeria's most vulnerable students.
The Limits of Private Solutions
The juxtaposition of these stories—philanthropic intervention alongside systemic exclusion—illustrates the limitations of relying on private actors to solve public education challenges. The Tonto Dikeh Foundation's support for 1,000 students represents meaningful individual impact, yet JAMB registers hundreds of thousands of candidates annually. Private philanthropy, however well-intentioned, cannot scale to meet systemic need.
Moreover, the issues facing visually impaired candidates cannot be resolved through financial support alone. Creating truly accessible examination systems requires institutional commitment, technical expertise, and sustained investment in adaptive technologies and trained personnel. These are responsibilities that fall squarely within the mandate of public education authorities.
The pattern emerging across Nigerian education suggests a troubling normalisation: private actors address symptoms while structural causes remain unexamined. Each philanthropic intervention generates gratitude and media attention, potentially reducing pressure on government institutions to fulfil their foundational obligations.
Towards Systematic Solutions
Nigeria's education access crisis demands responses that match the scale and complexity of the challenge. This requires moving beyond the philanthropy-and-crisis model toward systematic reform that addresses both financial barriers and institutional capacity gaps.
For examination bodies like JAMB, this means ensuring that policy commitments translate into consistent implementation across all candidate categories. Free registration must mean genuinely free, and accessibility must extend beyond physical access to include formats that serve students with diverse needs. The 2026 UTME registration experience should prompt immediate review of accessibility protocols and staff training on inclusive practices.
For policymakers, the lesson extends further. Education access cannot be outsourced to philanthropic goodwill. While celebrating private initiatives like the Tonto Dikeh Foundation's scholarship programme, government must simultaneously strengthen the public systems that should make such interventions unnecessary.
The students lining up in Port Harcourt, Lagos, and Abuja deserve support. So do visually impaired candidates seeking equal access to examination systems. Both groups ultimately deserve an education framework that treats access not as charity but as entitlement—a public good delivered systematically rather than sporadically, universally rather than selectively.
Until that transformation occurs, Nigeria's education system will continue producing these contradictions: celebration and exclusion, private generosity and public failure, existing side by side in a nation that can afford neither to waste talent nor to abandon equity.