Soft Skills and Inclusive Employment: Promoting Labor Market Participation for Persons with Disability in Nigeria

Persons with disabilities in Nigeria face significant barriers to labor market participation, including discrimination and limited access to professional networks. Despite growing policy attention to inclusive employment, persons with disabilities remains at a disadvantage. While employment initiatives often focus on vocational and technical training, soft skills for persons with disabilities remains unexplored. This project aims to conduct an exploratory study on soft skills and employment readiness initiative implemented by D-SARC.

With this grant, our team will examine the implementation of the initiatives aimed at improving employability among persons with disabilities. We will leverage on our partner to conduct structured surveys with 100 persons. The following questions will be examined: How accessible are soft skills development programs to persons with disabilities? What factors and barriers influence participation? and how does soft skills relate to employment outcomes and job readiness?

The project's value lies in generating evidence that inform the design of scalable interventions aimed at strengthening employment readiness among persons with disabilities. Conceptually, the study contributes to literature on inclusive labor markets for marginalized populations. Understanding how employment barriers differ across disability types, gender, and education levels will be important for designing inclusive workforce development programs.