Abstract:

The idea of inclusive education has moved from the background to the foreground in education across the world. An increasing number of countries have implemented policies on inclusive education and have witnessed its tremendous impacts on the beneficiaries – the students, learning environment, national development, and society as a whole. However, many countries are still sluggish in the push for inclusive education within their national boundaries perhaps as a result of their ignorance of the capabilities of inclusive education for their growth and development.

This study, therefore, aims to critically assess the impacts of inclusive education on national development, drawing out key evidence from Nigeria. Nigeria, as a nation, has failed repeatedly to achieve her national development goals and is being bedevilled, like any other developing country, with internal challenges especially low literacy rate, insecurity, corruption, and bad leadership. The rationale behind this study is to showcase the potential impacts that inclusive education could have on the overall national development of a country, particularly, developing countries that are still indifferent to the implementation of inclusive education, and to provide further evidence for the need for inclusive education. Also, the study intends to identify potential challenges and obstacles to the achievement of inclusive education. It provides an insight into the challenges impeding the implementation of inclusive education and, consequently, the obvious lack of its impacts.

In this study, a theoretical research method is employed to achieve its aim and objective. The method allows for an extensive and systematic literature review showing the findings of extant studies on the issue of inclusive education. Hence, a series of extant studies on the impact assessment of inclusive education are reviewed and the studies reviewed are theoretical and empirical in nature. The findings of the study, therefore, revealed the necessity and impacts of inclusive education on the national development of Nigeria and highlighted the actual challenges, possibly, facing inclusive education among developing countries.

Keywords:

Development, Growth, Impacts, Inclusive Education, Nigeria.